Official Sites In concert, Smith and her peers sang directly to the women who heard themselves in these songs and responded with cries of "Say it, sister! Then it was hosted by Bob Horn and was called Bob Horn's Bandstand.On July 9 of 1956 the show got a new host, a clean-cut 26 year old named Dick Clark. d. Chuck Berry, An important component of the Beach Boys' success was: In 1926, Blind Lemon Jefferson became the first solo singer-guitarist to have a hit record (Paramount's advertisement promised "a real, old-fashioned blues, by a real, old-fashioned blues singer") and he set a new fashion for earthier "country blues," followed by Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, Lonnie Johnson and Furry Lewis. That is the show that had Squeaky clean commercial pitchman and deejay Dick Clark inherited Bob Horns locally broadcastBandstandin July 1956 and revamped it for a national audience of teenage consumers as ABCsAmerican Bandstand, which first aired in August 1957. At the same time, the classic blues singers were too working-class and sexually frank for some of the urban middle classes. "Fun, Fun, Fun" a. Avalon and Vinton I'm thinking it was either Bo Diddley or Ben E. King. The abbreviated (15 minute) programs are necessary because of ABC's scheduling of American Bandstand from 12:301:30 p.m. each Saturday. "67Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_67', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_67').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Allen argues that images, like Will Counts's iconic photograph of black student, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by a white mob and being cursed by white student Hazel Bryan, forced some white Americans to revaluate their "habits of citizenship.". a. Kendall Productions Records, Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. don Cornelius wanted to make a black American bandstand. "The NAACP Reports: WCAM (Radio)," August 7, 1955, NAACP collection, URB 6, box 21, folder 423, TUUA. a. the Ronettes "53"WOOK-TV's Coloring Book," Washington Afro-American, February 16, 1963; "WOOK's Insult to Our Race," Washington Afro-American, February 23, 1963. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_53', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_53').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Another editorial argued that WOOK-TV insults "the colored race's intelligence by advertising itself as nothing but a station programming plain ol' music and dancing. The Mitch Thomas Show stood out because it was the first television show hosted by a black deejay that featured a studio audience of black teenagers. xamines four programs that brought music and dance to southern and border state television audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. The teens held and drank their sodas while dancing, keeping the sponsor's product in the picture throughout the song. In each clip, the teenagers dance as the singers lipsync to recordings of their songs, as was the common practice in this era. Only one kinescope of The Milt Grant Show is known to exist, but it features two separate performances by R&B performersone by the duo Johnnie and Joe (Johnnie Lee Richardson and Joe Walker), and the other by LaVern Bakerthat help explain how the show sought to manage the differences between black performers and white audience members. b. Boston In the 15-minute programs, please leave two 60-second cutaways for the Pepsi-Cola commercials which I am advised are all that we have sold in Teen-Age Frolics anyhow. Docu-Drama. Rarely has the music industrys received wisdom been upended by a single hit. Image courtesy of Matthew F. Delmont. We often use the history of popular culture to talk about the history of race in America. "There's 14 million Negroes in our great country and they will buy records if recorded by one of their own," he told Fred Hagar at Okeh Records. I became more fascinated with the operation than the program." In 1920, however, a loner with a knife wasn't going to help the commercially savvy Handy break the music industry's colour barrier. They didn't need that bridge to the South anymore. "As per our conversation of yesterday, it is going to be necessary that we make some adjustment in our Saturday afternoon schedule this fall with respect to Teen-Age Frolics," Helms wrote to inform Lewis and other staff that the show would have to be shortened from its regular one hour broadcast time. Lewis (WRAL), June 24, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; Daniel Jackson, letter to J.D. Grant needed to be able to feature black performers in a way that was safe for the consuming pleasure of the white studio and television audiences and the sponsors that were eager to reach them. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_50', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_50').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Both of these options were cost prohibitive for many of the African American viewers WOOK hoped to reach. Who was the first host of American Bandstand? None. "TV Jockey Profile: The Milt Grant Show,". b. teenage symphonies J.D. a. a smooth rhythm and blues influence in their harmonies With black performers only a few feet away from the white teenage dancers in the studio, the picture-in-picture technique demarcated the racial boundary between performers and audiences and offered one strategy for televising black musicians while maintaining racial segregation. This article will also be published in the Washington Post's Outlook section for Sunday, April 22, 2012. . The Dick Clark Showwas broadcast live from ABCs Little Theater in Manhattan. It was recorded by a girl group. Why Grace Jones is pop's greatest pioneer, a newly updated 1997 biography by Jackie Kay. Jesse Helms, later a US senator and national conservative leader, became an executive at Capitol Broadcasting in 1960 and delivered news editorials railing against communism, liberalism, and civil rights. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_22', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_22').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); They were watching, for example, when dancers on The Mitch Thomas Show started dancing The Stroll, a group dance where boys and girls faced each other in two parallel lines, while couples took turns strutting down the aisle. Teenagers lined up daily at the entrance to Studio B and American Bandstand. When did The Beatles appear on American bandstand? - Answers "12Otis Givens, interview withauthor, June 27, 2007. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_12', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_12').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Similarly, South Philadelphia teen Donna Brown recalled in a 1995 interview,"I remember at the same time that Bandstand used to come on, there used to be a black dance thing that came on, and it was The Mitch Thomas Show . c. Brian Wilson's production and writing From 1976 to 2011, however, Clark became progressively bolder, and less accurate, in his retelling of how he integrated the studio audience. American Bandstand also helped invent the demographic that still dominates popular culture: teenagers. Christopher Sterling and John Michael Kittross, "Voice of the People: In Defense of WOOK-TV,", "Nation's First Minority Group TV Station to Broadcast Today,", Nan Randall, "Rocking and Rolling Road to Respectability,". d. "Dead Man's Curve", "Dead Man's Curve" was a splatter-platter hit by: The female blues singers were on the losing side of a long, complicated argument about what the blues should be. Singer and musician Bobby Rydell sits next to host Dick Clark in the audience of "American Bandstand" around 1958. Pepsi's sponsorship proved important to making of Teenage Frolics financially viable in the 1960s as it fought for airtime against more profitable national programming. In his 1997 history of American Bandstand, for example, Clark contends, "I don't think of myself as a hero or civil rights activist for integrating the show; it was simply the right thing to do." "And why not? Did Dick Clark have segregation on American Bandstand? Dick Clark, host of the influential "American Bandstand,' dies | CNN Over the course of her career, she went on to win a total of 14 Grammys and even received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1967. b. the rise of surf music On 10 August, Smith and an ad hoc band called the Jazz Hounds recorded Bradfords Crazy Blues. Wald describes this as an "affective compact" that "complicates the clear division between production and consumption. Please rush your information. As a new generation of black female singers broke through in the 1930s Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Memphis Minnie some of the first wave sought refuge in other branches of showbusiness. August Wilson's Rainey calls the blues "life's way of talking". Lewis (WRAL), letter to Dick Snyder, May 24, 1963, Lewis Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection,University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, catalog number 5499, folder 139. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_36', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_36').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Lewis secured Pepsi Cola, which sponsored Teenage Frolics as part of the "special markets" campaign to increase sales of the beverage among African Americans.37On Pepsi marketing to black customers, see Stephanie Capparell, The Real Pepsi Challenge: How One Pioneering Company Broke Color Barriers in 1940s American Business (New York: Free Press, 2008). The Beach Boys were already the kings of surf pop by their first appearance on American Bandstand in 1964. d. gentle soul, Ben E. King had been a singer with: b. Jan Berry's songwriting 33 Unlike The Mitch Thomas Show and Teenarama, Teenage Frolics aired on a VHF (very high From one perspective, these televised teen dance shows were commercialized diversions during an era of profound changes in the racial dynamics of the South. While The Grady and Hurst Showbroadcast five times perweek, the weekly Mitch Thomas Show proved to be more influential. By examining these local programs this essay builds on the work of scholarsNorma Coates, Murray Forman, Julie Malnig, Tim Wall, George Lipsitz, and Brian Ward who have examined the intersections of music and television, the importance of televised teen dance shows as community spaces, and the development of rhythm and blues and rock and roll.9Norma Coates, "Elvis from the Waist Up and Other Myths: 1950s Music Television and the Gendering of Rock Discourse," in Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, eds. Singer adopted the moniker Pop to advertise his connection with the show. . Broadcasting daily evidence of Philadelphia's vibrant interracial teenage culture would have offered viewers images of black and white teens interacting as peers at a time when such images were extremely rare. "In the southern context, congregation was important because it symbolized anact of free will, whereas segregation represented the imposition of another's will." That is the show that did not mingle Black and Last modified April 11, 2014. http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/nicest-kids/index. Storer changed WPFH's call letters to WVUE and hoped to move the station's facilities from Wilmington closer to Philadelphia. Lewis (WRAL), May 29, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; "Nero, the Mad," letter to J.D. The "Funtown" reference is powerful because it captures one of the ways that Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy were most meaningful to children and teenagers. And if you liked this story,sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. Handy's anonymous musician now resembles the archetypal bluesman: a solitary, enigmatic vagrant, singing songs of "suffering and hard luck" to nobody but himself. More than 20 million people watched the coronation on the BBC . And it was fantastic. Continue Learning about Movies & Television. . d. Ricky Nelson, A distinctive vocal feature of the Everly Brothers was: In January 1962, it topped the chart again. For these and other artists who played at Washington's historically black Howard Theater, Teenarama offered an additional opportunity to perform and promote their music while they were in the city. Lewis (WRAL), June 24, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140, July 22, 1967; Gwendolyn Gilmore, J.D. Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement. The failure of the station that broadcast The Mitch Thomas Show underscores the tenuous nature of such unaffiliated local programs. As WOOK-TV prepared to come on the air in 1963, the Afro-American newspaper received a letter from Rev. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. We couldn't go on American Bandstand on a regular basis. As Dick Clark and American Bandstand celebrated the one-year anniversary of the show's national debut, local broadcast competition brought The Mitch Thomas Show's groundbreaking three-year run to an unceremonious end. WRAL's mailing to advertisers also included a list of the schools and organizations that had visited the show. "7"Afro-Americans who lived in communities as diverse as Chicago, Norfolk, and Buxton, Iowa, congregatedsometimes along class lines, but always together," Earl Lewis argues. Beach Boys on American Bandstand. Donald Hodge, letter to J.D. Among these four programs, only one recording is known to exist,a 1957 episode of The Milt Grant Show recorded to sell the show to sponsors. Colchester, VT: VPR, July 11, 2009. Did Billy Graham speak to Marilyn Monroe about Jesus? Hazel Jordan, letter to J.D. After the widely circulated photograph made her a local celebrity she attended the show with a bodyguard.68David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 44, 290. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_68', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_68').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Steve's Show was a highly visible regional space that asserted a racially segregated public culture and continued to do so until it went off the air in 1961. But now it doesn't interest anyone." In her documentary on Teenarama Beverly Lindsay-Johnson dealt with this lack of footage by recruiting contemporary Washington teenagers, teaching them the locally distinct "hand dance" of the era, and having them reenact the dances. A 1967 memo from Jesse Helms highlights the pressures Teenage Frolics faced from national broadcasts and mentions Pepsi's sponsorship of the show. Otis Givens, who lived in South Philadelphia and attended Ben Franklin High School, remembered that he watched the show every weekend for a year before he finally made the trip to Wilmington to dance on air. Self - Singer 1 episode, 1968 . d. Jan Berry, "Be My Baby" was a hit for: Please be respectful. 1950s Teen Dance TV Shows, Volume 1. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. Richard Wagstaff Clark [1] [2] (November 30, 1929 - April 18, 2012) was an American television and radio personality, television producer and film actor, as well as a cultural icon who remains best known for hosting American Bandstand from 1956 to 1989.

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