Louisiana Hayride
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| 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 – August 27, 1960 |
Louisiana Hayride was a radio and later television country music show broadcast from the Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium in Shreveport, Louisiana, that during its heyday from 1948 to 1960 helped to launch the careers of some of the greatest names in American country and western music. Elvis Presley performed on the radio version of the program in 1954 and made his first television appearance on the television version of Louisiana Hayride on March 3, 1955.
The creators of the show took the name from the 1941 book with that title by Harnett Thomas Kane, an examination of the "Louisiana Hayride" scandals of 1939–1940 that sent to prison such notables as Louisiana State University President James Monroe Smith and former Louisiana building superintendent George A. Caldwell. First broadcast on April 3, 1948 from the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Shreveport, Horace "Hoss" 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 Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.
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/700 and, later, television dubbed its version Midwestern Hayride.
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