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Elvis, Hank, and Me
Making Musical History on the Louisiana Hayride
By Horace Logan, Bill Sloan St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1998 Horace Logan with Bill Sloan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-10874-6
CHAPTER 1
The Shy Kid From Memphis
When the phone rang at my house that fall afternoon, I was tempted at first not to answer it. It was a little past lunchtime on Saturday, October 9, 1954 — still three or four hours before I had to report to the Municipal Auditorium near downtown Shreveport to get ready for that week's edition of the Louisiana Hayride — and I was trying to relax.
I was program director for radio station KWKH, one of a handful of powerful 50,000-watt broadcasting "giants" scattered across the southern United States. I was also the Hayride's producer, emcee, talent boss, and chief architect. From the time the show went on the air at 8 P.M. until long after it signed off at midnight, it would demand my undivided attention and every ounce of energy I could muster. But right now I was enjoying some quiet time at home with my family, and the last thing I wanted to do was get stuck in some long-winded telephone conversation.
Finally, though, I picked up the receiver, muttered a not-too-friendly "Hello" into the mouthpiece, and heard a husky male voice coming back to me over the line.
I recognized the voice immediately. It was the kid from Memphis, the one who was scheduled to make his first appearance on the Hayride that night. He sounded nervous as hell.
"I-I sure hate to bother you, Mr. Logan," he said hesitantly, "but we just got to town, and I was wonderin' if maybe there was some way me and the boys could get into the auditorium early. I'd like to get a feel for the place, you know. I mean before everybody gets there."
It was an unusual request — one I rarely heard from a first-time performer. The last time I could remember anybody insisting on an advance visit to the auditorium had been several years earlier when Gene Autry was doing a guest appearance on the Hayride and wanted to let his horse, Champion, get familiar with the place before he was brought out on the stage during the show.
"Well, right now it's just a big old empty building, son," I told him. "There's really nothing very unusual about it." I was half hoping I could talk him out of the idea, but his next words made me realize that was a lost cause.
"Yes, sir," he said, "but I never ... I mean, me and the boys ain't used to playin' for this many folks at one time, and I'd feel a lot better if we could just kinda check things out ahead of time."
I smiled in spite of myself. The auditorium seated thirty-eight hundred people, and our show usually came close to filling the place. In addition, countless thousands of other listeners in Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and other states would be tuned into the show on KWKH. When you were accustomed to playing in front of cozy crowds of a couple of hundred, the Hayride atmosphere could be pretty awesome. Consequently, in nearly six and a half years of overseeing the show — and watching it develop a national audience on the CBS Radio Network and grow into one of America's most popular country music shows — I'd soothed the stage fright of dozens of young singers and musicians. By this time, I'd spent over twenty years in radio and show business, but I also hadn't forgotten the butterflies that fluttered in my own stomach when I was starting out.
The kid and his two sidemen had to be dead tired after their six-hour drive from Memphis. If they'd been more seasoned performers, they probably would've checked into a motel and gotten some rest instead of worrying about the auditorium. But I could tell the kid was too keyed up to rest anywhere. Besides, until they got paid for the show tonight, I doubted if the three of them put together could scrape up enough money for a room at the cheapest dump in Bossier City.
"Okay," I said, "I understand. The auditorium's on the edge of downtown and just off Texas Street, which is the same thing as Highway 80, the road you drove in on. I'll bring my key and meet you down there in about twenty minutes."
"Thanks, Mr. Logan," the kid said. "I sure appreciate it."
When I drove up, the three young guys were waiting for me in an old faded blue sedan — a Plymouth, to the best of my recollection — with the doors hanging open and the radio playing. I didn't have any trouble picking out the leader of the group. He was also clearly the youngest of the three. He'd told me he was nineteen. The other guys looked to be in their early to middle twenties.
The kid was sitting in the front seat on the passenger side of the car. I later learned that his sidemen rarely let him drive, especially on long trips; they said they couldn't relax when he was behind the steering wheel. His baby face made him look even younger than his years. He wore white pants, a pink shirt, bushy sideburns, slicked-back hair, and an uneasy smile. I was surprised at how boyish and clean-cut he was, considering what I'd heard of his music. A couple of weeks earlier, when my friend Tillman Franks, a local freelance talent manager, had first given me one of the kid's records, I'd had to ask a pointed question: "Is this a black boy or a white boy, Tillman? I can't tell."
"Oh, he's white, all right," Franks had assured me. "He's just got a different sound, that's all."
The sound was different — different from anything I'd ever heard before — and I was relieved to learn the kid was white. He had the distinctiveness of style and sound that we were always looking for on the Hayride. There was something more, too — something wild and contagious about his music. But in spite of all that, I don't think I would've dared put him on if he was black. After all, this was the Deep South in the mid1950s, and I didn't think the region's country music fans were quite ready for a black performer.
"So you're the Hillbilly Cat from Memphis," I said, sticking out my hand. "I'm Horace Logan. Most everybody calls me Hoss."
"Pleasure to meet you, sir. Thanks for havin' us on the show."
He clearly wasn't comfortable with first-name familiarity — in fact, he didn't seem comfortable about much of anything — and I was struck by how polite he was. Most young people were polite in those days, but politeness was deeply ingrained in this kid. I knew right away he'd had "good manners" and "respect for his elders" drummed into his head by someone, probably his mother, from the time he was in diapers.
"We're much obliged to you for lettin' us mess up your Saturday afternoon, Mr. Logan," he said as we shook hands. Then he turned to the two other young men lounging against the side of the car. "This here's Scotty Moore and Bill Black. Scotty plays the guitar and Bill handles the bass."
After the two sidemen and I exchanged handshakes, they got their instruments out of the car and I led them around to the back door of the auditorium and unlocked it. Scotty had a pretty nice looking guitar, but Bill's bass was old and battered. The kid's guitar was undersized like — well, like a kid's guitar.
"The place is all yours for the next couple of hours," I told them, "so make yourselves at home."
* * *
As show time approached and other performers and staff people started drifting in, you could see the tension mounting in the kid. He didn't seem able to stand still for more than a minute or two. He alternated between pacing the length and breadth of the Municipal Auditorium, pausing to tune his guitar, and whispering and laughing with his sidemen.
I left them there for a while to get acquainted with the place on their own. When I came back, the kid approached me and asked shyly, "What do you think I ought to do tonight, Mr. Logan?"
I shrugged. "Just do whatever you do best," I said. "Just be yourself."
"Well, I think my best song's the one called 'That's All Right, Mama.' You heard it on my record. You think it'll be okay?"
"Sure, if that's the one you want to do."
"And I only get to do one song on the part of the show that's bein' taped for the CBS network, right?"
"That's right," I said. We limited everybody to just one number on the CBS segment because we wanted to showcase as many artists as we could. "Later on, you can do a couple of numbers for our live audience — or more if you get an encore."
I explained again to him about the system we followed on the Hayride. If the audience applauded loudly enough after an artist finished his two numbers on the later segments, he could come back for one or more encores. The artists who encored regularly were obviously the audience's favorites, and they were the ones we tried to sign to long-term contracts with the show. The ones who didn't encore usually moved on after a short time.
I also made sure he understood the way our payment system worked. Our performers were paid union scale — eighteen dollars per Saturday night for a soloist, twelve dollars for backup musicians like Scotty and Bill, and twenty-four dollars for a bandleader with at least five musicians in his group. This sounds like pocket change today, but back in the fall of fifty-four, many young guys were putting in a week's worth of long hours and hard physical labor for wages of thirty to thirty-five dollars or even less, so it wasn't bad pay for three or four hours' work.
"Sounds good to me," the kid said. "I can buy lots of hamburgers for eighteen bucks. And if I get a contract I'll get that much every week, right?"
"That's the way it works," I said. "And you'll have the other six nights a week free to sing wherever you want to."
"You think my music's gonna fit in on the Hayride, Mr. Logan?" The uneasiness was back in his voice again.
My response was the same one I'd given to at least half a hundred other aspiring young artists over the years: "Sure, son, you'll do just fine."
I wanted to cross my fingers as I said it, but I didn't. The truth was, a lot of regular Hayride fans weren't going to know what to make of this kid's music, and some were probably even going to hate it. It clearly wasn't the kind of "pure country" our audiences were used to, but I was willing to take a gamble on the kid because his style was so striking and unusual.
I knew one reason why the kid was so tense and worried right now. News traveled fast in our business, even in those days, and I'd heard how, just a week ago, the kid had gone to Nashville to audition for the Grand Ole Opry, and it had turned into a real disaster — one of the worst experiences of his life. He hadn't been allowed on the portion of the Opry that was broadcast every week on the NBC Radio Network, and by the time he'd finally gotten onstage it was the tag end of the evening, so much of the crowd at the Ryman Auditorium had already left. The kid had gone ahead and sung his two allotted songs, but the crowd had just sat there, and Jim Denny, the producer of the Opry, had ridiculed his music and made him feel like a fool.
"If I were you," Denny had told him, "I'd just go back to driving a truck and forget about trying to be a singer!"
Understandably, the kid was crushed. For two years, he'd been pounding the pavement, bucking the establishment, trying to get somebody to listen to him, and hoping to sing his way out of the housing projects where his parents lived. But except for one record on a label almost nobody ever heard of and a few hundred young fans in Memphis, he didn't have a cotton-picking thing to show for it. Now he'd seen his biggest chance yet go down the drain. He was deeply disappointed and depressed. Even worse, he was also angry and humiliated.
"He cried all the way back to Memphis," Scotty Moore told me at one point that afternoon while the kid was prowling around the auditorium out of earshot. "If he doesn't do better here, he just might take Denny's advice and forget the whole thing."
A little later, I listened while the kid and his two sidemen ran through the song they planned to do for the CBS taping. I'd liked it on the record, but it sounded even better in person. There was a quality to the kid's voice that was hard to describe. It had a current of electricity flowing through it, and it grabbed at your emotions.
For two weeks, I'd had a strong feeling about this kid and his music. I'd gotten pretty good at predicting which artists would be warmly received by our audience, but what I was feeling now was more than that. It was an intuitive sensation that I'd never felt this strongly more than a few times in my whole life. On an August night in 1948, I'd had almost the same feeling about another unknown singer — a young man named Hank Williams — as he walked out onto the Hayride stage for the first time. Tonight the feeling may have been even more overwhelming, if that were possible.
"I want to do something to make my mama proud of me, Mr. Logan," the kid confided during a break. "I sure hope I'll make her proud tonight."
"I've got a feeling you will, son," I said.
* * *
At two minutes until eight o'clock, there were close to thirty-five hundred eager, restless people packed into the auditorium as I started warming them up for a typically uproarious opening to the network portion of our show.
I asked how many people were there from Arkansas and drew a burst of cheers from the Arkansans in attendance. I asked the same question about Louisiana and got an even louder response. Then, with the second hand on my watch only a few ticks from the hour and the entire cast of tonight's show massed along the front of the stage to my right and left, I shouted a question that I knew from long experience would cause a thunderous explosion of sound.
Since we were only thirty miles from the "hillbilly havens" just across the state line in East Texas, there were always hundreds of Texans in the audience, and they always enjoyed making noise.
"And how many people are here from the great state of Texas?" I yelled.
The answering outburst made the old auditorium's rafters ring, just as one of our staff bands swung into theHayride theme song:
Come along, ever'body, come along,
Come while the moon is shinin' bright.
We're gonna have a wonderful time
At the Louisiana Hayride tonight!
The CBS portion of the show would be broadcast live over KWKH but also taped for delayed broadcast the following Saturday night over nearly two hundred CBS stations from coast to coast, and during this half-hour, things moved fast, as always.
There was just enough time on the network segment for six numbers, and I'd placed the kid near the middle of that night's lineup. We always led off with a strong act, like the Browns or Red Sovine, and closed with one of our top stars, like Slim Whitman or Johnny Horton, the "Singing Fisherman" — all of whom had risen from obscurity to national prominence on the Hayride. The kid wasn't big enough for that yet, but I had a feeling it wouldn't take him long to get there.
Soon it was the kid's turn. I could plainly see his knees shaking as he stepped to the microphone. He was still wearing the same white trousers and pink shirt he'd had on when I first saw him that afternoon. The only thing he'd added was a sportcoat that was neat and clean but somehow looked secondhand. I knew he was scared to death, and I wanted to say something reassuring to him, but there wasn't time.
Instead, I leaned toward my own microphone and spoke the following words: "Ladies and gentlemen, you've never heard of this young man before, but one day you'll be able to tell your children and grandchildren you heard musical history made tonight."
I smiled and held out my hand toward the shy kid from Memphis as polite welcoming applause swelled up in the auditorium.
I had just introduced Elvis Presley to America.
CHAPTER 2
Birth of an Entertainment Legend
Elvis changed everything. He changed the way popular music sounded, the way it looked, the way it acted — everything about it. I don't mean just country music or rock music, but all popular music, and not just in the United States, but all around the globe. It lit the fuse for the most meteoric rise to stardom in the annals of show business. It happened with such amazing speed that even those of us who witnessed it at close range still have a hard time believing it. And it all started that October night in 1954 when the Louisiana Hayride gave Elvis his first chance to sing for a nationwide audience.
Elvis wasn't the first performer to soar to sudden stardom from the stage of the Louisiana Hayride, and he wouldn't be the last. But his dramatic ascent to the pinnacle of the entertainment world over the next eighteen months unquestionably brought the Hayride its greatest moments of glory. For me, it was a breathtaking, almost magical experience — one I'll cherish as long as I live.
Surely, one of the most incredible parts of the Elvis phenomenon was where it all started — not in New York, Hollywood, Las Vegas, or even Nashville. It happened in a small, fairly obscure southern city that no one had ever accused of being a capital of the entertainment industry. Today's Shreveport has a population of more than two hundred thousand and its economy got a recent shot in the arm when gambling was legalized in Louisiana and new casinos, hotels, and related businesses started moving in. But in the Hayride's heyday, it was a quiet, comfortable, slow-paced community a little more than half that size. It was a town with no particular destination in mind and in no great hurry to get there.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Elvis, Hank, and Me by Horace Logan, Bill Sloan. Copyright © 1998 Horace Logan with Bill Sloan. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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