Elvis Louisiana Hayride 1955

[Mister Moon]

What is the most frustrating thing is that only about 20 Elvis performances exist on audio from nearly 2 years of him being on the radio while
Hank Williams and other artists have 100+ surviving audio of their performances and they were years before Elvis.

While it's true that tons of radio broadcasts by Hank Williams have survived, relatively few of them are from the Grand Ole Opry and the Louisiana Hayride, to name the two most popular c&w radio shows of the era.

Most of the surviving Williams broadcasts come from specially sponsored shows like Mother's Best, Garden Spot, and Health & Happiness. In those cases, special acetates were cut at a recording studio (usually the same studio Hank used in Nashville for his official recordings), and were distributed to stations for broadcast - they were not actual live recordings in front of an audience. It's from copies of those acetates that record releases have been processed.

By the way, and at the risk of becoming boring, I'm selling a factory-sealed copy of the now-deleted 15 CD / 1 DVD set that includes all the surviving Mother's Best recordings by Hank. Take a look at the pertinent section in this board, please.

[BloxyTiger]

There is no footage of Elvis performing at the Louisiana Hayride
A collector revealed that in a November 1981 documentary about the Hayride

[Mike C]

What is the most frustrating thing is that only about 20 Elvis performances exist on audio from nearly 2 years of him being on the radio while
Hank Williams and other artists have 100+ surviving audio of their performances and they were years before Elvis.

Much of the Hank Williams' audio consists of his Mother's Best shows form 1951. He pre-recorded those to acetate for airing at later dates while he was on the road. They survived because one of his friends salvaged them when WSM planned to junk them.

EDIT: I see Mister Moon mentioned this as well above.

Given that nearly all of the Elvis performance were done live for immediate broadcast, this may explain why so few survived.