a. a smooth rhythm and blues influence in their harmonies Singer and musician Bobby Rydell sits next to host Dick Clark in the audience of "American Bandstand" around 1958. Steve's Show, Little Rock, Arkansas, late 1950s. Seventeen was one of dozens of locally broadcast teen dance shows in this era. As Grant introduced The Four Aces' "I Just Don't Know," he exited the scene, the camera pulled back to focus on teens who flocked to pick up their free Pepsi. Most of his obituary writers have repeated some version of this claim. Broadcasting from Wilmington, Raleigh, and Washington, these shows reached regional audiences, but varied in terms of signal strength and network affiliations. on Saturday, May 14th. . I asked your daughter to tell you to call me, please. Broadly speaking, the playing was slick, the rhythms hot, the songwriting polished, the lyrics tough and ironic, the stagewear glamorous and the stars overwhelmingly female. When I started research six years ago for a book on American Bandstand, I believed, as Clark claimed, that the show's studio audience was fully integrated by the late 1950s. c. Los Angeles A daily dance show, Bandstand was the first national TV program directed at teenagers and starring teenagers.. Beach Boys on American Bandstand. Ramsey describes "community theaters" as "sites of cultural memory" that "include but are not limited to cinema, family narratives and histories, the church, the social dance, the nightclub, the skating rink, and even literature. . Sterling, Christopher and John Michael Kittross. "When I got back to Philly, and everyone had seen me on TV, I was big time," Givens recalled. between Hairspray (the movie) and the real events of the 1950's in From 1976 to 2011, however, Clark became progressively bolder, and less accurate, in his retelling of how he integrated the studio audience. Singer adopted the moniker Pop to advertise his connection with the show. He popularized the idea that teenagers are an important consumer group. On 10 August, Smith and an ad hoc band called the Jazz Hounds recorded Bradfords Crazy Blues. Clark first addressed the integration of the studio audience in his 1978 record collection celebrating the shows twenty-fifth anniversary. Clark's show put African-American music and performers on television every day. These shows broadcast in an era when civil rights lawsuits and protests sought to overturn policies of racial segregation in schools and public spaces in the South. Much in the same way that national teen magazines followed American Bandstand, the Tribune's teen writers kept tabs on the performers featured on Thomas's show, and described the teenagers who formed fan clubs to support their favorite musical artists and deejays.14On the Philadelphia Tribune's "Teen-Talk" coverage of Mitch Thomas' show, see "They're 'Movin' and Groovin,'" Philadelphia Tribune, July 31, 1956; Dolores Lewis, "Talking With Mitch," Philadelphia Tribune, November 9, 1957; Lewis, "Stage Door Spotlight," Philadelphia Tribune, November 9, 1957; Laurine Blackson, "Penny Sez," Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957 and April 26, 1958; Dolores Lewis, "Philly Date Line," Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957; "Queen Lane Apartment Group [photo]," Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957; Jimmy Rivers, "Crickets' Corner," Philadelphia Tribune, January 21 and April 22,1958; Edith Marshall, "Current Hops," Philadelphia Tribune, March 1,8 and 22,1958; Marshall, "Talk of the Teens," Philadelphia Tribune, March 22, 1958; and"Presented in Charity Show [Mitch Thomas photo]," Philadelphia Tribune, April 22, 1958. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_14', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_14').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The fan gossip shared in these columns documented the growth of a youth culture among the black teenagers whom Bandstand excluded. Vermont Public Radio. "Teen Dance Music from the 50s and 60s." It became one of the biggest rock n roll records of all time.6. Their teachers asked for volunteers and those who were Bessie Smith was the first African-American singer. cancelled. Just over onemile from Central High School, Steve's Show broadcast from the KTHV-TV studios. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_72', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_72').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Matthew Delmont is associate professor of history at Arizona State University and author ofThe Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and Civil Rights in 1950sPhiladelphia (University of California Press, American Crossroads series, February 2012), andWhy Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation(University of California Press, American Crossroads series, forthcoming February 2016). Drawing on Thomas's contacts as a radio host and on the talents of the teenagers, the program helped shape the music tastes and dance styles of young people in Philadelphia. a. the Ronettes Clark recognized, especially as rock n rock gained popularity among teenagers in the mid-1950s and was widely regarded by their distraught parents as a sign of moral collapse, that as a pitchman for the music that drove their kids to euphoric distraction, Clark would need parental trust. Like other young people across the country, black teenagers identified with different aspects of. Mamie Smith retired in 1931. Bessie Smith recorded one last session in 1933, for one-sixth of the fee she used to command, before she died after a car crash in 1937. Buddy Deane show was another 'dance-to-the-hits' show broadcast Please enable Javascript and reload the page. Here again, the advertisement incorporated the studio audience, with one young woman holding the radio while Grant praised its features. 1 (Spring 2007): 2125; Murray Forman, One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Julie Malnig, "Let's Go to the Hop: Community Values in Televised Teen Dance Programs of the 1950s," Dance & Community: Proceedings of The Congress on Research in Dance (August, 2006): 171175; Tim Wall, "Rocking Around the Clock: Teenage Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965," in Ballrooms, Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, ed. 6. Seventeen (WOI-TV's teen dance show), 1958. Undoubtedly, one of Clarks biggest coups was his promotion of Chubby Checker (ne Ernest Evans), born in South Carolina and resettled in South Philadelphia, where he attended South Philadelphia High School. Other black artists also appeared on Bandstand that year, including Jackie Wilson, Johnny Mathis, Chuck Berry, Mickey & Sylvia and others. The guy's name was Otis and I don't remember the girl's name. Bandstand began as a local program on WFIL-TV (now WPVI ), Channel 6 in Philadelphia on October 7, 1952. And the image Clark presented in those early years was exclusively white. "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 . As WOOK-TV prepared to come on the air in 1963, the Afro-American newspaper received a letter from Rev. Hazel Bryan (left) harasses Elizabeth Eckfordasblack students attempt to integrate Little Rock's Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas, September 4, 1957. a. I became more fascinated with the operation than the program." He is currently finishinga book titledMaking Roots: How an Epic Book and Television Miniseries Made History and Why Roots Still Matters(under contract with University of California Press). To comment, enter your name and text below (you can also sign in to use your Scalar account).Comments are moderated. There were two black dancers on this show, the "black Bandstand," or whatever you want to call it. Posted November 21, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AD76LwR2JA. There have been many cases where our leaders needed to make outcries such as Milt Grant's TV dance program, it seems to me that that was segregation. 1967], Lewis Family Papers, folder 140. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_45', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_45').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); As television production became increasingly centralized in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Teenage Frolics was part of the everyday life of black teenagers in the Raleigh area. show). 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. a. the Drifters Dance Party: The Teenarama Story. [2] Matthew F. Delmont,The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock n Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 142. "30Brett Gadsden, Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 7. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_30', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_30').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Many teens who danced on The Mitch Thomas Show or watched the program would have experiencedde jure school segregation and the slow realization of educational equality promised by Brown. The Milt Grant Show dedicated almost every minute to selling products, and Grant, as this message to potential sponsors makes clear, was a compelling and unabashed salesman. On Valentine's Day 1920, a little over a century ago, a 28-year-old singer named Mamie Smith walked into a recording studio in New York City and made history. I brought Ray Charles in there on a Sunday night, and it was just beautiful to look out there and see everything just nice. This preservationist instinct may have been valid but the assumptions that underpinned it were often paternalistic and segregationist: derived from the singing of slaves, the oral blues was the product of naive, untutored imaginations that would wither on contact with modernity, so they had to be protected, like rare orchids. With no need for backing bands or stage costumes, the men were much cheaper, too. What the show didn't do was fully integrate its studio audience as soon as he became host, as Clark has claimed. "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.". Televised teen dance shows offer an example of how"basic habits of interaction in public spaces" did not change dramatically in 1957. Handy's anonymous musician now resembles the archetypal bluesman: a solitary, enigmatic vagrant, singing songs of "suffering and hard luck" to nobody but himself. Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 226251; Coates, "Filling in Holes: Television Music as a Recuperation of Popular Music on Television,"Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 1, no. Eventually Black teens were allowed. Screenshot from Steve's Show, a documentarydirected bySandra Hubbard (Morning Star Studio, 2004). d. the auto accident involving Jan Berry. Courtesy American Bandstand. c. George "Shadow" Morton Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, George D. McDowell Collection, Special Collections Research Center, courtesy Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia. Why Grace Jones is pop's greatest pioneer, a newly updated 1997 biography by Jackie Kay. First, were important for black teens because the shows offered televisual spaces that valued their creative energies and talents. None. Despite its ban on black teenagers, the show regularly featured black R&B performers who were in town to perform at the Howard Theater. University of California Press. "31Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 10. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_31', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_31').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The Mitch Thomas Show teenagers would also have been familiar with segregation as practiced in Philadelphiaand televisedon American Bandstand. Only a handful were still making blues records in the 1930s. Clark. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_25', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_25').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Storer frequently bought and sold stations and, at the time of the WPFH acquisition, it also owned stations in Toledo, Cleveland, Atlanta, Miami, and Portland. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_11', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_11').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); His television show, broadcast every Saturday, resembled Philadelphia's Bandstand,at the timea local program hosted by Bob Horn,and other locally broadcast teenage dance programs. Groups like Donald and the Hitchhikers, Tiny and the Tinniettes, Little Joe and the Diamonds, Cobra and the Fabulous Entertainers, and the Dacels saw Teenage Frolics as a way to perform for other black teenagers and become known beyond their high schools and neighborhoods. The Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes wrote that Bessie conveyed "sadness not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter, the absurd, incongruous laughter of a sadness without even a god to appeal to." They feared the backlash that might happen if Black boys danced close to white girls. c. sympathizing with Civil Rights More recently, when asked about the racial policies of Bandstand in a 2011 New York Times interview, he answered simply: "As soon as I became the host, we integrated." WOOK-TV advertisement for Teenarama host Bob King,1965. After all, teenagers have $9 billion a year to spend.". Finally, the visibility these shows offered to teenagers was closely tied to the salability of teen music culture. d. Jan and Dean, Which of the following cities produced an especially high number of teen idol hits from 1957-1963? She was later signed to the Decca Recordings and later Verve Records. He was 82. One of the challenges with analyzing The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama is that no visual traces of the shows are known to exist. Record companies routinely ignored African-American musicianswith only a few exceptions, such as singer Bert Williams and bandleader James Reese Europe.
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