Cradle of the Stars: The Story of the Louisiana Hayride

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . Major funding for production of this program was provided by a grant from the Louisiana State Arts Council, Division of the Arts. Archery music worked its way into the hearts of people long before Nashville and its bright lives. Its stories were first told in the churches, on the front porches, in the homes and places

of people sitting around picking and singing. It began in the rural south, in the hills and valleys of West Virginia, Oklahoma, Texas, in small towns with names like Mariana Natchez, Py Town, and in cities like this one, Leafport, Louisiana. In fact, that's where I was born. My daddy Hank Williams was playing on a show called the Louisiana hayride. That was back when country music artists were called hillbillies and TVs stood for Tennessee Valley. Daddy made history on the Louisiana hayride but so did a lot of others who came to radio station KWKH in the late 40s and 50s. Folks started calling the hayride the cradle of the stars. The halls of the old municipal auditorium are silent now, but their shadows remember a pass filled with Saturday night performances by web peers, Farron Young, Slim Whitman, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash. The magic fiddle of Dobber Johnson, the crying steel guitar of hoop rains, and Floyd Kramer's

rolling piano chords. It's a story about good days and those that saw a lot of tears. It's a tale that takes place in the years following the Second World War. When many people were ready to hope again, it's about dreams that came true and some that didn't. It's the story of the Louisiana hayride. It's time to remind you that in the Arklets X, in the central time zone, the time is now 8 o'clock. No one expected it to be more than just a country music radio show. But it was.

The Louisiana hayride was a star maker. It built hundreds of careers in country music more than any other show of its kind. The hayride started at one of those times in history when all the ingredients are ripe for something to happen. Let's look at it this way. There was no TV. And it was the important thing to do in this area and this part of the country was to go to the Louisiana hayride on Saturday night or to tune it in on the radio and sit around and watch the radio and listen to the Louisiana hayride on Saturday night. It was the only thing to do and it was the only ball game in town. There is a chemistry, a music in that part of the country that you do not find anywhere else. The land of Cajun country, blues, pop, all of the ingredients are there and we had some great, great talent came there. Well if the opera was the promised land for country musicians on their way up, then the

Louisiana hayride was Heaven's Gate. They flocked to it, carrying guitars, fiddles and songs, looking to make some money and a name for themselves, hoping for that one big hit that might mean a recording contract and the move to Nashville. They were kind of like the training ground for Grand Ole Opry, you know. They'd make the star out of them and then the Grand Ole Opry'd grab them. There was a rivalry there, certainly was and they would send someone down here every Saturday night to see who was making it and who was going to be the next big star of the Louisiana hayride and if they could, they wooed them away and took them back up there as soon as they could by giving them a contract for recording or signing them to the Opry or whatever it took. Well yes there was competition but the hayride's first show was in 1948, almost 25 years after the Opry went on the air.

The hayride had a healthy respect for its older cousin but the Louisiana show never advertised itself as a stepping stone to the Opry. It had its own reputation and that was enough to keep its Saturday night roster filled. The hayride was a steady job, a rare piece of good fortune for anybody trying to make a living play in music. But many of the major stations like WLS Chicago, they had a WLS bond dance. Of course Nashville had the Grand Ole Opry. The older minion bond dance in Wheeling, West Virginia, have the show at Chattanooga and a later a show in Dallas called a Biggie Jamboree. So there was nothing innovative about a Saturday night live show. They had been going on for years. We were able to put them on simply because many of your major stations had live acts every morning in the studio. And you had six or eight acts perhaps going on consecutively in the mornings and they would go out at night, make personal appearances in the area and then they'd come back in the morning for studio show.

So you had talent, you had good talent, that could be gotten competitively inexpensively. The hayride had it all, gospel, live bands, comedy, men singers and girls. But it had something else that made it stand out, made it different from the other barn dance radio shows, a certain spirit that had a lot to do with its success. The show experimented with drums, singing styles, fancy guitar licks and honky tongue. It was daring and it got away with it. KWKH went on the air in 1925. Its signal reached most of East Texas, southern Arkansas and northwest Louisiana. Station owner WK Henderson learned right off that folks in his rural neighborhood had at least one thing in common. They liked the music they understood. So he gave his listeners country and his commercial sponsors loved him for it. Early morning country music shows got to be so popular on KWKH that the station added on a live Saturday night show.

It wound up being a dress rehearsal for the hayride. At KWKH prior to World War II in the middle thirties, we had a group of acts, the black wood brothers, the original black wood brothers. When there was a father and three sons, we had hoken Paul Rice, the Arizona ranch curls, the sunshine boys, many, many acts of that type. And we began a show we being KWKH, a show in the municipal auditorium in 3 port about 1936 called the KWKH Saturday Night Roundup. B.D. Robertson was in charge of the commercial department, the selling department. He kind of took me on his wing and taught me what to do and how to do and why. And I don't know who made the decision to start the KWKH Saturday Night Roundup, probably B.G., but I was the announcer of it. He in essence was the producer, but I was an announcer. And we ran that from the about 36, 37 up to the beginning of World War II. And we closed it simply because most of the people on it went in the service, including

me. When the war ended, KWKH picked up where it left off, but with a few improvements. It's signal was boosted to 50,000 watts, stretching its neighborhood clear out to the California coast. The old Saturday Night Roundup needed some changes too. A new cast, some big Nashville acts maybe, and a new name. We'd like to invite all of our good neighbors to visit with us tonight at Louisiana Hey Ryan. The bail brothers in our group and all the other acts to you here on KWKH will be there. The program started. We had a very good friend at WSC on the Randall Lopron, Dean R.U.F.S. and he helped us an awful lot in many ways while we were there. And we liked him and he liked us and he was leaving WSC on the street for Louisiana. They were really popular bail brothers. They had teams like Dustin on the Bible and I'm going to be loved. They were really setting the woods on fire.

We were on the Randall Lopron in 1947, Johnny and Jack and the Tennessee Mountain Boys. Dean ups and he was down at KWKH, the commercial manager at KWKH, and I called him and I said, Dean, I hear the bail brothers are doing real good down there. How would you like to have another act like Johnny and Jack and Tennessee Mountain Boys and Kitty Wells? He said, I would love it. When it started to start to lose on a hay ride, all it did, they got the order to almost say it a night and they would bring each one in for a little program and say it a night and they would advertise it during the week and they had a ready-made audience that would come out and see the losing hay ride to follow and was there for country music. The all-new Luizena hay ride kicked off April 3, 1948, KWKH depended on its morning

show talent just as it did to get the round up off the ground. Their popularity guaranteed eager sponsors and a packed house at the municipal auditorium on Grand Avenue every Saturday night, but those country music acts had to travel a lot of roads and entertain at a bunch of hold-down schoolhouses and barbecues to make it happen. It was pretty tough. It was practically almost starved. It was hard to make a living. It looked down on music and they called it hillbilly music and it wouldn't recognize as really the force it was because they figured like it was really real poor people and sorry people that that was the impression at the hand that was the type of people in it and it was the image that we had to the public went good back then. We got a KFA and live out of suitcase and what a heavy and no one in it.

We got real sometimes, no sleep, sometimes you might get in there and time it up to shave and shower before a job and sometimes you wouldn't. I've seen a lot of times that we play a place and come away with nothing after we paid for the advertising and gasoline to get there. I remember one time that we were going into a town and we put the last gas in the car. The money we had for gas in the car and it just happened that this town sat down in the valley and we got up on top of the hill and ran out of gas because it was right down in front of the place. We were supposed to play and then got to love my other life and got to love my other life to get some gasoline by teeth. It was hard days, it was rough days. Radio was changing that. These hillbilly songs about lost love hard times and hungry hours, these tunes about hell raising romance and just getting by.

They were being sung in living rooms everywhere. The hayride acts worked hard to replace hillbilly with country. They made it easier for people like my daddy to cross over. Hank Sr. was working the old south Alabama circuit for years before he came to Shreveport for a shot at the big time. We were having packed grounds before Hank Williams got there but they didn't have a big star. They didn't have an idol that he had anybody that could idolize, you know, scream and run and wait for hours. I think coming there and got such tremendous impact, he began to get lots of the people that like other kinds of music. When he hit so big, like the people that was raised and wouldn't admit that they like country music, he would see them down there and tell you why they were saying it was

Hank Williams. It really did. I would say that that was the impact that began to make it a national recognized show. If my daddy changed the show, well the hayride changed Hank Williams too. The Shreveport days were a fresh start for him. The money was good and show dates were regular and steady. Folks who worked with him then say he didn't drink as much as he did before or as much as he did again later. If he made a date in Tyler, Texas, Texarkana or Baton Rouge, his fans weren't disappointed. It was his reputation as a singer and a songwriter that was growing. I don't think it was just someone going to Alabama country boy and he never tried to be your pretending to be anything else. But he had an intensity about him and when he was saying he would lean in with a microphone and get very intense and it kind of drew you to him. It made you a part of the song because he felt those songs and you knew he was feeling him. His voice indicated he was feeling him and Hank in his way was definitely a genius.

He wrote the vast majority of the songs that he recorded. They all rhyme. They were poems. He left the same, you hand him and get turned and he didn't attain you long as he was. It would have set up many a night. We stayed up the daylight after losing a hay rod. We'd go out to our house over Johnny Beale's place with all this set and picked the daylight. When he came over there and he would hump down kind of wet my phone and lean into it. And he'd say the big old white hat, he'd say how they folks, he said me and my white Miss Audrey had the biggest fight last night. He said boys hurt me all day today and I wrote this song and I won't sing it. Miss Audrey knew why they come out of the seats cried. They loved it. Just a few months after he came to the hay rod daddy started singing an old pop song called Love Sick Blues.

That song took off to the tops of the billboard and cash box popularity charts. It sure gave announcer Ray Bartlett a reason to kick up his heels. It was the best advertisement the hay rod ever had. The first night that Hank's son loves sick blues, he didn't have an advantage with him and Dr. Johnson playing the field and failed to put it on the steel and buddy out of the way on the electric guitar and I was on the bass fiddle. I remember he sung it and they offered he was rehearsed in the dress room to one of its upstairs right there. And he just started saying the thing, I said, Hank, what in the world wrote that song? He said, Rex Griffin did. I said, man, that thing got a chord and I can't figure out where he going. But then I really couldn't see where he would do it, but when he would do that yodel, he would, when he would do the breaking varsity at wobble his knees, kind of when he did that. And then Ray Bartlett would get kind of underneath the stage and jump up and turn flips and that thing on the hand could do that yodel, the roof would come in.

I mean, on the air, it sounded like the greatest thing that everybody in the country had to go down there to see what was called an old commotion. He could just win over a crowd and when he'd start doing that little sick blues, he'd kind of start wiggling around and getting the old kind of. He'd made the remark that, I don't think they'd like to tune so well as they'd like to see me get tired and are not trying to sing it. He'd have to do that little sick blues for a friend four and five times before they'd let us off the stage, you know, with him at him all. Singing some time, he'd forget it. He'd turn around and be the one to know who the word, that's how I don't sing him, I just play him. The sick blues was Hank Williams' ticket to Nashville. He left the hay ride after less than a year on its stage, but like old friends do, Daddy never said goodbye, and three years later, he came back. Yeah, I got one and I'd like the thing that I wrote about Louisiana when I was down here

a few months, a few years ago at least, all right, little thing called jumble lie and the crotions. When Hank's drinking got so bad, it was obvious that the operate was going to have to terminate him. He had already been talking to me for weeks about coming back to the hay ride, and it was arranged and he called me and said, can I come back? I said, sure, can I? And he came back to the hay ride and signed a contract to appear on the hay ride for three years on Saturday nights, and it had two and a half years to go at the time of his death. He came to Nashville and he just set this whole world, and he was the first one to go to Los Vegas, the kind of center. He was the first one in a major hotel in New York City to work. He opened a lot of doors for us. Of course, he closed a lot of them for us later on in his career when he really got into the trouble with his booze and his personal life, and when Hank got into his own personal problems, later on, you know, just completely ruined him in a way in the industry. He didn't ruin the love of the people at him, but it hurt him from the booking staff.

My book was what they'd chances on it, because they knew if he'd booked him to have an hour of toyin' fool in Hank, one time out of ten, Mike show up. He was in so much trouble, personally. They had made an addict of him anyway when he fell off that horse and heard his back and they started giving more things. So Hank suffered. I didn't know I've seen him laying the floor on his back and it tears when I was at a certain person's bed, just to say a thing, for somebody just the people that don't know, say, oh, he died. I don't doubt that. Well, that ain't really true. He died a sick man. I saw him when he left, when he came back, and, you know, the word was out over the world. The Hank Williams was fired from the grando operator, the greatest radio show in the world. And he came back, and also I'm on course seven times when he came back, and he said, I've come back to my people down here and lose again, and they loved it. I saw him when he was drunk, and they still loved it, because he was real. He wouldn't film it.

Treeport made Daddy into a country music superstar, and his success focused the national spotlight on the hayride. The KWKH audience grew even wider after 1949. New talent replaced some of the show's pioneers who moved on to other opportunities. But before the big turnover of talent, the hayride became part of the legend, and the dream of making it was on a lot of people's minds. The other night when I came home, I couldn't see it. Red Savine inherited Hank's Johnny Fair Surf Radio spot, and soon had fans coming to the hayride just to see him. But the hayride fans chose another singer to fill the show's reputation as a star maker. Web Piers described his style as just a country boy singing his heart out.

He knew he was going to make it. The job was a manager of the Sears Mint section, Mints Department. Web couldn't get on the Louisiana hayride. They wouldn't let him on the Louisiana hayride. The way I was playing local honky tombs and outdoor shows, and he'd say, one of these days I'm not going to be on the Louisiana hayride, you wait and say it. You wait and say it. Then finally, I got to know Horst Logan and kept telling him he needed me on the Louisiana hayride. He told me I was an amateur, but finally he says I'm going to put you on there and show you. When you go down there and say that hayride, you're saying it among professional entertainers. He said, I'm going to show you, let you go out there and find out for yourself. Just how bad you are and how good they are. It was so obvious to me that he was going to do something. He was going to do something to kill himself, one of the other. He was just not determined.

There was a guitar player, a staff band named Buddy Attaway, and he paid Buddy Attaway to be sick, so he could play guitar, and so what he was playing, and he'd wear a pierce key play. He plays guitar like I do, bad, awful, and so what he got the opportunity, he just jumped to throw the Bible and started singing. So I went out there and stole the show from all of them, and he said, hey, you better come back. Next Saturday night, and that's the way it started. People I worked with, the series, when I started on there, I know one lady was very nice lady. You know, she said, well, we should go to training school and have your voice trained. And I said, have it trained. Yeah, so you can sing smooth, and like these big stars, I said, I don't want to sing like them.

I want to sing like me. I said, well, you know, you just, you don't sound like the others. I said, I don't want to sound like the others. You know, they thought everybody's supposed to sound like crew, so I guess. But this was country music. True to legend, Webb followed the trail east to Nashville, but he left behind a legacy of his own. More than any other artist, Webb was quick to give the new kid a break. At one point, Webb's band consisted of Goldie Hill, his girl singer, she's Mrs. Colosmith. Tommy Hill, her brother, his lead guitar, Farron Young, as a frontman and soloist, Jimmy Dale and Steel and Floyd Cramer on piano, wasn't a bad band, was it? Webb decided he wanted a girl singer, and he said, we already get a girl for the band. And Tommy said, well, I've got a sister at home who said, you want to give her a try.

And he said, why not? He called me, and he said, you want to sing, and I said, sure. I called always, you know, hey, right, my school of heart knocks, because we worked the road during the week and worked there in Saturday night. And we didn't make a lot of money, but you know, I don't guess anyone did. Even the stars, so to speak, it wasn't a big money situation, but it was a stepping stone. Of course, I started trying to write some country songs, then. And I went over and knocked on his door, and I told him, I'll catch you, I'll do him here, and I came in, let me in, and I sang him to it. And we have said, well, son, you sang a lot better than you were right. So I did, that was a compliment too, but I could start with good and this, you know, I didn't think of myself singing, I couldn't ever see myself as a professional singer making any money. And I told him, well, I'll be a songwriter, but he changed my ideas the rest of what you better sing.

A whole fair and left dairy farm, and then hit the road with the rest of Webb's band. That family saw a lot of miles before they all made it to Nashville. We went the one day, we were in time, right across the line over in Texas, advertised it, we went down to do the show, and there was no electricity in the school, but all. And they had lamps, they had coal oil lamps, of course we had nowhere to hook up to still get cars and things, and no PA system, though we were very lucky to sort of come in and hold about 50 people. And it was about 10 in there, and it was on the ground floor, and it was about 40 of them looking in the windows, you know, looking around. And Webb made a bad mistake, because he told everybody outside, well, if y'all want to see the show just come on in, well, those 40 came in with the 10 that was in there, played, we had to give them their money back, which was like a quarter or something, but it was funny. Those were, they weren't easy days. When Webb left the show, again, another artist became superstar.

It was a question among the acts, who's going to be the next big one? I was doing a show in Nashville in 1949 and 50, and the show folded. I was out of a job, and my manager knew that there was an opening in three-port, little lose on a hay ride. I didn't see how we could live on $50 a week, but Hank Williams had just left, and he had about the biggest record he ever had on the show, and so the wife, then I and my manager at the time said, okay, if Hank Williams could do it, maybe you can do it. I played a couple shows with him, once I remember we played Vivian Louisiana, made 75 cents. He might kill me for telling me.

When I went to the Louisiana hay ride, I was not a big artist. I had four records, and none of them had sold over 4,000 records, but they said, just keep plugging away one day, you will have a big record. He'd start in a low key and then work yourself up to the key where he was going to do the song. He was a unique different style of diapitalum, and very quiet and reserved that I noticed he got a tremendous response, and that wasn't what you could consider basically traditional in those days.

Now, whether it was a style or whether it was slim, boys or what, what the cue lures said, if you like to hear a coy old howl at the moon, then you'd like to swim with them, and the other then said, I think it's at how all you get to are that the record is so a million and nobody else is ever sold it. I don't know why and don't really care they were a million people liked it, and I'm glad to be a little part of pleasing them. You look, all had some steel guitar, which the other steel guitar players call errors. It went way up. I would be up in a high register, but steel guitar player would be up in a high register. So that style was created on the loose and a hayride, but as a mistake, it was something I heard it was supposed to be there, and I asked the guitar player afterward, I said, what did you do on that song? He says, I don't really know.

I said, what if he did do it again, and that's the way we started it. I have a soft place in my heart for the hayride. I spent a lot of good years there. The biggest record driver ever had worked cut in three-port. I'm still cutting records today, but it's hard to get a record as big as I had back then. Indian love call sold over two million singles. Slim Whitman was the first hayride graduate to break with tradition. He built an independent recording career instead of going to the Grand Ole Opry. But the Whitman sound became part of the hayride legend. People started watching the Sideman, the backup musicians who influenced the artist's style and the show's flavor. One thing we always had on the old Louisiana hayride was a variety of music. All of this soloists were encouraged, those who could afford it, to have their own bands so that have a different sound to sound their own.

And the hayride always had at least two different backup bands. One usually, a straight country band, a featuring buddy Attaway and Dobber and a few of the others. And another, a kind of an uptown band with preacher on the piano or floor at Cramer on the piano, some of the others with more of a modern country's sound, so they could back the various soloists on the show. Let's listen out to the old Louisiana hayride band as they play the yarn, awesome, special. Well, I think maybe having the chance to work with many different artists at that time was a different style of music, gave me more of a creative situation to my music. And it was basically I grew up with country and rhythm and blues, and it gave me more of a chance to really stretch out and play different types of music, pop music and jazz

as well as country and rock. James Burton and I were experimenting with guitar sound. The thin strings, the steel picks, more bands from a blues nature, but still country music and rock that made 50s rock. We were experimenting with all that, and even if it was a country sing, we would throw these lyrics in there, and we found the audience who loved it. The early 1950s were growing years for many musicians and artists, and the hayride grew with the law. The cast took on new faces, David Houston, Sonny James, Tommy Trent, Jump and Bill in the rest of the carliles, and from New Mexico, Billy Walker, then the hayride really got

hot. It joined the CBS National Network and the Armed Forces radio system picked up the signal and sent it all over the world. Saturday night, eight o'clock, millions tuned in to that live hayride sound. The CBS radio network presents the Louisiana hayride. Just before we hit the air, as the second hand went right up to the 60, I'd say, is anybody here from Texas? And since most of our audiences from Texas, the place would literally explode, and Jack would turn it wide open, and we'd hit the air with a tremendous blast of sound, and as it faded a little bit, I'd say, the Louisiana hayride, and it started to deep deep deep and start to theme. We'd never explained to the broadcast audience what we were doing. A gothbook quartet would be singing, k-koo water. We'd bring them cups of water, each man holding both hands for the water.

Then we'd bring the entire water, but the jug out, and the audience would go into his tariffs. We'd never explained on the air what we were doing. Just the incredible hysteria was going to notice, and we did have microphones hanging throughout the auditorium, so the applause could become as much a part of the program as the music coming from the stage. And the greatest, let's give a wonderful round of applause. Don't let him quit, Johnny Horton, let's go! Kilman Frank when he managed Johnny Horton, who's also teaching a little group of students with the guitar. And what he would do on a Saturday night, he'd get all his students, and he'd get him to sit all over the auditorium in different places. And then when Johnny came on, they would start applauding in their particular area. And of course, you know, they'd get everybody a round of applauding. If you did something well, then I mean, it'd stand up and let you know they liked it.

They're quick to encore you. That's you were good. And yet, if you were bad, nobody crucified you. You know, the audience didn't take any prisoners, let's say, you know, where'd all be prisoners? It was so business, it was designed to cause the people to be curious to want to come see the thing. That was a whole idea. The announcers were the glue that held it all together. Since he was the show's producer, Arce Logan was kind of the big daddy of them all. He, Ray Bartlett, and Bill Cutta back were their first. Frank Page was around almost as long. High Roberts, Norm Bail, and Jeff Dale signed on next, but the announcer that caused the biggest stir wasn't really an announcer at all. He was hired as one, but coming from Texas, he had much bigger plans. One night, Sleepy Libef failed to show. And so we asked Jim, you know, hey, you want to sing a couple?

And when do you feel it? And Jim said, sure. So he sang a couple of songs, and that's what started it all. It was an accident that Jim Reeves sang on the bluesy and A, right, and got his start on the Hey, right. I'm gonna get rid of it and rowdy, gonna tell everybody howdy, gonna go. Jim always had in mind a new direction that he was going, and he was probably as well organized and saw a head further than some of the other artists that I had known well and grew up with. He had everything lined up pretty well, and he was fortunate enough to later to start recording those tremendous vallards and develop that style that he and RCA developed after 1955 when he came to the opera and joined RCA. And 57, when he recorded four walls, he just decided that song just fit singing in an

intimate voice directly to a person, instead of millions of people, one person. And so that way he got to be his natural self and he worked. Jim Reeves died not ever fully knowing or realizing his capability or just how popular and how good he was. Jim Reeves' smooth style did a lot to create the country pop sound of the sixties. Just before Jim left the hayride, the Maddox brothers and Rose joined the show. Rose and her brothers lit up the place just by what they had home. And when that Alabama lady started singing, well, the place got its first taste of what RCA Billy was all about. Rose got the hayride ready for what was coming next, and what was coming made everything

else that came before seemed pretty tame. At first they called him the Memphis Flash, then the hillbilly cat. They didn't know what to call his music. Elvis Presley hit the hayride stage in October 1954. It was only a week after the opera turned him away and told him to go back to driving a truck. What a mistake that was. But by the time Elvis left 18 months later, the hayride, country music, pop music, and American culture in general, was changed forever. I'm sure the big decision was made by Horace Logan, or even by the manager at that time, who was Henry Clay, that we gave him a try, because the hayride was innovative. The opera was stained, they were nothing but acoustic instruments, no drums, and we were

willing to take a chance. But I went down and got Elvis into the auditorium, and I watched him as they set up and rehearsed a little bit. And I knew that he wasn't country, but I also knew that he was really innovative. This is different. Oh my gosh, this is something. It seemed like yesterday, and he was wearing a peat coat, black pants, and white shoes, which was a definite giveaway that this guy must be a little different than the other people that you were going to see on that night on the stage. There's first appearance, they had told him not to use any bug or moment, and they have to say, I was nervous, and he stood out there. And so the second appearance, he didn't do much, and when he come over to me out in the corner, him and Scott had been on there, they couldn't understand why they didn't tear the roof down, because they'd been doing it at the Eagles best, and Memphis, the sleepy eye John, up there, where he's been buried, and there where he goes, people go on, they

didn't do it. And I said, well, don't pay attention. I said, do anything you want to out there. What can he do to you? And so when he went out there the second time, he started giving that wiggle, and the roof come in. That was the first night. Elvis? How are you? This evening. It's fine. How are you, sir? You all geared up with your band. Let us hear your songs. Well, I like to say I'm happy we are to be down here. It's a real honor for us to get a chance to appear on the Louisiana hay ride. We're going to do a song for you. You got anything else to say? No, I'm ready. We're going to do a song for you. We've got on the Sunday record. He goes something like this. I will have to really say that he's shaking and it should go. I wasn't used to nothing like that. I said, look at that. That looks bumpy. And like I mentioned before, about a month later, I was standing at the same spot on the side of the stage and said, you know I wonder if I'm going to have a job next week down here tonight.

That would have been the smooth to go away. I saw her. I saw her right now. Elba signed a one-year contract to appear every Saturday night on the Louisiana hay ride. During that year, he beefed up his band by adding staff drummer DJ Fontenum. They toured all over the arkletecs, developing the Presley style and learning how to work a crowd. It was a time to experiment because it was all new for Elvis and his audience. There was a club right outside of Shreveport about 10 miles out. And we were going to work that. It was called Lake Club. Lake Club. Well, the place was packed because they were expecting Hooten Curley. That was their crowd. They had been out there for years. What about 1015? There was a sole left of the club. We had to run them off. We didn't understand his type of music, rock and roll, whereas this was a country show. Definitely a country show.

A lot of people didn't like the idea of him coming in and changing it. The young people flopped the place. And the young people was the rock. They weren't the older much. So it just gradually took over like a disease. I think he built it here at help build it. I mean, it was already a big monumental show as it was. I think right here I'm just being there attracted more people. In the middle of 1955, Elvis hired Colonel Tom Parker as his manager and signed another one-year contract with the hayride. After the Memphis Flash was on national television several times, Elvis and the Colonel figured they could do better without having to come back to Shreveport every Saturday night. KWKH charged Elvis $10,000 to get out of his contract early and made Elvis do one last concert. It was held at the Fairgrounds Coliseum, the only place big enough to hold 9,000 screaming teenagers.

When he came on stage, he came by me and it just went nuts, that went nuts, the whole thing was nuts. It was great, and the light, the cameras, the flash bulbs were light. The brightest light, you can imagine, thousands of them all that went just blinding you. And screams like high pitch, it just, you know, you're so high in this eerie rockability. That was the new name for hillbilly, rockability there. So we all had to go out there and count ahead. We all had to sound just a little bit like Elvis to get a nice hand. Elvis was a hard act to follow, but a lot of guys tried.

Murrow Kilgore was one of them. His real fame came as a songwriter. One of his tunes was co-written with June Carter and recorded by a young singer on the sun label in Memphis. Johnny Cash came to the hayride looking lean and hungry, riding the waves of Elvis Presley's thunder. It took great steamy to overshat him. People were screaming holler for Johnny Cash, and he did good, real contributions. But they were always white for Elvis Presley to come back. Well, over the period of year, we had two unique, different fresh new styles. And even though the Presley had come along, and a lot of the artists at that time absolutely destroyed the hayride, nobody wanted to follow himself because of the great tremendous response and the style that he did and the difference of the age group become younger than the people that started coming soon. And then just a year later, here comes Johnny Cash, with basically the same instrumentation

but a different approach. Well, there's two within a year that started right there on the hayride, and it's quite unique. And well, oh, not a cry, and I showed the clouds out of cover of a clear blue sky, and a tears with a cry to that woman, I'm gonna flood you big river, and I'm gonna surprise here until I die. By the summer of 1956, Johnny Cash was gone, too. Bob Lumen was one of several rockers that tried the hayride stage. It became a rockabilly showcase, but there was still room-owned stage for a good, honky-tomp singer. George stayed for a few years, then went to Nashville, and became a major star in the mid-sixties.

The hayride continued for a while without a real big name on the show, a lot was blamed on Elvis, and the changing taste of the public. There were no new country stars being formed, built, because they were all singing Elvis style. The change he did with the hayride on whatever happened there happened with the music business, the entire country music business, the knowledge that we had to all change. I came up with the Nashville in 1957, I recorded a song and was lucky enough to get on those same pop charts that he was dominating. I didn't go up very far, but I got on the pop charts. So I made us try and hard and try something different. The hayride fans turned their attention to those performers who were good, but just weren't famous. There were dozens of them, known as the rest of the hayride gang, folks like Leon Payne, Buddy Attaway, Betty Amos, James O'Gwen, and Margie Singleton.

They were part of the hayride, too, and it was their turn to carry the show. If the story of country music was ever really told, I mean, the man had to leave out guys galore, they had to leave thousands, and it wouldn't have been what it is without those guys, because, well, you take two or three or a couple of stars on the hayride. They wouldn't have been there without those 30 or 40 in-between acts, because the people probably wouldn't have came just to see them, but it came to see the whole show like they're doing where else. I mean, to me, I don't care whether you're man-gavens, or it was in a local dish jacket and some work on the hayride, or whether you were Elvis Presford. You should have that one thing, you were hayride.

And to me, one was important as he had one of the hayride regulars since the early days always seemed to be just around the corner from making it big. He had one hit called Honky Tonk Man that hit the top ten, but he just kept smiling, waiting his turn. Success was never the driving force for Johnny Horton. That's why they called him the Singing Fisherman. He was more like a sportsman. He'd rather fish and hunt and do things like that, and singing was a means of way to get money for him by fishing baits with. And he'd put all his fishing equipment in the trunk of the car, and sometimes one hardly had room enough for his guitar. And if he had just, like, seen a pond along the way, he'd just might stop and go fishing. He was going to be late, but he left to do it. That was his life, you know.

The big time caught up with Johnny when he recorded a song that Tillman heard on Nashville radio. It was different from the Honky Tonk style Johnny was known for it. The record turned out to be a classic. The Battle of New Orleans was just one of those special tunes that comes along every now and then. It went number one all over the country and made Johnny Horton, Shreveport's favorite son. He followed it up with other big hits like North to Alaska, but he's still like coming home and playing the hay ride. On November 5, 1960, Johnny died while traveling between the men's shoulders.

He was killed. We had played in Austin, Texas at this club called the Skyline Club, and we left there about one o'clock, and I guess it was about two when he was the boy hit us on the bridge as we was going around the bridge there. I was in the front seat and my head was laying against his shoulder, and I just remember Johnny fighting the steering wheel when the boy hit us. Of course, I went out too, I got this car up on top of my head, and Tommy Thompson lost his leg. He was in the back seat, and by the time we got to the hospital, Johnny was dead, and I was unconscious to get home of self. For a long time, it was hard for me to set the fact that he was gone, you know? By the time Johnny Horton died, the Louisiana hay ride was no longer a weekly show with the Municipal Auditorium and Shreveport.

The show lost its spot on the CBS Network, rising costs put a strain on the hay ride's profits, and then there was the new competition from television. We found when Crosby managed, and we didn't have the big stars, the only way to keep going was to bring a star in. Then we had to change our entire way of doing things. We had to pay them what they wanted instead of, you know, them taking what we were giving. And one thing led to another, we went from every Saturday night to a twice a month, and then to a once a month, then finally, the end. It was just like a death of a type. I've seen people leave, you know, like their job or something, it's not the same thing. It's something that they knew was a unique in that time and place, and will never be the same again, couldn't be.

And just picture how to your life. If the plans had been made for extensive booking of the people that we had, if there had been recording studios to keep side musicians busy, if publishing houses had been set up, if all of those things had been set up at that time, perhaps they ride what have survived and be as big as Nashville is to do. Of course, I understand the hayride is still operating over in Bose or City, I think. But it's a different situation, different set up than it was when KWKH had the Louisiana hayride and the Louisiana hayride was the show in that section of the country. In 1974, Shreveport businessman David Kent bought the hayride name from KWKH and started

a weekly show and a new building outside of Shreveport. It seems old legends die hard, especially in country music. There's a mystique about the Louisiana hayride. They come here almost as if it is to a shrine. Well, they know that 23 of the stars and superstars of country music started here, and they are proud to be a part of that. I don't underestimate it at all in break catches on it, but exactly why it has this effect on them. I don't know. I guess it's sort of to a religious person who would be like visiting the Holy Lab, it's almost that way. When you think about it, the old Louisiana hayride was a fast-moving stream that fed the

big river of country music. It lives on in the music of the people that played there and in the hearts of the folks who listened and yelled for more. At the time of the hayride, we were having a good time. We really were not aware that we were making country music history. It was a lot of fun, and I don't think we really took anything very serious. Well, at 19 years old, there's not many others that do take time for serious. The fun and the relationship that all others had on the Louisiana hayride was a kind of a type of relationship, and I never will forget it, and I'm thankful that I was here to write plates at the right time to be in the participate in something that is great as a man hayride. Then it was a wonderful thing, something that you never forget. So here I am 50 albums later, won't go back to sleep or work the Louisiana hayride one more time, get the old gang together, wouldn't that be fun, that'd be great.

Please, take a walk through my mind, to a place long ago, take me back there one more time, over mountains of dreams, across the river of tears, through the valley of hurt, has to give you lonely memories, let me go back and find, stay old town, stay old friends, let me see them one more time.

We had here with us, we had a wonderful time, and we want to invite folks all over this great United States of ours to come down, where Saturday night is good country music, the Louisiana hayride, good night to you Norm, thank you very much Farron, and folks, next week we plan to have the famous gospel singers, the Chuck wagon gang, hope you'll plan to tune in your favorite CBS radio network station, our thanks tonight to Bob Shelton and Farron Young, and of course to all the rest of the gang. I'd like to close with the term used by the late Hank Williams when he had a program on KWKH. If the good Lord's Willon and the Creek still rise, we'll see you next week. Until then, this is Norm Bail speaking for Jeff Dale saying, the best of luck to you and good night, everybody. Good night Brown, we've all had a wonderful time at the Louisiana hayride in Florida. Radio Stitter drills, the spends comes tomorrow on the CBS radio network.

Major funding for production of this program was provided by a grant from the Louisiana State Arts Council Division of the Arts.