SHREVEPORT – Country music star Johnny Horton was at his apex.
Horton, who moved to Shreveport to cut his honky-tonk and rockabilly music teeth on the famed radio show Louisiana Hayride, had released his third No. 1 country song (North to Alaska) in 1960 that was the title song of a John Wayne movie. Horton's "Battle of New Orleans" in 1959 reached the top spot on the Billboard Top 100 regardless of genre.
But a car crash ended Horton’s life on Nov. 5, 1960, near Milano, Texas, as Horton and his band members were traveling back to Shreveport after a gig in Austin.
Author Kelly Hagy was piecing together the details of Horton’s life and death for her biography “Finding Johnny Horton,” but first-hand information, sources and documents weren’t readily obtainable more than five decades from Horton’s death until Nagy’s research began in 2016.
That included the police report from the fatal head-on collision between the car in which Horton was a passenger and an oncoming truck on a bridge.
But the Northwest Louisiana Archives had valuable documents in their collections, including a copy of the police report from Horton’s crash. The original had been destroyed decades earlier in a records purge back in Texas.
Hagy visited the collection, housed in LSUS’s Noel Memorial library, in November of 2023, tying up loose ends needed for the biography that published in May of 2024.
The police report was found in the Wellborn Jack Papers, a collection that archivists Fermand Garlington II and Leah Widmeyer noticed had some of the same names as the Robert and Laurie Gentry Collection, which contained items pertaining to Horton and the country music scene.
“I could not have written “Finding Johnny Horton” without the Robert and Laurie Gentry Collection, the Wellborn Jack Papers, or the talented team of archivists at Noel Memorial Library,” Nagy wrote in a letter to the Archives. “The collection was so vast that I could not go through it all, so the possibility for further biographies is there.
“I had spent seven years searching for any surviving documentation of the crash, so to say that was a thrilling moment was an understatement.”
The Gentry Collection was amassed mostly by Robert Gentry, the long-time publisher of the Sabine Index in Many and an avid collector of documents and newspapers related to music and politics.
The Gentry Collection (donated to the NWLA Archives in 2010) contains photos, newspaper and magazine articles, phonograph records, cassettes, CDs, and tapes about country music artists.
Gentry had a specific Johnny Horton collection as well.
“I knew about Robert Gentry but had not been successful in contacting him until Laura McLemore (head archivist at the NWLA Archives) came to my rescue in 2023,” Hagy wrote. “She not only helped me contact Robert Gentry, but she connected me to Frank Severic, a graduate assistant who once worked at the library and went through the archives for me.
“The information Frank sent was a gold mine and was exactly what I had hoped it would be. The collection contains interviews with Horton’s siblings, friends, second wife, and colleagues along with letters, photos, recordings and personal memorabilia.”
Hagy was specifically interested in what Horton was like before and after finding fame.
While she did conduct interviews with five living family members and bandmates, most had died by the time she started researching the project in 2016.
“I was incredibly frustrated by what I found through available sources because the information conflicted or seemed greatly exaggerated, and the sources for the information had no citations,” Hagy wrote. “As a journalist, I felt it was incumbent upon me to set the record straight.”
While much is known about Horton’s music, Nagy’s book has been acclaimed for shedding light on who he was as a person.
