Elvis performs at the Louisiana Hayride.

The strange but true story behind the famous phrase

There’s no question Elvis Presley has an enduring legacy in Northwest Louisiana.

Typically, what people think of first is the famous black-and-white image of when the shy kid from Memphis turned up at the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Shreveport in the fall of 1954 for his first tentative performance on KWKH’s Louisiana Hayride radio program.

But perhaps Elvis’ most intriguing legacy in Shreveport is the birth of one simple phrase – a phrase you’ve heard before. It is five simple words uttered at the Hirsch Coliseum by Louisiana Hayride announcer Horace Logan on the night of Dec. 15, 1956.

“Elvis has left the building” is a phrase that has turned up everywhere – from later Elvis concerts to the climactic scene of the Will Smith movie “Independence Day.” Most notably, the ubiquitous phrase is simply part of the American lexicon. Everyone knows what it means.

However, to understand the significance of Elvis “leaving the building” and its connection to Shreveport, we must first examine the buildup to that moment.

In the early weeks after Elvis’ arrival in Shreveport back in October 1954, he was still relatively unknown. Louisiana Hayride audience members could easily chat with Elvis on the front steps of the Municipal Auditorium or in line at the concession stand. Famously, Elvis even played a fill-in gig at the now-gone Lake Cliff Club in Shreveport, and the displeased crowd had cleared out before Elvis was even done performing. But as Elvis’ reputation grew, his anonymity faded. A nation of teenagers eager for something new turned their eyes to the Louisiana Hayride. That groundswell of fame was represented by an audience that grew younger and wilder with every passing week. Jokingly, some Louisiana Hayride cast members would start referring to the Hayride as the Elvis Presley Show.

Less than a month after his first appearance – on Nov. 6, 1954 – Elvis signed a one-year contract guaranteeing the Louisiana Hayride would feature Elvis for the foreseeable future. The agreement guaranteed Elvis $18 every Saturday night.

Within just a matter of months, though, the anonymity that Elvis brought with him from Memphis had disappeared entirely, and the soon-to-be-crowned King of Rock and Roll would be plagued by the mobs and photographers that would follow him until he died in 1977.

Two years after Elvis joined the Hayride, he would explode in American pop culture. The reserved teenager who arrived in Shreveport in October of 1954 was gone, and in his place was a singular musical force whose immeasurable power and cultural influence had never been seen in American music. In addition to more than 50 contractual appearances on the Hayride, Elvis crisscrossed the country performing and even made his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan television show.

In September 1955, Elvis signed a second one-year contract to appear on the Louisiana Hayride.

The crowd goes wild at Hirsch Coliseum.

But this contract would prove problematic and too limiting for the now-superstar Elvis Presley. In April of 1956, Elvis and the famed Colonel Tom Parker bought out Elvis’ Hayride contract with KWKH for a whopping $10,000 — with one minor caveat. Elvis had to return to Shreveport for one final Hayride performance, and the proceeds from that show would go to a charity of Elvis’ choice. At the time, KWKH general manager Henry Clay was chairman of the building committee for the Shreveport YMCA, so that idea was suggested.

Elvis agreed, and just like that, the stage was set for the wildest concert that anyone in Shreveport had ever seen.

On the night of Saturday, Dec. 15, 1956, Elvis made his final appearance on the Louisiana Hayride. The program was relocated from its regular location downtown to the much larger 10,000-seat Hirsch Coliseum — then called the Youth Building — at the Louisiana State Fairgrounds. (Despite common belief, the phrase “Elvis has left the building” was not born at the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium.) Tickets for the show were $2 in advance and $2.50 at the door.

In an interview with the All Y’all podcast in 2020, Louisiana Hayride archivist and historian Joey Kent described the scene that night.

“They sold out every ticket very quickly. But it wasn’t the Elvis Presley headliner show. He was one act of 20. … That to me is just amazing because at that point he’s got ‘Hound Dog’ out, his first movie is out, and he’s a really big deal.”

In Kent’s book “Cradle of the Stars: KWKH and the Louisiana Hayride,” announcer Frank Page recounted the chaos before the show even started.

“We’d tried to keep the fire marshal happy by setting up a fence in front of the stage and limiting the number of chairs on the floor of the coliseum,” Page said. “But as soon as the doors were open, that plan went right out the window. A solid mass of teenagers grabbed at the chairs and drug [sic] them as close to the stage as possible.”

As an added attempt to deter the fanatic mob of Elvis lovers, the Shreveport Police Department devised a last-minute plan involving one of the earliest, if not the first ever, known uses of an Elvis impersonator. A police officer named Robert Catts bore a striking resemblance to Elvis and was chosen to participate in the scheme. To pull off the ruse, Catts was dressed in clothes like The King and driven to the Hirsch Coliseum’s front door in a borrowed pink Cadillac. Meanwhile, the real Elvis was quietly brought in the back door. Within moments of arriving at the Hirsch Coliseum, the fake Elvis and his police escort were surrounded by Elvis fans. Some people even jumped on the car.

In a September 1977 article in the Shreveport Journal, Catts recalled that experience.

“The mob at the coliseum scared me,” Catts said. “I knew then I didn’t want to be Elvis, not what he went through. I could just picture him — always being grabbed at, always having to hide, not being able to live a normal life. But that’s the price of fame, I guess.”

From Hayride staff and performers to the last-minute Elvis impersonator, that night at the Hirsch involved more chaos than music. The frenetic mix of Elvis’ fame and enthusiasm for a new era in American music created the perfect cauldron of energy — primed for an explosion.

“When Elvis finally came on stage, thousands of Brownie Reflex cameras went off simultaneously,” Frank Page recalled. “Several of the photographs taken that night show me off to one side, and I look terrified. I was! I had never heard 10,000 teenagers screaming at the top of their lungs before. It was absolutely frightening. The screaming began when Elvis came out on stage, and it never let up for the entire time he performed.”

For Joey Kent, the scene was not hard to imagine.

Winston Hall with the original sign acknowledging Elvis’ gift of a swimming pool.

“The show gets going, and Elvis comes out and does a 30 minute set and does a five-minute encore of ‘Hound Dog.’ And if you’re familiar with the song, it only really has one lyric. So how do you make that last five minutes? You end up with the burlesque rendition. You can just see his leg making these rotations as he’s gyrating.” The recording of that night’s performance also tells a tale. When Elvis transitions from the normal-tempo version of “Hound Dog” to the half-speed, burlesque version, the screams become deafening, almost lifting the roof off the Hirsch Coliseum. The cataclysm is so absurd that even Elvis sounds in disbelief, at one point offering a chuckle mid-lyric.

Upon singing the very last words of “Hound Dog,” Elvis’ handlers quickly whisked him off stage while the backing band “played him off.”

“But he finishes and leaves, and the applause continues,” Kent said. “And it’s just madness because all the teenagers – hey, they’re exiting the building. The girls want to catch a glimpse of Elvis, and the teens are like, ‘We didn’t come here for country music. What we came here for is gone.’ So, everybody’s leaving.”

Unbeknownst to those in attendance, what happened next would become an immortal moment – not just in American music, but in American history.

Hayride radio announcer Horace Logan stepped up to the microphone. To slow the mass of teens headed out the door in search of Elvis, he offered the following plea:

“All right … Elvis has left the building. I told you absolutely, straight up to this point you know that he has left the building. He left the stage and went out the back with the policemen, and he is now gone from the building. I remind you again that the Hayride will continue right on ‘til 11:30 o’clock, presenting again most of the country artists that you have seen tonight.

We’d be very pleased to have you remain with us.”

In perhaps the worst timeslot draw in entertainment history, Louisiana Hayride performer Gary Bryant had to follow Elvis that night. Noting Elvis had not performed “Blue Suede Shoes” during his set, Bryant did a quick rendition of the song only to elicit boos from the crowd.

Although the show continued inside and the chaos eventually subsided, outside was a different story. In his book “Louisiana Hayride Years:

Making Music History in Country’s Golden Age,” Horace Logan reflected on one peculiar casualty from that chaotic night — his 1955 hardtop Mercury. He had unwittingly parked the car in the rear of the coliseum near a row of windows about 12 feet above the ground. A hoard of Elvis fans had used the car as a launching point to try and reach the windows. When he came out to the parking lot after the show, Logan discovered the car had been trashed.

“It looked like an elephant had danced a jig on it,” he wrote.

After that historic night in Shreveport, “Elvis has left the building” began working its way into American pop culture. In an ironic twist, the meaning has flipped. When Horace Logan originally used it, the phrase meant the show was not over. However, longtime Elvis announcer Al Dvorin began using the phrase to signal that Elvis would not return for an encore at the end of concerts. Because of that, now almost 70 years later, “Elvis has left the building” means the show is over.

In perhaps one of the funniest denouements in Shreveport’s musical story, the proceeds of Elvis’ final Hayride show did, in fact, go to Shreveport YMCA’s Camp Forbing. The show raised $15,000, and after the unscrupulous Colonel Parker had taken his cut, there was $7,551.67 left. With the remaining money, Camp Forbing built a swimming pool in the vicinity of what is now Kroger Marketplace. Elvis Presley’s contribution to the pool’s construction was noted with a simple wooden sign nearby. The pool is long gone today, but the sign still resides at the Lash Family YMCA on Ellerbe Road. The sign will soon be part of a larger display that pays homage to the YMCA’s connection to Elvis and the famous phrase associated with that night.

While “Elvis has left the building” carries an almost light-hearted connotation now, its original utterance carries much more significant meaning. The night of Dec. 15, 1956, in Shreveport was a clear divergent point in American music history. Elvis’ appearance at the Hirsch Coliseum was the birth of a new idea: the christening in part of the rock and roll revolution itself. Yes, the Louisiana Hayride would go on to produce more country stars. But Elvis took a different path, and when he “left the building,” he changed American music forever. And while most people say “Elvis has left the building” as a simple gimmick, Shreveport can find more meaning in the phrase. It will forever be a tip of the hat to the timeless and enduring legacy of Elvis Presley in Northwest Louisiana.