Louisiana Hayride
country music show originating in Shreveport, Louisiana
Louisiana Hayride is a radio and later television country music show that was broadcast from the Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium in Shreveport, Louisiana; during its heyday from 1948 to 1960, it helped to launch the careers of some of the greatest names in American country and western music. Created by KWKH station manager Henry Clay, the show is notable as a performance venue for a number of 1950s country musicians, as well as a nascent Elvis Presley.
Hayride history
Beginnings
The creators of the show took the name from the 1941 book with that title by Harnett Thomas Kane. First broadcast on April 3, 1948, from the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Shreveport, Horace Logan was the original producer and emcee. The musical cast for the inaugural broadcast included the Bailes Brothers, Johnnie and Jack, the Tennessee Mountain Boys with Kitty 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.
Popularization
The show was soon made into a Broadway attraction called Louisiana 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. The flagship station of the program was KWKH/1130 in Shreveport. The popularity of Louisiana Hayride spawned various incarnations in other parts of the United States, most notably in Cincinnati on WLW radio and later television; its version was dubbed Midwestern Hayride.
Beginning with the successful first show on April 3, 1948, Louisiana Hayride ranked second only to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry in terms of importance until ABC began telecasting Ozark Jubilee in 1955.
The public source identifies “Louisiana Hayride” as country music show originating in Shreveport, Louisiana. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Louisiana, Hayride and country.
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This entry incorporates text from “Louisiana Hayride” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.