Dancing Through the Early '50s

Dancing Through the Early “50’s

Got time for a little time travel? I hearken back to the days before I-pods, CD’s, Walkmen, 8-Tracks, tapes, stereo, and even LP records. Music was live, on the radio, on records, or on jukeboxes. By the mid 50’s forty-five rpm records were the height of technology and adapters were needed to adapt them to spindles built for 98 rpm records. Those records were a buck apiece at a time when kids were lucky to make 50 cents an hour and many adults were making only $1 an hour.

During my preteen years the radio was always tuned to KWKH, a station in Shreveport , Louisiana, (this is before TV) that played mostly country music and broadcast The Louisiana Hayride live every Saturday. In addition they had live shows featuring such stars as Hank Williams selling Johnny Fair syrup and Johnny and Jack (also featuring Loretta Lynn) selling some other product with their hit of “The Little Paper Boy”.

I remember another show selling Doughnuts that friends of mine were invited to perform on prior to their performing on the Hayride. A neighbor from across the street, Tommy Tomlinson, played lead guitar for Johnny Horton who had the hit record “Battle of New Orleans”.

So, this is just the long way of saying that during my early years I was totally immersed in country music. Hank Williams “Lovesick Blues”, Lefty Frizell’s “Always Late”, Webb Pierce’s “I’m in the Jailhouse Now”, Slim Whitman’s “China Doll”, and Earnest Tubb”s “Walking the Floor Over You”; these are a sample of the songs that captured my attention and in which I was engrossed.

Then I discovered girls and that I liked to dance with them. Fortunately the Hunter family, owners of the local Coca Cola Bottling Company, liked kids and built a playground, pools, sponsored sports teams and provided Hunter’s Playhouse for our pleasure. Hunters, the shortened name we used, had a free jukebox playing 98 rpm records, a large dance floor, adult monitors who were teachers working a second job, and game rooms. Games were cards, checkers, ping pong and pool. Electronic games did not yet exist.

The juke box automatically cycled through its record selection and we danced to all of those songs, and those songs helped shape the rest of my life. The records on the jukebox were all pop songs, not a country song among them, except for covers by pop artists or a crossover song like Sonny James “White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation”. Goodbye Country, hello pop music!

Mostly the girls sat along the one wall and the boys sat on the other side of the dance floor. The boys had to walk across the floor to ask the girl to dance, and had to risk rejection. So, I learned to deal with rejection, developed skills to turn a rejection into a “Yes”, and got to dance with most of the girls that came to Hunter’s, including many who had never been on a dance floor before, but obviously wanted to or they wouldn’t be there. Decades later I was pleased to have one of those girls thank me for talking her onto the dance floor and teaching her to dance.

We jitterbugged to Glen Miller's “In the Mood”, twirled to “Glow Worm” by the Mills Brothers, slow danced to “Half as Much” by Joni James, two stepped to Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa”, glided to Johnny Ray’s “Cry”, faked it on Eddie Albert’s “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White”, and danced along with tunes by the Ames Brothers, Teresa Brewer, the Ink Spots, Sinatra, Doris Day, Jo Stafford, and all the other top recording artists of the day.

Hunter’s Play House closed down sometime in the late fifties, but it was there all through my junior high and high school years. It was open two nights a week, and it provided a safe haven for the teens of my hometown, a place which introduced me to the pleasures of pop music and dancing.

Rock and Roll and Rockabilly? Those came mostly after high school and deserve a story of their own. Maybe later.