Elvis Has Left the Building

Novelist Walker Percy once stated that two types of people come out of Louisiana: preachers, and storytellers. “For God's sake, be a storyteller,” Percy implored, “The world's got too many preachers.” In the city of Shreveport, which certainly has no shortage of preachers, Sara Hebert and Chris Jay are some of the most avid and enthusiastic storytellers you will find. The couple produces the live storytelling event and podcast All Y’all, and recently released a six-episode mini-series for the podcast chronicling the stories of the Louisiana Hayride in partnership with Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

What Is the Louisiana Hayride? 

Those who were raised in Northwest Louisiana are acutely aware of the Hayride and its country music legacy already. “If you grow up around here it’s like they hand you a summary of the Hayride when you’re born,” laughed Jay, who grew up in the Shreveport-Bossier region. For the rest of us from further south and beyond, the Hayride’s history is a bit more nebulous. “Being from South Louisiana and moving up here, I knew there was something about Elvis and Shreveport, but I didn’t really know all the details,” Hebert explained. “But the longer you live here, the more you realize [the Hayride’s] sort of woven into the fabric of the history of the city.

“I mean, can you imagine? Music history literally just fell out of the wall and landed on his foot."

—Chris Jay, cohost of the All Y'all podcast

So what is the Louisiana Hayride, besides something about Elvis and Shreveport? Somewhat akin to the Grand Ole Opry’s wilder younger cousin, the Louisiana Hayride was a country music radio show and later television program that was broadcast from Shreveport Municipal Auditorium between 1948 and 1960. The Hayride was Elvis Presley’s first national broadcast, and helped kick-start the careers of other country music greats including Hank Williams, Johny Cash, Willie Nelson, and many others. As rock ’n’ roll increased in popularity and began to eclipse country music, the Hayride ended its regular broadcast in 1960. Since the original Louisiana Hayride went off the air, however, several other iterations have been produced.

All Y'all's Louisiana Hayride Mini-Series

When Louisiana Public Broadcasting re-aired Ken Burns’ award-winning docuseries Country Music in August, they sought a Shreveport-based partner to collect and produce stories about the Hayride. Hebert and Jay, with their storytelling podcast All Y’all already established as a testament to their abilities to hone in on and provide a platform for southern stories, naturally made sense to take on the project. Interviews with a variety of sources knowledgable about the Hayride are included in the course of the six episodes: from Dr. Tracy Laird, who authored the book Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music along the Red River; to archivist Joey Kent; to local newspaper publisher “Big Rob” Gentry; to country music superstar Kix Brooks (of the “& Dunn” fame).

Keeping in the storytelling tradition of All Y’all, the Louisiana Hayride Stories series is not a scripted history lesson. More casual and intimate, the interviews are presented as what they are: conversations, where subjects are given an opportunity to share memories and tales about the Hayride as they remember them, from their own mouths. Through these conversations, iconic moments in Shreveport’s country music history are illuminated: a highlight is the origin of  the now-cliché phrase “Elvis has left the building.”

The Origins of "Elvis Has Left the Building"

Joey Kent, whose father David launched a second installment of the Hayride after the original ended in 1960, grew up backstage at both iterations of the show. Kent explains that following Presley's final Hayride performance, in an attempt to control the rabid crowd of predominantly women, producer and announcer of the Hayride Horace Logan told the audience, “Elvis has left the building.” This was the first-known iteration in of the now-iconic phrase being uttered. This is not the only music history discovery Kent shares with All Y'all: decades later, when Kent was cleaning out an office at KWKH radio station in Shreveport, an old reel-to-reel rolled out from a space between a desk and the wall. It turned out that particular recording was from October 16, 1954—the day Elvis Presley made his Louisiana Hayride debut. “I mean, can you imagine? Music history literally just fell out of the wall and landed on his foot,” Jay marveled. “It was a moment for me that I just looked at Sara in the recording booth and my jaw dropped.”

The African Americans and Women of the Hayride Era

Tying each episode’s unique perspective on the Hayride together is original music by AJ Haynes of Shreveport-based soul rock band the Seratones. Rather than the upbeat, “yee-haw!” sort of vibe one might expect from music opening a podcast series about the Louisiana Hayride, Haynes’ theme for the series captures an air of retrospective regret that comes from acknowledging that as seminal as the Hayride was for Louisiana music history, the voices of women it represented were minimal and trivialized, and voices of Shreveport’s African American community were neglected entirely during the Jim-Crow era broadcast. “What I’m riffin’ on is like, Slim Whitman and underdog kind of haunted, definitely minor,” Haynes says of her composition. “Like, it’s not happy-upbeat. It’s like, we’ve got spooky skeletons and repression in our blood.”

While the series tells the stories of the Hayride from a variety of perspectives, Hebert and Jay also do the important work of acknowledging the stories that were left out of the Hayride’s legacy. In the episode featuring Hebert’s conversation with Haynes, a Black female musician herself, the pair discuss how at the time of the Hayride’s original broadcast, similarly revolutionary strides in jazz and gospel music were being made by African American artists just down the street from the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium at the Calanthean Temple. “But because of the landscape of race relations in the city, these two very vibrant, incredible music movements were separated,” Hebert lamented. “And it breaks my heart when I think about it: Wouldn’t it have been incredible for those musicians to interact with one another on stage?”

[Read more about All Y'all in this story from our September 2017 issue.]

This is another reason Hebert and Jay identify as storytellers, rather than historians: in the series, they do not seek merely to tell the history of the Hayride. Through their conversations, they more broadly explore its relevance to Shreveport’s music legacy—including what that means for the future. “I think that it’s important that as we move forward and think about the Hayride and its role in our region’s history, that we acknowledge that if the Hayride took place today in the year 2020, it would look extremely different than what it looked like in the fifties and sixties,” Hebert mused. “It would include lots of women and lots of people of color, and it would be maybe a little less about country music but more about interpreting the landscape of our area through music in a different way.” Considering that the Hayride has been revived in the past, and surely will be again in the future, that’s certainly something to anticipate with hope.

To listen to the Louisiana Hayride Stories podcast series produced by All Y’all in partnership with Louisiana Public Broadcasting, search “All Y’all” wherever you listen to podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, or Spotify) and look for episodes 71-76. Episodes may also be streamed at allyallblog.com.

Hebert and Jay also produce Stuffed & Busted, a podcast, website and email newsletter dedicated to exploring and celebrating the food and drink of North Louisiana. Stuffed & Busted publishes two new articles each month, which may be viewed at stuffedandbusted.com.