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Country
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
3 Country The term “country music” suggests a range of styles, most closely associated with Southern white working-class culture and evolving over the first two decades of the twentieth century. The pioneering “hillbilly” recordings that began in 1923 emphasized stringed instruments like the guitar, fiddle, and banjo, along with the harmonica. Within thirty years love, relationships, home, and nightlife had become staples in country music lyrics. Although contemporary commercial country features a slick pop and rock-influenced hybrid emanating from Nashville, country as a genre covers a wide variety of musical sounds: old-time, bluegrass, honky-tonk, western swing, new country, Bakersfield sound, progressive country, alt(ernative) country, and so on. These subgenres grew whenever country music planted itself in the fertile grounds of particular times and places. Thus, country music sounds different in the mountains of West Virginia than in the valleys and flat lands of central California or in the humid, piney woods that characterize the Ark-La-Tex. The Louisiana Hayride dominates any notion of Shreveport’s importance in country music history, and with good reason. Radio station KWKH’s 50,000watt signal beamed the program into homes hundreds of miles away, and these weekly broadcasts allowed listeners to hear such highly regarded musicians as Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Jim Reeves, and Elvis Presley. The Hayride also brought acts of more circumscribed renown like Merle Kilgore and Claude King, as well as local performers like Ray Hendrix or Jimmy and Johnny, into living rooms throughout the country’s heartland. Likewise, the Hayride dominates this country music section of Shreveport Sounds, framed with excerpts from the book on the topic by one of this collection ’s co-editors.1 We also include excerpts from a 1976 interview with longtime 4 Hayride director, Horace Logan, and one of a handful of new pieces written for this collection, Steven Morewood’s essay about long-time radio and recording engineer Bob Sullivan. Sullivan worked the board at Shreveport’s Municipal Auditorium on most Saturday night Hayride broadcasts; and he often recorded after hours in the KWKH studios, creating beloved cuts by Slim Whitman, Jim Reeves, Dale Hawkins, and other 1950s legends. Before the Hayride, its host radio station KWKH already drew country musicians to its studios eager to take advantage of its powerful signal. Most famous among these, Jimmie Davis aired a weekly live broadcast during the late 1920s and recorded on the station owner’s “Hello World” label. (Station owner W. K. Henderson also surfaces in the section of Shreveport Sounds titled “Radio, Records, and Rhythm”). A string of regional performers made their way to the city for a chance to broadcast over KWKH’s mighty radio signal in these early years. Monty Brown’s piece on the Taylor-Griggs Melody Makers offers an oral history of one family band’s experiences broadcasting at KWKH, as well as cutting commercial records in the industry’s early era. As a companion to that piece, Susan Roach writes an account of the Cox Family, a contemporary family band who gained fame via their inclusion on the film and soundtrack, O Brother Where Art Thou?, but remain bound to their northwestern Louisiana roots. Both groups draw on a tradition of string music that blended Anglo and African influences beginning in the era of slavery. The Shreveport region is fertile ground for this tradition, which started in the early nineteenth century when white farmers and merchants, some bringing slaves, arrived along a westward track from the Piedmont region of the southeastern United States. Those who settled in northwestern Louisiana found a life fueled by the cash crop agriculture of cotton and the commercial navigation of the Red River to New Orleans, then a world-class port. Music-making in this context occurred at house parties, among both blacks and whites, and in formal dances of the elite white plantation culture. It also happened in established churches and at tent revival meetings, aboard the steamboats that plied the Red River, or with the traveling minstrel shows that entered town by wagon or, later, by train. All these experiences shaped the region’s musical culture, including its country music. White rural bands with guitar, bass, fiddle, and mandolin are by no means unique to the area. Shreveport’s location, however, is such that influences of black music, Cajun and Creole, and Texas music gave these bands a distinct COUNTRY [44.221.43.88] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:39 GMT...