Biography
Known as the "Southern Songbird," Eva Conn performed under the stage name Louisiana Lou. Although her origins may have been in Louisiana, records first place her as a student during the 1920s at Clarke Memorial College near Jackson, Mississippi. She completed her studies there at age sixteen and took up music instruction before radio performances grew increasingly appealing. Station WJDX in Jackson eventually brought her on the air, where her programs quickly registered as a major draw. She soon expanded her appearances, among them an early-thirties trek that reached audiences in Iowa. By 1933 she had become a featured performer on WHO’s Iowa Barn Dance and shortly afterward wed fellow entertainer Dutch Conn. Recording sessions also commenced that year, yielding the single “Export Gal,” itself an adaptation of the traditional ballad “Knoxville Girl” relocated to the otherwise unverified town of Export, Arkansas. She remained with the WHO program into the early 1940s, after which she moved to Kansas City’s rival outlet KMBC and its Brush Creek Follies, where she appeared as a comic foil in the customary hillbilly-matron attire of shawl and bonnet. The same broadcasts incorporated her songwriting, resulting in published sheet music for pieces such as “Garden in the Sky.” With her career anchored in the Midwest, Louisiana Lou never participated in the country-and-western developments that followed World War II, since talent scouts of the period assumed practitioners of the style resided exclusively in the South. No documented link exists between her and any later entities that adopted the same stage name, whether the Louisiana Lou stage production, associated line-dancing forms, or any of the numerous songs bearing the title, among them the Allman Brothers’ “Louisiana Lou and Three Card Monty.”