Shreveport's KWKH: A city and its radio station in the evolution of country music and rock -and -roll.

Abstract

How does a city's history---its culture, commerce, race relations---affect its music? Shreveport, Louisiana, is known as the home of KWKH's Louisiana Hayride, a radio barn dance broadcast from 1948 until 1960. But its story begins earlier. Founded in 1836, the river port became a locus for commerce and culture, a place where the Deep South met the Frontier West. African-Americans and whites, living in close proximity, continually exchanged music and culture across socio-political borders; border-crossing between whites and blacks is the critical backdrop for this exploration of popular music. In 1925, W. K. Henderson built a small radio station, KWKH, where he ranted populist sermons interspersed with studio fiddles and fox-trot records. By the post-World War II era, KWKH had become a 50,000-watt powerhouse. With its Louisiana Hayride, KWKH introduced many of country music's most distinctive voices, from Hank Williams to Elvis Presley. At the same time, the station influenced a generation of white musicians who tuned in to both country and rhythm-and-blues. Along with Presley, many of these youths became influential players of a style described as rockabilly: music with one foot in rhythm-and-blues, the other in country. Shreveporters D. J. Fontana, James Burton, Joe Osborn, and Jerry Kennedy were part of this generation and enjoyed careers as performers and studio musicians, leaving their stamp on U.S. popular music. This study uses letters, newspapers, memoirs, and other sources in an interdisciplinary examination of Shreveport history and its musical culture over the past two centuries. This study focuses on the area of Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas that marks a border between the South and the West. The implications are broad, considering the international fame of Huddie Ledbetter, the development of the phonograph and radio, the post-WWII prominence of the country music radio barn dance, and the birth of rockabilly. Oral history interviews enrich a discussion of Shreveport musical life from the 1930s through the 1960s. Finally, the study illuminates the mixture of circumstance and talent that made the late 1940s to 1950s a watershed era in the musical history of this deep South city.