Jo Walker-Meador, who joined the Country Music Association when it was a tiny start-up in the late 1950s and, as its longtime executive director, transformed it into a powerhouse in the music industry, died on Tuesday in Nashville. She was 93.

The association announced her death.

Mrs. Walker-Meador (pronounced MED-er) was the association’s first employee, hired as a secretary and office manager — “a gal Friday,” as she once put it — at a time when country music was fighting to be heard. Radio stations, responding to the rock ’n’ roll revolution, were adopting a Top 40 format and dropping country from their playlists.

In 1958, when the association was formed, with just 200 members and an office in Nashville with rented desks and typewriters, there were fewer than a hundred country stations left in the United States.

Mrs. Walker-Meador had some ideas on how to change the equation, and when the first executive director quit in 1962 — the group could not afford to pay two salaries — she had a chance to try them out.