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b. doo-wop-style backing vocals Dance Party: The Teenarama Story. Second, television technology worked to enhance and/or limit the visibility of different youth musical cultures. [3] Ibid., 147; Jackson,American Bandstand, 30-31, 99-101, 107, 145-47; Lehmer,Bandstandland, 74-75. Black teenagers were banned. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_52', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_52').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); King went on to say that he considered Teenarama and his radio show to be "rhythm and blues" programs, and R&B artists like James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Walter Jackson, and Chuck Jackson all performed on Teenarama. 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. "Your records are up to date and your show is very much for teenagers. Delta blues singers such as Charley Patton, Skip James, Son House and Robert Johnson slotted into the post-war counterculture's worship of untameable outcasts who lived tough, rootless lives a million miles away from bourgeois conformity. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_1', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_1').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); With "Betty and Dupree," Willis revived a folk song, first recorded as "Dupree Blues" in 1930 by Blind Willie Walker from Greenville, South Carolina. University of California Press. He first commented on the program's integration in his 1976 autobiography, when American Bandstand's ratings were in decline and the show faced a challenge from Don Cornelius' Soul Train. In July 1956, Dick Clark, a commercial pitchman and deejay with an unsullied reputation, inherited WFIL-TVsBandstandfrom scandal-tainted Bob Horn and revamped it for a national audience of teenage consumers as ABCsAmerican Bandstand, which first aired in August 1957. Bessie Smith was the first African-American singer. The Nat King Cole Show(19561957) failed to attract national advertisers and lasted only oneyear. Philadelphia American Bandstand Regular Billy Cook shows us his style of the Fast Dance as it was called on Bandstand/American Bandstand (Jitterbug/Lindy Hop. Like other white teens that protested the desegregation of Central High, Hazel Bryan danced regularly on Steve's Show. The resulting image nicely illustrates the tensions surrounding televising black music to white audiences. We may earn a commission from links on this page. As historian. "45Donald Hodge, letter to J.D. [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. Ultimately, these televised teen dance shows encourage us to expand the range of sounds and images we associate withblack youth in the South. The earliest representative of African-American performers on this site is George Walker ("Her Name's Miss Dinah Fair"). Broadcast locally during the 1957 school integration crisis, the show featuredexclusively white dancers, includingHazel Bryan. Footage features black and white rock n roll stars performing their latest hits--both on daily American Bandstand at WFILs Studio B and ABCs Saturday night version of American Bandstand, The Dick Clark Show, broadcast live from New York City. In 1903, he recalled in his 1941 autobiography, he was sitting in a railroad station in Tutwiler, Mississippi when he heard a man playing "the weirdest music I had ever heard" on a guitar, using a knife blade as a capo. "40David Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 9. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_40', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_40').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Teenage Frolics offered a black cultural space that bridged this period between segregatedand integrated schools. This problematic assumption has since resurfaced in writing about soul music and hip hop: the sound of suffering is considered more powerful and real than the sound of defiant enjoyment; pain is more authentic than pleasure. Screenshots (1 and 2) from Black Philadelphia Memories, directed byTrudi Brown (WHYY-TV12, 1999). A hallmark of earlyAmerican Bandstandwas Clarks promotion of Italian-American male teen idols, sex-symbol pop singers who hailed from South Philadelphia: Frankie Avalon (ne Francis Avallone), Bobby Rydell (ne Ridarelli), and Fabian (ne Fabiano Forte). Letters from viewers and aspiring musicians to Lewis and WRAL attest that many teenagers and performers wanted to appear on Teenage Frolics. schools danced on Bandstand starting in 1952 when Bob Horn was the Dick Clark Comes to Bandstand 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. The cameras shift between a medium shot of the artists and a wide shot of couples dancing, before using a picture-in-picture production technique that presented the shot of the artists in a box overlaying the shot of the teenagers dancing. 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. These scholars and folklorists saw the "real" blues, by contrast, as a vanishing oral tradition from the rural South that needed to be captured and preserved before it disappeared completely. 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. Please rush your information. this meant airing black music performances while maintaining a segregated studio audience that would appeal to sponsors. The female blues singers were on the losing side of a long, complicated argument about what the blues should be. As Delmont tells it: "There was a singer named Bobby Brooks, an African-American teen singer from South Philadelphia who was their favorite singer. xamines four programs that brought music and dance to southern and border state television audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. WTTG-TV was was founded as a DuMont station and DuMont ended network operations in 1956. b. the rise of surf music a. Aldon Music being sold to Columbia Pictures/Screen Gems The Superiors, a group of six fourteen to sixteen-year-olds from Smithfield, North Carolina, expressed dreams of auditioning for Motown and asked, "could we sort of take an inch of your show to sing" to "show North Carolina they will be greatly represented. DVD. Show,", On Mitch Thomas' concerts, see Archie Miller, "Fun & Thrills,", Ray Smith, interviewwithauthor, August 10, 2006. As one 1926 study observed, "upwards of 75% of the songs are written from a woman's point of view. Arlene with singer Frankie Avalon at an American Bandstand event. . 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. "55"WOOK Says it Isn't Just One-Color TV," Washington Star, February 11, 1963. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_55', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_55').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); These critiques reflected differences in age and class between the readership of the Afro-American and potential viewers and listeners of WOOK-TV and WOOK-radio.56John Henry Murphy, Sr. started publishing the Afro-American newspaper in Baltimore in 1892. Clark first addressed the integration of the studio audience in his 1978 record collection celebrating the shows twenty-fifth anniversary. My plan is to bring a group of 45 or 50 children . Beach Boys on American Bandstand. "Teen Angel" The station also included a coverage map of WRAL-TV, "which includes the most heavily populated Negro areas of the state of North Carolina (Approximately 450,000 Negroes)," and promised that "'The Teen-Age Frolic Show' affords a wonderful opportunity for firsthand consumer reaction to the sponsor's product."36J.D. Dick Clark, who died Wednesday at age 82, made rock and roll safe for American living rooms. By the time Clark delivered a revampedBandstandto national audiences asAmerican Bandstandin 1957, the show was ostensibly squeaky clean. b. a. a smooth rhythm and blues influence in their harmonies 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. But that is where his legacy gets complicated. Race and American Bandstand, The Seven-Year Itch: West Philly Loses American Bandstand, Report accessibility issues and request help. Every form of historical revisionism has its winners and losers. Most people listening to a dance program would rather hear the latest records. With no need for backing bands or stage costumes, the men were much cheaper, too. With limited televisual evidence, my analysis draws on archival documents, promotional materials, newspapers, photographs, and interviews to explore how these shows got on and stayed on the air and what they meant to their audiences. d. Chuck Berry's guitar influence, Dick Dale was known for: An appearance on Dick Clark's American Bandstand launched Checker's version of "The Twist" to the No. c. It was produced by Phil Spector. One particularly opinionated "Frolic Fan" wrote, "I am very concerned with your show. (19631970) hosted by Bob King. 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. 4 (October 2008): 443444. [8] Ibid., 105-111; for a full description, see chap. "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. "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. And I always was like "wow." These white teenagers were not alone in watching The Mitch Thomas Show. Rainey performed in ostrich feathers and a triple necklace of gold coins. A graduate of Morehouse College and a World War II veteran, John Davis (J. D.) Lewis, Jr. started his radio career at Raleigh's WRAL in 1947 as a morning deejay playing gospel music. b. Phil Spector 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. Julie Malnig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 182198; George Lipsitz, Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). It portrayed the Mississippi Delta as a land lost in time, closer in spirit to the slavery era than to modern America. Please enable Javascript and reload the page. The teens held and drank their sodas while dancing, keeping the sponsor's product in the picture throughout the song. Bradford then decided to use Smith to popularise a form of music that had been packing out venues in the South for almost 20 years. 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. Bessie Smith earned more, and spent more, than anybody else. I was standing there watching them dancing in a line, and after a while I asked them, 'What are y'all doing out there?' a. Other black artists also appeared on Bandstand that year, including Jackie Wilson, Johnny Mathis, Chuck Berry, Mickey & Sylvia and others. Mitch Thomas, J. D. Lewis, and Bob King created televisual spaces that privileged black audiences and displayed the creative energies and talents of black youth. c. musical playlets That is the show that did not mingle Black and musical director / music arranger (59 episodes, 1961-1967) When a white singer dropped out of a recording session at the last minute, Bradford convinced Hagar to take a chance on Smith, a Cincinnati-born star of the Harlem club scene, and scored a substantial hit. The failure of the station that broadcast The Mitch Thomas Show underscores the tenuous nature of such unaffiliated local programs. King and Goffin Whereas the likes of Ma Rainey travelled to the city to record their music, song collectors moved in the opposite direction, taking their recording devices to the South in order to capture what the leading folklorist John Lomax called "sound-photographs of Negro songs, rendered in their own native element". 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. a. From 1976 to 2011, however, Clark became progressively bolder, and less accurate, in his retelling of how he integrated the studio audience. That day, 2 June, was the first royal service to be televised - and for many it was the first live event they ever watched on TV. 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. 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. Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement. Their teachers asked for volunteers and those who were 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. The first Black "super couple" on "American Bandstand" was Famous Hooks and June Strode, still fondly remembered today by "Bandstand" enthusiasts In the "American Bandstand" dance contest in 1966, featuring dancers from all over the country, a brother and sister couple from Detroit, Lester and Leslie Tipton, won first place. Beverly Lindsay-Johnson, interview with author, January 8, 2013. 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). The lead singer is Danny Rapp. Enter your comment below. Lewis (WRAL), June 10, 1967, Lewis Family Papers,folder 140. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_44', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_44').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Letter fromThe Superiorsto Teenage Frolic, North Carolina, July 25, 1967. a. This site requires Javascript to be turned on. a. There were two black dancers on this show, the "black Bandstand," or whatever you want to call it. To do otherwise would necessitate our preemption of a solid hour of commercial network programming, which I deem inadvisable. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_9', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_9').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The Mitch Thomas Show debuted on August 13, 1955, on WPFH, an unaffiliated television station that broadcast to Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley from Wilmington.10"The NAACP Reports: WCAM (Radio)," August 7, 1955, NAACP collection, URB 6, box 21, folder 423, TUUA. Walker's song, in turn, was based on the story of Frank Dupre, who was hanged in Atlanta after stealing a diamond ring for Betty Andrews and shooting a detective.2Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 7475; Tom Hughes, Hanging the Peachtree Bandit: The True Tale of Atlanta's Infamous Frank Dupree (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014). Dubois High School, Wake Forest, North Carolina," The North Carolina Historical Review 85, no. In addition to viewer letters, Lewis received mail from local music groups that watched and wanted to appear on the show. Clark. Among the many projects in Clarks musical portfolio was ABCs Saturday night version ofAmerican Bandstand. b. teenage symphonies But Clark's recollections differ from archival materials, newspaper accounts, video and photographic evidence and the memories of people who were regulars on American Bandstand or who were excluded from the show. Most early television shows were recorded over or discarded because storage was too expensive. I can hardly recognize my own voice, said Fabian. For The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama Dance Party this meant trying to attract sponsors to advertise to black television audiences. d. Ricky Nelson, A distinctive vocal feature of the Everly Brothers was: Some teens were still holding their bottles when Grant started the next advertisement for Motorola portable radios. The reality behind the scenes ofAmerican Bandstandwas quite different than what viewers saw on national television. Clark's show put African-American music and performers on television every day. Rainey was dropped by Paramount in 1928 and returned to the Southern tent circuit, her stolen gold necklace replaced by imitation pearls. This eclipse is the result of a concerted effort by cultural gatekeepers, across several decades, to valorise certain aspects of the African-American experience while denigrating others. Delmont, Matthew.