Legendary Musicians Who Rocked Shreveport's Hirsch

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Shreveport's musical history runs very, very deep. It's in the bones of the city, even if the city's leadership doesn't like to focus on it, or highlight it. The city served as the foundation for Elvis Presley's career and where "Elvis has left the building" was born, it essentially served as the hometown for Lead Belly, and even though it was for all the wrong reasons...the city inspired Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come".

Beyond the city's direct contributions to musical history, it has also hosted musical history on it's many stages. From the legendary "Louisiana Hayride" acts on the stage of the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium, to bands like Pantera playing their first ever show in Downtown Shreveport, the city has witnessed greatness gracing it's stages for nearly a century.

One of the most active homes of legendary shows was the Hirsch Memorial Coliseum. Elvis "left the building" in 1956, the 70s brought acts like Stevie Wonder, Aerosmith, Marvin Gaye, and KISS, then the 80s dropped Run D.M.C., Iron Maiden, and Prince. By the 1990s, shows had started to taper off, but the Hirsch still had MASSIVE acts in the moment, like New Kids on the Block in 1991, Alice In Chains the same year, and Garth Brooks as well. Once 2000 arrived, it brought a brand new arena on the Bossier City side of the Red River, which took many of these size shows out of the Hirsch, but it was still able to get some strong shows, like a young Brad Paisley in 2002.

Legendary Musicians Who Rocked The Hirsch In Shreveport

Here's a sample of the legendary musical acts who have played Shreveport's Memorial Coliseum over the last 60 years. The Hirsch was basically the homefield for bands like Van Halen and ZZ Top, who regularly put the Hirsch near the top of their tours. For that reason, we're actually not going to feature them on this list, because they were basically "house bands" for Shreveport...and that's NOT a bad thing.