a. accusations of Communism "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.". I'm thinking it was either Bo Diddley or Ben E. King. The entrepreneurial songwriter Perry Bradford, a man so stubborn he was known as "Mule", knew better. 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. And his nationally televised American Bandstand influenced music, dance and fashion, establishing Clark as one of the savviest businessmen of the 20th century. 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. Lewis, July 7, 1967, Lewis Family Papers,folder 139. Clarks policy was to restrict American Bandstand to youth aged 14-17. You appear to be using an older verion of Internet Explorer. American Bandstand - Broadcast History. and Black Power Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 217, 72. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_70', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_70').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); While Soul! Six months later, she did it again. At age 26, Dick Clark, a native of Westchester County, New York, and a 1951 graduate of Syracuse University, started out at WFIL-TV doing commercial spots. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. . Every form of historical revisionism has its winners and losers. "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. You are signed in as (Sign out). 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. Most of the obituaries of Clark, who took over Bandstand in 1956, have noted that the show used rock and roll to break down racial barriers, mostly because that is the story Clark told. But that is where his legacy gets complicated. Mamie Smith, pictured with her band the Jazz Hounds, was the first black singer to make a record (Credit: Getty Images). A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. "It is surely no accident that so many of the early blues performers that revivalists scorned as inauthentic were women; to them, authenticity had a male voice," writes Hamilton. Bessie Smith had affairs with several chorus girls while Ma Rainey sang, in 1928's Prove It on Me, "I went out last night with a crowd of my friends/ It must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men/ Wear my clothes just like a fan/ Talk to the gals just like any old man." Cash Michaels, "Memories of Teenage Frolics,". I became interested in these teen dance shows while researching and writing a book on American Bandstand. The Otis Givens, interview withauthor, June 27, 2007. b. Boston Unlike American Bandstand, or Soul Train, which started broadcasting nationally in 1971, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, Teenarama Dance Party, and The Milt Grant Show are not well known outside of their local broadcast markets. . Broadcast locally during the 1957 school integration crisis, the show featuredexclusively white dancers, includingHazel Bryan. Posted November 21, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AD76LwR2JA. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. Less obviously, the Iowa teens were also emulating teens on The Mitch Thomas Showa black teen dance show that broadcast locally from Wilmington, Delaware, to the Philadelphia areawhose version of the Stroll influenced the American Bandstanddancers. 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. . c. doo-wop And if you liked this story,sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. c. they had top 40 albums In the 1920s US, glamorous, funny black female singers were the blues' first - and revolutionary hitmakers. 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. 1966-67], Lewis Family Papers,folder 140. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_41', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_41').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); A letter to "John D." from an adult chaperone suggests that Lewis was a well-known and approachable local television personality,"I came to your house two Sundays ago to see you. 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. c. the Crystals Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. 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. https://collaborativehistory.gse.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/American%20Bandstand%27s%20West%20Philadelphia%20Home.jpg, American Bandstand's West Philadelphia Home, https://collaborativehistory.gse.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Dick%20Clark%20.jpg, Dick Clark Hosts American Bandstand at Studio B, https://collaborativehistory.gse.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Dick%20Clark%20at%20podium.jpg, Dick Clark and American Bandstand Youngsters, https://collaborativehistory.gse.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Dick%20Clark%20and%20youngsters.jpg, https://collaborativehistory.gse.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Pop%20Singer%27s%20.jpg, https://collaborativehistory.gse.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Line%20outside%20Studio%20B.jpg, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, American Bandstand: West Philadelphia's Seven-Year Wonder 1957-1964, Starting Local: WFIL-TV, Bob Horn, and Philadelphia's Bandstand, Going National: Dick Clark and ABC's American Bandstand, Whose Music, Whose Dances? None. New York Airdate: February 4, 1967Welcome Back!.."So Glad We Made It!"To see a ticket stub for today's episode of "New American Bandstand '67" taped on Jan. 28, 196. Music was the glue that held together a carnival of consumption. c. Jan and Dean 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). Fifty years later, Bandstand fan Sharon Sultan Cutler wondered what had become of the "Regulars," the name given to the teens that showed up daily to . We couldn't go on Shindig on a regular basis. At the same time, the classic blues singers were too working-class and sexually frank for some of the urban middle classes. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_71', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_71').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Unlike Soul Train, which moved from Chicago to Hollywood after one year, these local shows featured and appealed to black teens from Wilmington, Raleigh, and Washington, and as the opening clip from Seventeen suggests, they influenced American musical cultures in surprising ways. While The Grady and Hurst Showbroadcast five times perweek, the weekly Mitch Thomas Show proved to be more influential. Like the man WC Handy spotted at Tutwiler station, their alienation guaranteed their authenticity. We don't want to remember all-American American Bandstand as discriminating against black teenagers. This essay examines four programs that brought music and dance to southern and border state audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. 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. The Beach Boys were already the kings of surf pop by their first appearance on American Bandstand in 1964. 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. The show's producers implemented racially discriminatory admissions policies because they feared that racial tensions around the studio in West Philadelphia would alienate advertisers. b. the Shangri-Las He was stunning. Susan Jordan, letter to J.D. 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." Storer Broadcasting Company purchased WPFH in 1956.25Herbert Howard, Multiple Ownership in Television Broadcasting (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 142147. Filmed 19571958. The hillbilly influence began creeping into it and the music became what we call rock and roll . Bessie Smith was the first African-American singer. J.D. 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. Screenshots (1 and 2) from Black Philadelphia Memories, directed byTrudi Brown (WHYY-TV12, 1999). Ramsey, Guthrie P. Jr.. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. ", Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was one of several black women who dominated the classic blues African-American culture's first mainstream breakthrough (Credit: Getty Images). http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/segregated-america.html. I would like to come with 6 or 7 others, and be a part of your show. That is the show that did not mingle Black and Letters from viewers and aspiring musicians to Lewis and WRAL attest that many teenagers and performers wanted to appear on Teenage Frolics. As historian Earl Lewis has noted, when African Americans faced Jim Crow policies in parks, swimming pools, and movie theaters, they developed separate recreation sites through which they turned segregation into "congregation. 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. 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. I asked your daughter to tell you to call me, please. And then I saw Jimmy Peatross and Joan Buck do it, who were probably the best dancers who were ever on Bandstand. "59"Dance Party (The Teenarama Story), Research Narrative," Box 2, Kendall Production Records, Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. The son of a radio-station owner in Utica, N.Y., Dick Clark had been a radio disc jockey as a student at Syracuse University. c. a combination of low chest singing and high falsetto pitches YouTube video, 31:42. b. Phil Spector American Bandstand was Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Virginia. They said, 'That's The Stroll.' 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. Some commented they looked like grampas'. For the writer Zora Neale Hurston, His Negroness is being rubbed off by close contact with white culture.". In this essay, Matthew Delmont examines four programs that brought music and dance to southern and border state television audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. One musician even claimed Rainey and Smith were romantically involved at one point. Otherwise, Clark and his producer, Tony Mammarella, stayed with Horns formula of teens dancing to hit records in Studio B and showcasing the talents of lip-syncing musical guests. WOOK-TV only perpetuates this image. By 1973, the show drew many of the top R&B performers and competed with American Bandstand for viewers on Saturday afternoons. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_48', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_48').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Soul Train and American Bandstand attracted nationally known performers, but on Teenage Frolics, teenagers participated in the show's creation and saw their neighbors, classmates, friends, and family do the same. For example, in a 1957 episode the show's teens finished dancing to The Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love" and the camera focused on Grant in front of a table with dozens of bottles of Pepsi. a. A lot of rock and roll today is bordering on what is called 'popular music.'"52Ibid. We're going to make them do it in the glaring light of television. "Leader of the Pack" There was a protest in the early 60's, I think it was 1963 (my parents were there as teens). Teenarama Dance Party received top billing in this advertisement and ultimately the show's fortunes would rise and fall with WOOK's. "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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_23', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_23').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Because the show influenced American Bandstand during its first year as a national program, teenagers across the country learned dances popularized by The Mitch Thomas Show. "6Quoted in Bodrogkozy, Equal Time, 2. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_6', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_6').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); In the context of pitched battles over segregation and civil rights, these televised teen dance shows reveal much about the visibility of different youth musical cultures in the 1950s and 1960s. "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." 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. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story Is Our TV Pick Of The Week, Small Town Horror Story: The Racist Attack Of A FedEx Worker. Beverly Lindsay-Johnson, interview with author, January 8, 2013. It also featured vocal harmony groups from the Philadelphia area.18"Teen-Age 'Superiors' Debut on M.T. Anonymous ("102 Pilot St.), letter to J.D. d. Ricky Nelson, A distinctive vocal feature of the Everly Brothers was: When Chuck Willis released his single "Betty and Dupree" in 1958, he and Atlantic Records wanted to keep teenagers across the country dancing the Stroll. I would appreciate your information by telling me if we can come and when we can come. 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). c. the Everly Brothers "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. Thomas continued to work as a radio disc jockey through the 1960s, until he left broadcasting in 1969 to work as a counselor to gang members in Wilmington. Photograph by Will Counts. 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. If you stood around the cameramen, they would show you how to operate the cameras. A century later, however, it's a different story. They sincerely loved this music but its unpopularity certainly enhanced its mystique, as did the murky sound that came from recording it on cheap equipment and pressing it on cheap plastic. Horn had appointed a committee of 12 youngsters to monitor the behavior of their peers in the studio; Clark expanded the size of this committee and he enforced a code of conduct that required boys to wear a suit jacket, shirt, and necktie; prohibited girls from wearing tight sweaters, low-necked dresses or pants; and banned gum, smoking, and obscene or profane language. Lastly, no one under age 14 or older than 18 [was] to be admitted.1. The sponsor was Beechnut Foods, for whom Clark pitched Beechnut Spearmint Gum and, contrary to the no gum rule on his daily Philadelphia show, Clark encouraged his New York audience to chew and chew again, the more visible the chewing the better. 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. and black dancers (like American Bandstand had already been doing), a. Any racist similarities As Jackie Kay puts it in her biography, "These old bluesmen are considered the genuine article while the women are fancy dress." tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_35', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_35').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); WRAL, however, offered Teenage Frolics signal strength and stability, and Lewis's success at attracting advertisers and navigating station politics kept the program on the air for twenty-five years. b. they were pop-oriented Bessie Smith earned more, and spent more, than anybody else. Lewis (WRAL), May 29, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; "Nero, the Mad," letter to J.D. Willis's "C. C. Rider" (1957) sparked the popularity of the dance and earned Willis the nickname "The King of the Stroll." 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). Blues enthusiasts often spoke of these men as if they were revenants or creatures from folklore rather than real people, hence the old myth that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. In a 1998 interview for the documentary Black Philadelphia Memories, Thomas recalled that "the show was so strong that I could play a record one time and break it wide open. a. Roy Orbison d. singing in falsetto, Which event helped signal the end of the Brill Building? Please be respectful. ", The scholar Angela Davis calls Bessie Smith "the first real 'superstar' in African-American popular culture" (Credit: Getty Images), Like rappers decades later, the classic blues singers were flashy avatars of liberation and aspiration. 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. Most important, American Bandstand defined what teenagers looked like for a generation of viewers. Who was the first host of American Bandstand? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 9192. b. his trademark fast tremolos on the guitar d. gentle soul, Ben E. King had been a singer with: "60Beverly Lindsay-Johnson, interview with author, January 8, 2013. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_60', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_60').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This story and the black and white reenactments in Lindsay-Johnson's film speak both to the creativity that historians of television must employ and to the imprint Teenarama made on the black population in Washington, DC.