On a Saturday night in 1948, Hank Williams stepped onto the stage
of the Louisiana Hayride and sang "Lovesick Blues." Up to that
point, Williams's yodeling style had been pigeon-holed as hillbilly
music, cutting him off from the mainstream of popular music. Taking
a chance on this untried artist, the Hayride--a radio "barn dance"
or country music variety show like the Grand Ole Opry--not only
launched Williams's career, but went on to launch the careers of
well-known performers such as Jim Reeves, Webb Pierce, Kitty Wells,
Johnny Cash, and Slim Whitman.
Broadcast from Shreveport, Louisiana, the local station KWKH's
50,000-watt signal reached listeners in over 28 states and lured
them to packed performances of the Hayride's road show. By tracing
the dynamic history of the Hayride and its sponsoring station,
ethnomusicologist Tracey Laird reveals the critical role that this
part of northwestern Louisiana played in the development of both
country music and rock and roll. Delving into the past of this Red
River city, she probes the vibrant historical, cultural, and social
backdrop for its dynamic musical scene. Sitting between the Old
South and the West, this one-time frontier town provided an ideal
setting for the cross-fertilization of musical styles. The scene
was shaped by the region's easy mobility, the presence of a legal
"red-light" district from 1903-17, and musical interchanges between
blacks and whites, who lived in close proximity and in nearly equal
numbers. The region nurtured such varied talents as Huddie
Ledbetter, the "king of the twelve-string guitar," and Jimmie
Davis, the two term "singing governor" of Louisiana who penned "You
Are My Sunshine."
Against the backdrop of the colorful history of Shreveport, the
unique contribution of this radio barn dance is revealed. Radio
shaped musical tastes, and the Hayride's frontier-spirit producers
took risks with artists whose reputations may have been shaky or
whose styles did not neatly fit musical categories (both Hank
Williams and Elvis Presley were rejected by the Opry before they
came to Shreveport). The Hayride also served as a training ground
for a generation of studio sidemen and producers who steered
popular music for decades after the Hayride's final broadcast.
While only a few years separated the Hayride appearances of Hank
Williams and Elvis Presley--who made his national radio debut on
the show in 1954--those years encompassed seismic shifts in the
tastes, perceptions, and self-consciousness of American youth.
Though the Hayride is often overshadowed by the Grand Ole Opry in
country music scholarship, Laird balances the record and reveals
how this remarkable show both documented and contributed to a
powerful transformation in American popular music.
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