cadillac-elvis wrote: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.