Tribute to Laura of Cowboy Cultural Society

The matriarch of cowboy music on the radio and the internet dies Memorial Day, only two weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. Laura Ellen of KPIG radio in the Santa Cruz, California, area.

Laura was the force behind Cowboy Cultural Society, an internet station of cowboy music. It's been my online favorite for about 5 years.

Outside my realm of experience, she was a radio maverick at KPIG, refusing to go with the strict playlist rules of the FM-radio industry.

The Santa Cruz Sentinal newspaper:

To understand Laura Ellen Hopper, you had to talk music with her.

Oh, she had other passions. She loved horses all her life and spent as much leisure time as she could manage in the saddle. She was an excellent cook and was especially devoted to wood-fired stoves. She proudly restored an old Airstream trailer. She was devoted to her husband, Frank, her daughter, Elsie, and a confederacy of close friends that encompassed miles and years.

But any portrait of the woman mourned by so many this week up and down the California coast and across the country would have to begin and end with music.

Hopper's friend Gail Korich had countless conversations with her about music, many times sitting on the floor of her office at KPIG [107.5 FM] in Watsonville over coffee.

"There was nothing like the light in her eyes when she found something she really liked," said Korich, who works at the Santa Cruz-based Hawaiian-music recording label Dancing Cat. "She was always saying, 'Oh, you've got to hear this.' "

...

"Laura is to Americana what Bill Monroe was to bluegrass," said "Sleepy John" Sandidge, longtime host of KPIG's Sunday morning live show, "Please Stand By" "If she really knew what kind of influence she had, she would have been living in France with servants waiting on her. But money was never a motive for her"

She gave her programmers great latitude in choosing their music. But many of them took their cues from Hopper because of her impeccable radio instincts.

"She was the most talented programmer I've ever known," Amy Airheart said. "She was really good at the musical segue. I learned how to segue from one song to another, paying attention to the themes, from Laura"

Bill Goldsmith now runs Radio Paradise, a pioneering Internet-only station inspired by his work at KPIG. He said that Hopper was guided by a stubborn adherence to an ideal.

"To her, nothing was more important than the music and treating the music and her listeners with a certain amount of respect. And that's unheard of in the radio business today," Goldsmith said.

"There was no such thing as Laura playing your music because she was your friend," said Gail Korich. "It had to live on its merits"