Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music along the Red River.

Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music along the Red River. By Tracey E.W. Laird. American Musicspheres. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 208. $29.95, ISBN 0-19-516751-1.)

The radio program Louisiana Hayride is known to country music scholars and fans alike as the upstart barn dance on Shreveport, Louisiana's KWKH where newcomer Hank Williams yodeled "Lovesick Blues" and a young Elvis Presley sang "Blue Moon of Kentucky." A study of the radio show that looks beyond those well-known events is overdue, and this book is a welcome addition to the discourse on country music. Tracey E. W. Laird's research proposes that the character and lasting impact of that show were unique manifestations of Shreveport's regional identity. Laird reexamines issues of genre identity, business practices, geographic location, and race as they pertain to the heyday of honky-tonk music and the emergence of rock-and-roll.

Laird's ambitious agenda is to weave a coherent narrative linking the founding of Shreveport as a city to the show's musical styles and their impact on popular music. The first two chapters recount the settling of Shreveport and its commercial role as a river town, where barrelhouse boogie woogie, blues, and hillbilly music were cultivated with other vernacular styles, both black and white. Chapters 3 and 4 recount the emergence of hillbilly music recordings and the rise of country radio stations. Although much in these chapters may be known to readers, they provide a link in the narrative that connects place and meaning to the Hayride. Chapters 5 and 6 bring the threads together in a detailed study of the Hayride, which was broadcast from 1948 until 1960, discussing the show's major country stars and the relationship of the Hayride to popular culture through the performances of Elvis Presley and others.

From the days of Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter onward, Shreveport fostered desegregated musical innovation. Those diverse musical influences converged on the Hayride in both progressive musical styles and managerial attitudes that welcomed experimentation. Laird summarizes that the Hayride "suggests the limitations for tacitly adopting Ralph Peer's segregated commercial categories for southern roots music as ... viable parameters for understanding the music ..." (p. 152). Her arguments are convincing, but similar cases have been made for other regions that fostered country music's development.

The few questions left unanswered are minor in comparison to the book's contributions. By restricting her comparisons of the Hayride to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry, Laird conspicuously omits contextualization of the Hayride with other radio shows that shaped country music's history, most notably WLS's National Barn Dance and several programs in California. She also contrasts the progressive musical attitudes of Hayride performers with the Nashville Sound, but she does not acknowledge the presence of the era's more adventurous country music styles in places like Bakersfield.

Laird concludes that Shreveport's role as a commercial crossroads was mirrored in its cultural confluence of Cajun, blues, and hillbilly musical traditions, which, through the Hayride, had a far-reaching impact on popular culture. Although the book principally centers on the Hayride, it is also an analysis of place, commerce, and musical aesthetics as social forces. Perhaps the most persuasive recommendation for the book is that it left me wishing for similar treatments of other cultural institutions in country music's colorful history.

JOCELYN R. NEAL 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill