Triumphant Minstrel

Music lovers chose the Governor of Louisiana last week. The choice was a blow--1) to the remnants of the Huey Long machine, 2) for music.

The victor was tall, twangy, easygoing James H. ("Jimmie") Davis, 43, a fancy-dressing hillbilly tenor, and composer of such eminent sockeroos as You Are My Sunshine, Nobody's Darlin' but Mine, and It Makes No Difference Now. The losers were egg-bald 67-year-old Lewis L. Morgan, longtime public chairwarmer in the state's pre-reform days, and other "old regulars" of New Orleans Mayor Robert S. Maestri's machine. Tenor Davis, supported by Governor Sam Houston (''Sweet-Smellin' Sam") Jones, gave the Longsters even a worse walloping than Jones had given them in 1940--a 37,000 vote majority v. 20,000 in 1940.

The Longsters asked Louisiana to return to "the liberal government of the late Huey P. Long." Jimmie Davis campaigned mostly by plugging his own sad ballads, moving around the state with his five-man hillbilly band, usually talking less than ten minutes before he went into his act. He sang and moved on, and the Bayou citizens remembered the music and something about low taxes.

The Governor-to-be, who carries a guitar but knows only a couple of chords, has held two other public offices. In 1938 he sang his way into a job as Shreveport's Commissioner of Public Safety. In 1942 he strummed his way into a post on the State Public Service Commission. A "shouting Baptist," he was born in northern Louisiana's hilly Jackson Parish, one of eleven children of a cotton farmer. His grandfather had a local reputation as a buck-&-wing artist. Jimmie planned to be a teacher. He graduated from Beech Springs Consolidated School in a class of three and attended a New Orleans business college. Later he got a B.A. at Pineville's Louisiana College, an M.A. at Louisiana State, and finally joined the faculty of Shreveport's Dodd College as a professor of history and social science. (He taught yodeling on the side.)

The prospect of being a teacher forever began to depress him. He got out. He had been dreaming up ballads in his ample spare time, and for a while he sang them over Shreveport's station KWKH. In the late '30s Decca made a record of his It Makes No Difference Now, made another with Bing Crosby doing the singing, and Davis was in demand. Since then his records have sold more than a million copies, and Davis has acquired 450 acres of farmland. He calls the farming his insurance. "When a man's in the business I'm in," he says, "things may blow up overnight."

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