Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music Along the Red River (review)

Abstract

Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music Along Red River. By Tracey E. W. Laird. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. (American Musicspheres Series.) [x, 208 p. ISBN 0-19-516751-1. $29.95.] Maps, photos, bibliography, discography, filmography, index. With this book, Tracey E. W. Laird returns to her hometown of Shreveport to examine forces that shaped distinctive culture and music of northwest Louisiana and created one of most significant radio barn dance shows in American music history, Louisiana Hayride. Using Hayride and its host radio station KWKH as centerpiece, Laird questions how intersecting forces of geography, history, demography, and economics shaped character of region and set stage for this unique radio program of singular influence. Shreveport's history of musical dynamism between blacks and whites, with relatively equal numbers of each living in close proximity, results in inevitable musical exchange. This blurred racial boundary points to central issue of book: that neat and tidy black-and-white musical categories handed down through commercial and academic discourse are a distorted exaggeration of realities of musical life in early part of century. Laird's detailed focus on one influential locale offers strong support for a reassessment while at same time providing a detailed description of how one corner of American music impacted whole. The book proceeds in three major sections, each given two chapters. Section 1 presents a historical background of area focusing on founding of Shreveport as a commercial river in 1830s. The area is portrayed as a frontier region caught between two identities: the burgeoning commercial center and lawless hedonic port (p. 23). Musical life along waterway of Red River straddles these identities with a wide variety of contexts and styles including showboats, brass bands, tent shows, house parties, and entertainment venues amidst legalized prostitution of Fannin Street district. Laird uses genre-crossing repertoire and style of Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter), who lived and worked around Fannin Street, to illuminate her portrait. His career attests to a broad range of musical experiences, most of which predate era of commercial records and his songs fall under a variety of genre headings: ragtime, blues, country ballads, folk songs, children's songs, and Tin Pan Alley. Laird asks: how much did formulaic thinking and myopia of commercial profit shape recorded output of black and white rural musicians alike? How often by late 1920s and early 1930s were artists encouraged to fit their repertoire and performance styles to whichever audience record company wished to target (p. 36)? Although most often historicized as a blues artist, Leadbelly's songs and his performance style fit 1920s-1930s 'country' criteria more completely, pointing to a richer dynamic within southern roots music than artifacts of phonograph records (and many early histories) portray. This musical fluidity across racial and cultural borders emerges from day-to-day realities of life in Shreveport and lays foundation for unique qualities of Hayride. While this first section may be driest and least original part of Laird's book, it is, nonetheless, central to her argument and important for those readers not familiar with early foundations of blues and country music in United States. Though geography is stated to be central to her thesis, Laird concerns herself minimally with issues of space and migration-career moves to Grand Ole Opry notwithstanding. With exception of one large-scale, minimally detailed, map of Red River, there is little in book to give reader a sense of locale or human geography. A map of city of Shreveport (Fannin Street and Bossier City) would have helped in presentation of this early history. …