Hayride

The program didn’t list individual musical numbers, but reviews and other sources indicate that among the songs performed in the revue were: “Blackberry Winter”; “The Blue Tail Fly”; “He’s Gone Away”; “Jambalaya”; “Little Things Mean a Lot”; “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”; “Vegetable Love”; a medley of Hank Williams’s songs; and a medley of Stephen Foster’s songs. Richard Watts in the New York Post suggested an entire evening of hillbilly music was “slightly excessive,” but he liked the “remarkably engaging” cast and singled out “Vegetable Love,” a song that cataloged the names of numerous vegetables; William Hawkins in the New York World-Telegram and Sun said Sunshine Sue’s “Blackberry Winter” was the evening’s “most memorable” song, but noted a half-hour of the revue was enough for some while others would “yell for more far into the night”; L.F. (Lewis Funke) in the New York Times said the new Broadway season got underway with a “whoop and a holler” and doubted if a band of “more informal and earnest entertainers has ever graced a local professional stage”; but for a “city square” who was not “unreceptive” to hillbilly music, a “full evening” was somewhat “enervating”; and John McClain in the New York Journal-American had been prepared for a “dreary” time but discovered the revue was enjoyable and he liked the “ingratiating” and “infectious” mistress of ceremonies Sunshine Sue. Philip Strassberg in the Daily Mirror wasn’t so taken with the proceedings, and wondered why one of the performers was there on stage with the hillbillies because the “refugee” had been seen on the Borscht Belt circuit. John Chapman in the Daily News was in a querulous mood and said the revue was a “juke box with people” that “aroused the damnyankee in me.” As far as he was concerned, the new theatre season would really begin a few nights later when “a reasonably house-broke hillbilly named Tallulah Bankhead” opened in the play Dear Charles. Walter Kerr in the New York Herald Tribune suggested the performances were a little too slick, and he suspected the players hadn’t really been back to hillbilly country in “quite a spell”; the amplification for the electric guitars was deafening, the humor weak (“I wanted to come to New York the worst way—so I did, on one of them Bloodhound Buses”), and the patter just a little too pat (Sunshine Sue’s dialect was a “syrupy confection” that seemed better suited for selling toothpaste). He noted Aristotle once said entertainment should invoke pity and terror, and wondered if Aristotle could have been thinking of Hayride. The cast included soon-to-be bluegrass music legends Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and their Foggy Mountain Boys. Scruggs composed the music for the now classic instrumental number “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and he and Flatt (and Jerry Scroggins) later performed the popular “Ballad of Jed Clampett,” the theme song for the long-running CBS television series The Beverly Hillbillies. The program noted the “hillbilly show” was a standard form of live popular entertainment in Southern and Midwestern cities on Saturday nights that was usually broadcast on local radio stations. Hayride was one such fixture that had played live and on radio in Richmond, Virginia, for a number of years. Its Broadway debut introduced old and new hillbilly and folk music–styled songs to New York. It lasted just three weeks, and in the intervening years there has been just one more similar revue, Broadway Opry ’79: A Little Country in the Big City, which opened on July 27, 1979, at the St. James Theatre for six performances (the performers included Tanya Tucker, Floyd Cramer, Don Gibson, and Waylon Jennings). The program for Hayride included a glossary for the uninitiated, and thus provided definitions for various musical terms (a “hamburger swing” denoted a series of one-night personal appearance dates, a “chili dipper” was a ukulele or small guitar, and a “stomach Steinway” was an accordion).

Music

Various (traditional and hillbilly songs)

Lyrics

Various