 | |
| Genre | stage show and broadcast |
|---|---|
| Home station | KWKH |
| Syndicates | WLW |
| TV adaptations | KSLA-TV |
| Recording studio | Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium(Shreveport, Louisiana) |
| Original release | April 3, 1948 (1948-04-03) – August 27, 1960 (1960-08-27) |
Louisiana Hayride is a radio and later televisioncountry music show that was broadcast from theShreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium inShreveport, Louisiana; during its heyday from 1948 to 1960, it helped to launch the careers of some of the greatest names in Americancountry andwestern music. Created byKWKH station manager Henry Clay, the show is notable as a performance venue for a number of 1950s country musicians, as well as a nascentElvis Presley.
The creators of the show took the name from the 1941 book with that title byHarnett Thomas Kane.[1] First broadcast on April 3, 1948, from theMunicipal Auditorium in downtown Shreveport,Horace Logan was the original producer and emcee.[2] The musical cast for the inaugural broadcast included the Bailes Brothers,Johnnie and Jack, the Tennessee Mountain Boys withKitty Wells, the Four Deacons,Curley Kinsey and the Tennessee Ridge Runners, Harmie Smith, the Ozark Mountaineers, the Mercy Brothers, and Tex Grimsley and the Texas Showboys.[2]
The show was soon made into aBroadway attraction calledLouisiana Hayride. Within a year of its debut, the program was so popular that a regional 25-station network was set up to broadcast portions of the show, and was even heard overseas on Armed Forces Radio.[2] The flagship station of the program wasKWKH/1130 in Shreveport. The popularity ofLouisiana Hayride spawned various incarnations in other parts of the United States, most notably inCincinnati onWLW radio and latertelevision; its version was dubbedMidwestern Hayride.
Beginning with the successful first show on April 3, 1948,Louisiana Hayride ranked second only toNashville'sGrand Ole Opry in terms of importance untilABC began telecastingOzark Jubilee in 1955.Hank Williams began performing on theHayride in 1948 after his initial rejection from the Grand Ole Opry, and after being fired from the Opry on August 11, 1952, Williams returned to theHayride briefly before his death on New Years Day, 1953.
While theOpry, theJubilee, and theHayride all showcased established stars, theHayride was where talented, but virtual unknowns, were also given exposure to a large audience. Over the years, country music greats such asWebb Pierce,Kitty Wells,Jimmie Davis,Will Strahan,Slim Whitman,Floyd Cramer,Sonny James,Hank Snow,Faron Young,Johnny Horton,Jim Reeves,Claude King, Jimmy Martin,George Jones,John and The Three Wise Men,Johnny Cash, Frankie Miller,Tex Ritter,Willie Nelson,Bob Wills, Cowboy Jack Hunt & Little Joe Hunt of the Rhythm Ranch Hands,Nat Stuckey, andLefty Frizzell, among many others, performed onLouisiana Hayride.
By mid-1954, a special 30-minute portion ofLouisiana Hayride was being broadcast every Saturday on the AFN Pacific channel of theUnited KingdomScottish Forces Radio Network. On October 16 of that year,Elvis Presley appeared on the radio program. Presley's performance of his debut release on theSun Records label, "That's All Right", brought a tepid response, according to formerHayride emceeFrank Page (1925–2013).[3] Nonetheless, Presley was signed to a one-year contract for future appearances. Presley became so popular that after his final appearance onHayride in 1956, emcee Horace Logan announced to the crowd a phrase that would become famous: "Elvis has left the building."[4]
The immediate and enormous demand for more of Presley's new kind ofrockabilly music actually resulted in a sharp decline in the popularity of theLouisiana Hayride that until that point had been strictly a country-music venue. On March 3, 1955, Presley made his first television appearance on the TV version ofThe Louisiana Hayride, carried byKSLA-TV, theCBS affiliate in Shreveport.
Within a few years,rock and roll had come to dominate the music scene, and on August 27, 1960,Louisiana Hayride ended its primary run.[5] However, KWKH continued to use theLouisiana Hayride name for packaged music tours throughout the 1960s on a biweekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, finally ending operations entirely in 1969.[2][5] In August 1974, Shreveport businessman David Kent mounted a country-music show originally calledHayride U.S.A., which was retitledLouisiana Hayride in 1975 after KWKH agreed to let Kent use the name.[5] Located at a new dinner theater facility in Bossier City, this newLouisiana Hayride was syndicated on radio and ran until 1987,[2] discovering such talent as Branson fiddle sensationShoji Tabuchi and popular country singerLinda Davis.
Some strictly local performances have been done in the Shreveport area under the name, including a 2003Louisiana Hayride cast reunion calledOne More Ride that featured 60 acts from the original show, including Kitty Wells, the Browns, Betty Amos, Homer Bailes,Billy Walker, Mitchell Torok, and Hank Thompson.Barney Cannon (1955–2009), a KWKHdeejay, became a specialist on the history of country music, KWKH, and theHayride. In August 2009, theLouisiana Hayride (1948–1960) was inducted into theLouisiana Music Hall of Fame.
In 2009, after several years of litigation over theLouisiana Hayride name and trademark, a federal court ruled thatMargaret Lewis Warwick owned the rights to the name.[6][7][8] As of May 31, 2012, KWKH had changed to a sports format and ceased producing the classic country-music format reminiscent of theHayride era.
At the Louisiana Hayride Tonight, a set of 20 CDs with 599Hayride performances, was released in October 2017 by Bear Family Records. The release includes a book on the Hayride's history. A live recording ofJambalaya (On the Bayou), by Hank Williams, is included in the set.[9] The set includes archival material from the collection of Chris Brown, Archivist atCentenary College of Louisiana in Shreveport, with the bulk of the audio and images in the set sourced from an archive originally assembled by Joey Kent between 1992–2009 and donated to the Library of Congress in 2009.[10][11]
