If white teen shows sought to shore up the supremacy of whiteness in youth music culture, the black teen shows visualized black teens as equal participants in the production and consumption of music culture. 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. A lot of rock and roll today is bordering on what is called 'popular music.'"52Ibid. Walker, along with his partner Bert Williams, were perhaps the most famous (to both black and white audiences) black entertainers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement. Bessie Smith was the first African-American singer. http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/segregated-america.html. 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. 6. American Bandstand - 10 Great Performances - LiveAbout Unfortunately though, because of her poor appearance and dress, they did not give her the opportunity to be booked for a week at the Apollo, which was supposed to be part of the winning prize. Who was the first black singer to appear on American Bandstand. "Afro-Americans who lived in communities as diverse as Chicago, Norfolk, and Buxton, Iowa, congregatedsometimes along class lines, but always together," Earl Lewis argues. 1950s Teen Dance TV Shows, Volume 1. 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. Submissions are moderated. '"69Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_69', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_69').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The prevalence of racial segregation in recreational spaces and on white teen dance shows throws the importance of The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama into sharp relief. We do not intend to assume a controversial role. We couldn't go on Shindig on a regular basis. a. the Drifters I asked your daughter to tell you to call me, please. Teenarama host Bob King came to WOOK in 1956 from WRAP radio in his hometown of Norfolk, Virginia, where he hosted an R&B show.51James Lee, "He Plays Teens Picks," Washington Star, [n.d.] ca. Bessie Smith was the first African-American singer. August Wilson's Rainey calls the blues "life's way of talking". b. d. Jan and Dean, Which of the following cities produced an especially high number of teen idol hits from 1957-1963? A WOOK-TV advertisement in the 1965 Broadcasting Yearbook highlights the promise and precarity of the station that broadcast Teenarama Dance Party. The teens on Seventeen were emulating their peers in Philadelphia who popularized the dance on the nationally broadcast American Bandstand. Where Are the American Bandstand Regulars Now? "38Jesse Helms, memo to Ray Reeve, July 6, 1967, Lewis Family Papers,folder 139; Ray Reeve, memo to J.D. 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 . History of Segregation on American Bandstand - The Nicest Kids in Town 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. Ella Fitzgerald Was the First Black Person to Ever Win a Grammy "17Black Philadelphia Memories,directed byTrudi Brown (Philadelphia,WHYY-TV12,1999), television documentary. a. sweet soul Thomas remembers that the teens on his show "created a dance called The Stroll. between Hairspray (the movie) and the real events of the 1950's in d. Weil and Mann, All of the following are examples of girl groups EXCEPT: 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. It wasn't until the 1920s that record . Among the blues singers who have gained more or less national recognition there is scarcely a man's name to be found. Nationally, American Bandstand blocked black teens from entering the studio during its years in Philadelphia, despite host Dick Clark's claims to the contrary. Her songs "Tweedle Dee" and "Jim Dandy" both reached the top twenty of the pop chart, but white singer Georgia Gibbs's cover of "Tweedle Dee" topped the pop chart and outsold Baker's version.63Arnold Shaw, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 376. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_63', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_63').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Baker's contemporary Ruth Brown explained, "I wasn't so upset about other singers copying my songs because that was their privilege, and they had to pay the writers of the song. "66"TV Jockey Profile: The Milt Grant Show," Billboard, February 6, 1961, 43. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_66', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_66').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); He promised potential sponsors that for an hour every afternoon WTTG-TV's studio in the Raleigh Hotel in downtown Washington would be a nexus for selling products to area teenagers. Technical Specs, See agents for this cast & crew on IMDbPro, Self - Interpretive Dancer with The Allen Brothers, producer / executive producer / producer (41 episodes, 1964-1967), technical producer (23 episodes, 1963-1967), technical producer (18 episodes, 1962-1966), technical producer (10 episodes, 1961-1966), assistant producer (4 episodes, 1961-1962), technical producer (2 episodes, 1965-1966), set designer / scenic designer (7 episodes, 1960-1962), audio / sound recordist (56 episodes, 1960-1967), film unit: sound recordist (1 episode, 1966), lighting director (37 episodes, 1964-1967), lighting director (11 episodes, 1962-1963), lighting director (9 episodes, 1960-1962), lighting director (3 episodes, 1960-1962), lighting director (3 episodes, 1963-1966), lighting director (2 episodes, 1965-1966), cameraman: The Allusions segment / cameraman: teenagers discussion segment (2 episodes, 1966), cameraman: Angelina Lauro segment / cameraman: The Bee Gees segment (2 episodes, 1966), cameraman: Pearl Turton segment (1 episode, 1963), musical director / music arranger (59 episodes, 1961-1967), floor manager / studio manager (56 episodes, 1961-1967), production assistant (33 episodes, 1964-1966), production assistant (10 episodes, 1963-1964), production assistant (4 episodes, 1961-1962). . While the advertisement used large, bold font to tout the city's majority African American population to potential advertisers, smaller letters tried to put a positive spin on the station's limitations,"281,000 UHF sets in operation in WOOK area as of Oct. 1, 1964. Who was first black artist on American bandstand? - Answers 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. Male country blues resonated with rock's singer-songwriters in a way that the classic blues never could. 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. Other black artists also appeared on Bandstand that year, including Jackie Wilson, Johnny Mathis, Chuck Berry, Mickey & Sylvia and others. 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 . [3] Ibid., 147; Jackson,American Bandstand, 30-31, 99-101, 107, 145-47; Lehmer,Bandstandland, 74-75. "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. "20Mullinax, "Radio Guided DJ to Stars." b. they were pop-oriented 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. Screenshot from Black Philadelphia Memories, directed byTrudi Brown (WHYY-TV12, 1999). While Black artists were permitted to perform, only white dancers were allowed. 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. Jackie Kay's book and George C Wolfe's film are important reminders of the period when the blues was mass-market party music and its reigning stars were women, proud and majestic in feathers and gold. Clark brought African-American performers to national television in an era when such performances were rare. "It's been a long, long time since a major network has aimed at the most entertainment-starved group in the country," Clark told Newsweek in 1957. A year later, an American Bandstand producer told the New York Post that this incident contributed to American Bandstand's segregation.62John Jackson, Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll (New York: Shirmer Trade Books, 2000), 168169; Jackson, American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock 'n' Roll Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 56. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_62', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_62').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The Milt Grant Show clips from May 1957 predate the Freed-Lymon controversy, but the show faced similar concerns. She was later signed to the Decca Recordings and later Verve Records. Why Grace Jones is pop's greatest pioneer, a newly updated 1997 biography by Jackie Kay. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. c. Brian Wilson's production and writing This obsession with the "genuine" black experience proved fatal for the classic blues. American Bandstand - Broadcast History. 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). As Jackie Kay puts it in her biography, "These old bluesmen are considered the genuine article while the women are fancy dress." Self 1 episode, 1983 Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers . Dick Clark, the nations first national deejay, began his stellar career in television at the podium of American Bandstand at WFIL-TV in West Philadelphia. 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. 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. As colored people, we've been plagued with that image ever since we were freed from slavery. They had four top 10 pop hits and "Don't Worry, Baby" was the B-side to their first #1 "I Get Around." 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. 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). He popularized the idea that teenagers are an important consumer group. a. Photograph by Will Counts. Aperformance later in the show by white singer Jeri Renay did not use this technique. d. harmonies sung at the high end of the male vocal range, Musical influences on the Beach Boys include all of the following EXCEPT: 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,". Like other young people across the country, black teenagers identified with different aspects of. 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." This essay examines four programs that brought music and dance to southern and border state audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. Most people listening to a dance program would rather hear the latest records. The reputation of Bessie Smith, the subject of a newly updated 1997 biography by Jackie Kay, was kept alive by prominent admirers such as Janis Joplin and Nina Simone, while Rainey's was revived by August Wilson's 1982 play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and, more recently, by George C Wolfe's movie adaptation. "I engineered a plan to get membership applications," Walter Palmer told me, "and gave them Irish, Polish and Italian last names. Their teachers asked for volunteers and those who were Directed by Matt Wolf. 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. Hairspray (the movie) is not a documentary. Colchester, VT: VPR, July 11, 2009. First, were important for black teens because the shows offered televisual spaces that valued their creative energies and talents. The scholar Angela Davis calls her "the first real 'superstar' in African-American popular culture. 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. Screenshots courtesy of Matthew F. Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town. this meant airing black music performances while maintaining a segregated studio audience that would appeal to sponsors. As a teenager though, she was very talented in performing arts. Matthew F. Delmont is an assistant professor of American studies at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., and the author of The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia. Going National: Dick Clark and ABC's American Bandstand In addition to viewer letters, Lewis received mail from local music groups that watched and wanted to appear on the show. As historian. From 1976 to 2011, however, Clark became progressively bolder, and less accurate, in his retelling of how he integrated the studio audience. When American Bandstand started broadcasting nationally in 1957, it had to avoid being tainted by the anti-rock and roll protests taking place across the country. One particularly opinionated "Frolic Fan" wrote, "I am very concerned with your show. . c. writing playlet songs ", Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was one of several black women who dominated the classic blues African-American culture's first mainstream breakthrough (Credit: Getty Images). When did The Beatles appear on American bandstand? - Answers 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. "23Black Philadelphia Memories,dir. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_26', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_26').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Thomas's show was among the first victims of the station's financial problems. a. one-hit wonders Sisters Gwendolyn and Lena Horton, for example, regularly walked from the Walnut Terrace neighborhood to appear on the show. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 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." a. they produced several hit singles From 1954 to 1956, in addition to his television work pitching an array of products, he hostedDick Clarks Caravan of Music, a radio version of Bob Horns WFIL-TVBandstandtargeting an older audience than Horns teeny-boppers., Horns firing fromBandstandin the spring of 1956 opened the door for the boyish-looking, telegenic Clark to be his successor the following summer. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_21', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_21').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Vera Boyer and Otis Givens show off their dance steps on The Mitch Thomas Show, Wilmington, Delaware, ca. Like much of American popular music, Willis and his songs had deep roots in the South. From another, however, these shows were spaces that celebrated the creative potential and everyday lives of black youth. FormerBandstanderArlene Sullivan, famous in her own right as aBandstand regular in the late 1950s, recalled, There werent many people in the fifties who did not think that Fabian was the handsomest boy theyd ever seen. The Milt Grant Show is particularly interesting for how it sought to bring black music performances to television viewers while maintaining a segregated studio audience that would appeal to sponsors. 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. 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). 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. The music industry had previously assumed that African Americans wouldn't buy record players, therefore there was no point in recording black artists. Dubois High School, Wake Forest, North Carolina,". In 1958, more than 20 years after her first performance at the Apollo Theater, Ellla Fitzgerald become the first African American to win a Grammy. 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.
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