a. the Drifters Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude. Hairspray (the movie) is not a documentary. schools danced on Bandstand starting in 1952 when Bob Horn was the For The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama Dance Party this meant trying to attract sponsors to advertise to black television audiences. If you stood around the cameramen, they would show you how to operate the cameras. One particularly opinionated "Frolic Fan" wrote, "I am very concerned with your show. Here again, the advertisement incorporated the studio audience, with one young woman holding the radio while Grant praised its features. It portrayed the Mississippi Delta as a land lost in time, closer in spirit to the slavery era than to modern America. In a letter to potential advertisers, WRAL billed Teenage Frolics as "a live and lively dancing party featuring colored teenagers from high schools in the Channel 5 area." Thomas remembers that the teens on his show "created a dance called The Stroll. c. Los Angeles On race and segregation in Philadelphia, see Countryman, Up South; Countryman, "'From Protest to Politics': Community Control and Black Independent Politics in Philadelphia, 19651984,"Journal of Urban History 32 (September 2006): 813861; Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town; James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Wolfinger, "The Limits of Black Activism: Philadelphia's Public Housing in the Depression and World War II," Journal of Urban History 35 (September 2009): 787814; Guian McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2008); McKee, "'I've Never Dealt with a Government Agency Before': Philadelphia's Somerset Knitting Mills Project, the Local State, and the Missed Opportunities of Urban Renewal," Journal of Urban History 35 (March 2009): 387409; and Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Blues are here to stay." Susan Jordan, letter to J.D. Mamie Smith, pictured with her band the Jazz Hounds, was the first black singer to make a record (Credit: Getty Images). c. Sedaka and Greenfield Sterling Tucker, director of the Washington branch of the Urban League, worried that WOOK's focus on the "Negro market" was out of step with civil rights efforts,"You don't go along the road of segregation to achieve integration. . "The NAACP Reports: WCAM (Radio)," August 7, 1955, NAACP collection, URB 6, box 21, folder 423, TUUA. a. one-hit wonders The lead singer is Danny Rapp. a. Dick Clark b. Neil Sedaka c. Chubby Checker d. Bob Horn, The focus of American Bandstand was: a. provocative live performances b. resurrecting rhythm and . (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 6263, 7778; Barlow, Voice Over, 98103. Clarks policy was to restrict American Bandstand to youth aged 14-17. While advertisers started to pay more attention to black consumers in the 1950s, a product-identification stigma lingered throughout the decade, preventing many brands from sponsoring black programs.27Barlow, Voice Over, 129; Giacomo Ortizano, "One Your Radio: A Descriptive History of Rhythm-and-blues Radio During the 1950s" (PhD dissertation, Ohio University, 1993), 391423. "The songs may live," wrote one critic in 1926, "but the best thing of all, the free impulse, the pattern of careless voices happily inventing as they go, if it dies it cannot be resurrected." Each show featured musical performances and records alongside dancing teenagers. Urban listeners, meanwhile, were abandoning blues for the faster, more sophisticated sound of swing, represented in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by Chadwick Boseman's young, impatient Levee. As program manager in the late-1960s, Helms was Lewis's boss.35Jesse Helms, Here's Where I Stand (New York, Random House, 2005), 4451; Ernest Furgurson, Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 6991; William Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008), 6498. But what did hurt me was the fact that I had originated the song, and I never got the opportunities to be in the top television shows and the talk shows. While performers, record companies, and music fans welcomed Teenarama's promotion of R&B, WOOK's music programing drew criticism from Washington's black press and the city's black leaders. Lewis (WRAL), May 29, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; "Nero, the Mad," letter to J.D. The female blues singers were on the losing side of a long, complicated argument about what the blues should be. I focus on three black teen shows, The Mitch Thomas Show from Wilmington, Delaware (19551958); Teenage Frolics (19581983), hosted by Raleigh, North Carolina, deejay J. D. Lewis; and Washington, DC's Teenarama Dance Party (19631970), hosted by Bob King. A playlet is a short song telling a humorous story. Screenshot courtesy of Matthew F. Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town. On Aug. 5, 1957, "American Bandstand" (as it was now called), debuted to a national audience. Lewis, July 7, 1967, Lewis Family Papers,folder 139. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_38', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_38').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Despite Helms's backhanded reference, Pepsi's sponsorship offered Teenage Frolics a national brand sponsor, something neither The Mitch Thomas Show nor Teenarama possessed. Self - Singer 1 episode, 1968 . Black music and black dances originating in Philadelphia neighborhoods contributed substantially to the success ofAmerican Bandstand; yetAmerican Bandstandsdancefloor and bleachers were racially segregated, and some of the shows most popular dances were adapted without attribution from black neighborhoods. a. sweet soul Vermont Public Radio. According to Thomas Dorsey, the gospel blues pioneer who used to play in Rainey's band, "It collapsed I dont know what happened to the blues, they seemed to drop it all at once, it just went down.". a. Courtesy American Bandstand. 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. Arguing that television provided creative outlets for some black teens during segregation, Delmont focuses on three black teen shows, The Mitch Thomas Show from Wilmington, Delaware (19551958), Teenage Frolics (19581983), hosted by Raleigh, North Carolina, deejay J. D. Lewis, and Washington, DC's Teenarama Dance Party (19631970) hosted by Bob King. a. Avalon and Vinton These interpolated commercials, common in radio and television in this era, offered sponsors daily visual evidence of teenagers' eagerness to consume and encouraged The Milt Grant Show's viewers to participate in the same rituals of consumption. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_8', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_8').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Like American Bandstand, the local programs I explore in this essay brought dynamic music cultures to eager audiences and advertisers, while they also traced the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in their cities. Lewis (WRAL), June 21, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; Guadalupe Hudson, letter to J.D. 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. d. Chuck Berry's guitar influence, Dick Dale was known for: On Pepsi marketing to black customers, see Stephanie Capparell. I can hardly recognize my own voice, said Fabian. b. Jan Berry's songwriting Lewis (WRAL), May 8, 1966, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_42', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_42').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Fans also felt free to criticize the format of Teenage Frolics. "In the southern context, congregation was important because it symbolized anact of free will, whereas segregation represented the imposition of another's will." Despite living during a time when music in America was divided into two categories popular music and race music the iconic singer, Ella Fitzgerald, still managed to become the first Black artist to win a Grammy. 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. He turned instead to the flamboyant women who had honed their craft on the vaudeville and tent-show circuits, where the blues would be mixed up with comedy songs and dramatic routines professional entertainers who knew how to delight a crowd. August Wilson's Rainey calls the blues "life's way of talking". Just over onemile from Central High School, Steve's Show broadcast from the KTHV-TV studios. The classic blues, sometimes known as "vaudeville blues" or "city blues," was a hybrid of rural folk and urban pop, southern roots and cosmopolitan panache. "23Black Philadelphia Memories,dir. Sisters Gwendolyn and Lena Horton, for example, regularly walked from the Walnut Terrace neighborhood to appear on the show. Intresting note: in 1963 Dick Clark and Swan records had the opportunity to release the Beatles in the US under their label, but Dick took one look at . Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay is published on 18 February. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_5', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_5').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Part of the power of television for civil rights activists was how the medium exposed excessive acts of physical violence to audiences outside the South. "17Black Philadelphia Memories,directed byTrudi Brown (Philadelphia,WHYY-TV12,1999), television documentary. "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.". tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_24', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_24').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Mitch Thomas hosts Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, Wilmington, Delaware, December 7, 1957, ThePhiladelphia Tribune. For his part, Eaton argued on the eve of the station's first broadcast, "WOOK-TV will be a place where young Negroes can develop their talents and the problems of the Negro [will be] vividly displayed. Continue Learning about Movies & Television. 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. c. sympathizing with Civil Rights It wasn't until the 1920s that record . "58Nan Randall, "Rocking and Rolling Road to Respectability," Washington Post, July 4, 1965. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_58', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_58').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); In an interview with filmmaker Beverly Lindsay-Johnson, who made an important documentary on the show, Teenarama regular Reginald "Lucky" Luckett recalled, "One of the key things about the program was that it got the [teens] involved. a. Dick Dale's guitar solos J.D. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_7', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_7').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Unlike other racially segregatedleisure spaces, however, television brought the sounds and images of black music cultures to viewers of all colorsacross and beyond the cities from which the shows broadcast. b. the Drifters tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_3', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_3').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); That same year, black students from St. Augustine University and Shaw University staged sit-ins at lunch counters in Raleigh to protest the whites-only policies at Woolworths and other stores.4Jeffrey Crow, Paul Escott, and Flora Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History,North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1992). Historian Brett Gadsden describes Delaware as "a provincial hybrid, one in which ostensibly southern and northern modes of race relations operated. the show's powers-that-be refused and the show was subsequently Image courtesy of Matthew F. Delmont. Other black artists also appeared on Bandstand that year, including Jackie Wilson, Johnny Mathis, Chuck Berry, Mickey & Sylvia and others. Clark and American Bandstand did not choose this path. c. writing playlet songs "41Susan Jordan, letter to J.D. . New York Public Library Digital Collections, Billy Rose Theatre Division. 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. http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/segregated-america.html. An appearance on Dick Clark's American Bandstand launched Checker's version of "The Twist" to the No. My question ismay they appear on your 'Dance Party'? selected went together as a group. While the nationally televised dance program hosted a number of prominent black performers, the show regularly blocked black teenagers from its studio audience until it moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in 1964. And Steve's Show was not unique: Dick Reid's Record Hop in Charleston, West Virginia; Ginny Pace's Saturday Hop in Houston, Texas; John Dixon's Dixon on Disc in Mobile, Alabama; Bill Sanders's show in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Dewey Phillips's Pop Shop in Memphis, Tennessee; and Chuck Allen's Teen Tempo in Jackson, Mississippi were all segregated dance shows. Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting, Third Edition. As Marybeth Hamilton writes in her excellent book In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions, "Once only encountered at house parties and barn dances, on street corners and the black showbiz circuit, the blues could now be heard pouring out of speakeasies, nightclubs, houses, apartments, drug stores and barbershops, hardware stores and funeral parlours, anywhere race records were played or sold. Vermont Public Radio. In 1970, for example, black students who attended W. E. B. DuBois High School were transferred to historically white Wake Forest High School and the DuBois High School building became Wake Forest-Rolesville Middle School.39Barry Malone, "Before Brown: Cultural and Social Capital in a Rural Black School Community, W.E.B. Peter, Paul, and Mary The pop audience's perception of the image and authenticity of folk music was the result of the effort of the music industry to market the movement. This obsession with the "genuine" black experience proved fatal for the classic blues. schools danced on Bandstand starting in 1952 when Bob Horn was the For the best experience please upgrade your IE version or switch to a another web browser. As historian. It takes nothing away from the young men and women who risked their lives to desegregate schools and lunch counters to recognize that thousands of teenagers found joy and value in dancing on television or watching their peers do the same. Like other young people across the country, black teenagers identified with different aspects of. The role of the A&R man was to organize and coordinate the professionals involved in recording. d. Ricky Nelson, A distinctive vocal feature of the Everly Brothers was: c. melodic soul 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. The teens on Seventeen were emulating their peers in Philadelphia who popularized the dance on the nationally broadcast American Bandstand. We had Teenarama, which was ours. In addition, I examine Washington's The Milt Grant Show (19561961), which allowed only white dancers. The qualities represented by the classic female blues singers resilience, solidarity, community, fun could not compete. | One such woman was Gertrude Pridgett, aka Ma Rainey, who had been performing the blues for more than 20 years when she recorded her first session for Paramount in 1923 at the age of 37. Jeffrey Crow, Paul Escott, and Flora Hatley. d. Chuck Berry, An important component of the Beach Boys' success was: The show urged teenagers to drink Pepsi, eat at Tops' Drive-Inn, listen to Motorola portable radios, and buy the newest records at the Music Box record store. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 9192. The show's producers implemented racially discriminatory admissions policies because they feared that racial tensions around the studio in West Philadelphia would alienate advertisers. At the same time, WPHF's Wilmington studios were only thirty miles from Philadelphia, a city that,historian Matthew Countryman notes, many black people called "Up South. Despite the racial segregation of the studio audience, The Milt Grant Show offered black performers like LaVern Baker valuable exposure to white consumers. More than 20 million people watched the coronation on the BBC . This essay examines four programs that brought music and dance to southern and border state audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. Her journey from Georgia to Chicago in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom represents the Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of black people from the rural South to the urban North during that period. A 1967 memo from Jesse Helms highlights the pressures Teenage Frolics faced from national broadcasts and mentions Pepsi's sponsorship of the show. For many young people being blocked from amusements parks, swimming pools, and skating rinks would be their first exposure to what King calls the feeling of "forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness. . "5, A talented local pop group that dodged the label Philadelphia Schlock was Danny and the Juniors, four white teenagers who attended John Bartram High School in Southwest Philadelphia and who rose meteorically in Clarks orbit with At the Hop, a catchy song to which Clark held half of the publishing rights. c. Jan and Dean b. Carole King "We weren't able to get into Bandstand, [but] The Mitch Thomas Show gave me a little fame. Soundings is an ongoing series of interdisciplinary, multimedia publications that use historical, ethnographic, musicological, and documentary methods to map and explore southern musics and related practices. Among the blues singers who have gained more or less national recognition there is scarcely a man's name to be found. National Museum of American History, Behring Center. "When I got back to Philly, and everyone had seen me on TV, I was big time," Givens recalled. Bodroghkozy, Aniko. Steve's Showdebuted in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the spring of 1957, months before the integration crisis at Central High School drew national attention. Examining Little Rock, political theorist Danielle Allen writes, "Nineteen fifty-seven forced citizens to confront the nature of their citizenshipthat is, the basic habits of interaction in public spacesand many were shamed into desiring a new order. Beautiful, if you will.4, Critics have derisively called the Fabian-Avalon-Rydell, white-teen-idol side ofAmerican BandstandPhiladelphia Schlock, also tame rock and roll. Yet, as the historian Matthew Delmont observes, there was an edgier side to Clarks show, a side that hosted R&B vocal groups like the Shirelles; rockabilly and country-influenced artists like Brenda Lee, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, and Patsy Cline; and Motown artists such as Mary Wells and Smoky Robinson and the Miracles; as well as R&B and soul pioneers like James Brown and the Famous Flames, Marvin Gaye, and Aretha Franklin. Filmed 19571958. 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. Submissions are moderated. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like Teen idols were marketed primarily as: a. bad boys b. ideal boyfriends c. singer/songwriters d. professional studio musicians, Who was the first host of American Bandstand? 2007. b. they were pop-oriented By selling an estimated one million copies in its first year, Crazy Blues was like the first geyser of oil in untapped ground, instantly revealing a huge appetite for records made by and for black people. One musician even claimed Rainey and Smith were romantically involved at one point.
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