Bill Cody, whose mid-Tennessee baritone introduced more than 30 years of mornings on WSM Nashville and called the Grand Ole Opry through some of Music City’s biggest nights, died Tuesday, June 9, at age 67, his family said. He had been hospitalized for several weeks with kidney and heart failure.
Cody’s daughter Hannah confirmed the death in a statement posted Friday after a week in which Nashville’s radio and recording community had been preparing for the outcome. “He gave 50 years to the audience,” she wrote. “Coffee, Country, and Cody is closing time.” Rolling Stone, which broke the news to a national audience, reported that Cody’s family asked that donations go to the National Kidney Foundation in lieu of flowers.
Cody had hosted WSM’s flagship Coffee, Country & Cody since 1993, a 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. block that became the de facto town square for Nashville’s working music industry. Songwriters drove home from late nights at Lower Broadway with the show on, label A&Rs scheduled pitch meetings around its hourly Opry plug, and artists from Vince Gill to Carrie Underwood to Lainey Wilson cycled through its live-in-studio segments for decades. WSM’s continuous broadcast since 1925 is the longest-running clear-channel signal in country music, and Cody held its mornings for the back third of that run.
The Tennessean reported that Cody had been the Opry’s most frequently used announcer through the 2010s and 2020s, calling the show’s Saturday-night broadcasts and most of its televised milestones, including induction nights and the 2024 venue centenary celebrations. He had been working through the spring on what he had called his last on-air stretch before the hospitalization.
Born William Stephen Cody in Birmingham, Alabama in 1958, he started in commercial radio at 17 and bounced through Kansas City, Cincinnati and Atlanta before being hired by WSM in 1990. He was inducted into the Country Radio Hall of Fame in 2012, the same year he received the Country Music Association’s National Broadcast Personality of the Year award. His voice-over work also reached the Country Music Association Awards telecasts, the Academy of Country Music Awards and the CMT Music Awards across multiple decades.
Tributes began landing within an hour of the family’s statement. Vince Gill called Cody “the cleanest voice country radio had,” and Trisha Yearwood wrote that “Bill knew when to talk and when to let the song breathe, which is the only thing this format ever actually had to learn.” Brad Paisley posted a photo of the WSM studio with the caption “morning will sound different.” Industry insiders are expecting a public memorial at the Ryman Auditorium, the Opry’s original home, in late June.
Cody’s death lands during a stretch of unusually high mortality for Hollywood’s older guard. Margaret Kerry, the live-action model for Disney’s Tinker Bell, died this week as we reported earlier, and the broader Hollywood-Nashville obituary calendar has thickened across the past month. For country radio in particular, the closest comparable losses in recent memory are Charlie Mattos and the long-running WSM weather voice Tom Davis, both within the past five years.
Cody is survived by his daughters Hannah and Caroline, a longtime partner Vivien, and an extended family in Birmingham and Nashville. WSM has not yet announced an interim morning-show plan; the station broadcast a retrospective of Coffee, Country & Cody segments through the Friday morning block in lieu of live programming and is expected to re-air on Saturday morning. The Grand Ole Opry will pay tribute during this Saturday’s broadcast.
