Screenshots (1 and 2) from Black Philadelphia Memories, directed byTrudi Brown (WHYY-TV12, 1999). Who was the first black dancer on American Bandstand? 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. She was later signed to the Decca Recordings and later Verve Records. While a few women, notably Victoria Spivey and Edith Wilson, lived long enough to return to the stage during the 1960s blues revival, the likes of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones were far more interested in the hardbitten men of the Delta. Clark brought African-American performers to national television in an era when such performances were rare. Jesse Helms, later a US senator and national conservative leader, became an executive at Capitol Broadcasting in 1960 and delivered news editorials railing against communism, liberalism, and civil rights. Clark was the host of American Bandstand in the late '50s through the mid-'60s. On Pepsi marketing to black customers, see Stephanie Capparell. 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. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to ourFacebookpage or message us onTwitter. 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. For the best experience please upgrade your IE version or switch to a another web browser. Who was the first host of American Bandstand? As if their enforced retirement weren't bad enough, these women suffered the double indignity of being retrospectively sidelined. Each show featured musical performances and records alongside dancing teenagers. "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. "Your records are up to date and your show is very much for teenagers. 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. An older sisters birth certificate and piled-on makeup enabled some underage girls to get membership cards to Studio B. Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, George D. McDowell Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia. 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. host and continued as the show became American Bandstand with Dick Some scholars and folklorists like Zora Neale Hurston saw these popular recordings as a spiritual corruption of the blues (Credit: Getty Images). Bob King watches dancers on Teenarama, Washington DC, ca. In this way, Teenage Frolics served as what scholar and musician Guthrie Ramsey calls a "community theater." 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 . "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. Dancing Around the "Glaring Light of Television": Black Teen Dance 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." [8] Ibid., 105-111; for a full description, see chap. - The canny mythology of Dolly Parton, - Why Grace Jones is pop's greatest pioneer. Over the course of her career, she went on to win a total of 14 Grammys and even received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1967. Clark inherited WFIL's local television show Bandstand (1952-56) from the deejay Bob Horn, who proved that teenagers liked watching their peers dance. 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. ", 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. Please be respectful. This, however, did not stop her and she began playing gigs around New York City. It is not even a Blues are here to stay." "64Quoted in Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 48. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_64', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_64').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Baker, who appeared on The Milt Grant Show while she was in town to play the Howard Theater, performed "Jim Dandy Got Married" and "Play the Game of Love" on this episode. City councils from Jersey City to Santa Cruz to San Antonio had banned rock performances, and radio stations in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Denver, Lubbock and Cincinnati refused to play rock and roll. a. the Drifters . the show's powers-that-be refused and the show was subsequently And that was something for the black kids to really identify with. Screenshots courtesy of Matthew F. Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town. 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. As colored people, we've been plagued with that image ever since we were freed from slavery. Bandstand (TV Series 1958-1972) - Full Cast & Crew - IMDb We couldn't go on American Bandstand on a regular basis. . c. King and Goffin A 1967 memo from Jesse Helms highlights the pressures Teenage Frolics faced from national broadcasts and mentions Pepsi's sponsorship of the show. 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). For the writer Zora Neale Hurston, His Negroness is being rubbed off by close contact with white culture.". 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). American Bandstandwas by no means Dick Clarks only entrepreneurial venture. "Fun, Fun, Fun" Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. 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. Bessie Smith earned more, and spent more, than anybody else. On Aug. 5, 1957, "American Bandstand" (as it was now called), debuted to a national audience. Lewis (WRAL), June 21, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; Guadalupe Hudson, letter to J.D. "As per our conversation of yesterday, it is going to be necessary that we make some adjustment in our Saturday afternoon schedule this fall with respect to Teen-Age Frolics," Helms wrote to inform Lewis and other staff that the show would have to be shortened from its regular one hour broadcast time. and black dancers (like American Bandstand had already been doing), As Dick Clark and American Bandstand celebrated the one-year anniversary of the show's national debut, local broadcast competition brought The Mitch Thomas Show's groundbreaking three-year run to an unceremonious end. b. the Drifters In 1934, at the age of 17, Fitzgerald performed at the famous Apollo Theater in New York City and won the prize of $25 for Amateur Night. . And that says more about our desire to embrace a more comforting narrative of racial progress than it does about Clark's legacy. "57"Nation's First Minority Group TV Station to Broadcast Today," Chicago Defender, February 11, 1963. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_57', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_57').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); WOOK-TV never assumed a leadership role with regards to the main political issues of its era, but Teenarama showcased black youth culture for Washington viewers. The early blues women were sidelined by the "Blues Mafia" who championed Delta blues singers such as Robert Johnson, Skip James and Son House [pictured] (Credit: Getty Images), For all its obsession with the "real", the 1960s blues revival was built on a series of myths. Barry Malone, "Before Brown: Cultural and Social Capital in a Rural Black School Community, W.E.B. Wald describes this as an "affective compact" that "complicates the clear division between production and consumption. By the time Clark delivered a revampedBandstandto national audiences asAmerican Bandstandin 1957, the show was ostensibly squeaky clean. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963. Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement. This meant buying additional hardware to receive the channels, or, after Congress passed the All-Channels ReceiverAct in 1962, buying a newer television set.50Christopher Sterling and John Michael Kittross, Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting, Third Edition (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 255256, 351352, 383, 415416. white dancers on the same dance floor. We hope to show interracial activities which are harmonious. While Des Moines, Iowa, may be a long way from the South geographically, television connected Iowa teens to music and dance styles flowing from Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina, and elsewhere. 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. Smith's versatile blues encompassed gallows humour (Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair), social commentary (Poor Man's Blues), salty innuendo (Kitchen Man) and lusty good times (Gimme a Pigfoot). "Leader of the Pack" First, were important for black teens because the shows offered televisual spaces that valued their creative energies and talents. Differences in terms of station power and stability shaped the duration of each program. Clarks daily afternoon program pioneered in musical television by showcasing a range of black and white pop music performers, including R&B, rock n roll, and country. Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story Is Our TV Pick Of The Week, Small Town Horror Story: The Racist Attack Of A FedEx Worker. Fletcher and Fred Fletcher's Capitol Broadcasting Company, which owned WRAL, received a TV license in 1956 and Lewis played an important role in convincing the Federal Communications Comission (FCC) that WRAL-TV would serve African American viewers. 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. The hillbilly influence began creeping into it and the music became what we call rock and roll . Joan Cannady, who was the first black student to attend Germantown Friends High School in the northeast section of Philadelphia, remembers watching the program to hear black music that was not played at parties with her white classmates. This 2019 photograph shows the building that once housed WFIL-TV and Studio B at 4548 Market St., where Dick Clarks American Bandstand was broadcast live every weekday afternoon from 1957 to 1964. The role of the A&R man was to organize and coordinate the professionals involved in recording. 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. We may earn a commission from links on this page. 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. Ultimately, these televised teen dance shows encourage us to expand the range of sounds and images we associate withblack youth in the South. 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 . Today the building is the home of West Philadelphias Enterprise Center, which maintains American Bandstand memorabilia in the space once used as Studio B, today used as a room for Enterprise Center events. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_2', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_2').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The teenagers in this clip from Seventeen, a teen dance show broadcast by WOI-TV to central Iowa in the late-1950s, did not need to know this history to appreciate that Willis's "Betty and Dupree" was a perfect song for dancing the Stroll, even if they did so awkwardly. The first order of business was to lure disaffected Horn loyalists to his version ofBandstand. 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. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. Aperformance later in the show by white singer Jeri Renay did not use this technique. By 1933, record sales were just 7% of what they had been in 1929 and many of the theatres had closed or been turned into movie theatres. a. Avalon and Vinton I'm thinking it was either Bo Diddley or Ben E. King. Broadcast icon Dick Clark, the longtime host of the influential "American Bandstand," has died, publicist Paul Shefrin said. He was 82. 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. Eustace Gay, "Pioneer In TV Field Doing Marvelous Job Furnishing Youth With Recreation,". As George Melly, one of the few critics to take the classic blues seriously in the 1960s, wrote, "there is a proportion of the worthless, the mechanical, the contrived, but there is also a gaiety, a vitality, a sense of good time.". Male country blues resonated with rock's singer-songwriters in a way that the classic blues never could. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. My Place. Hairspray (the movie) is not a documentary. Like much of American popular music, Willis and his songs had deep roots in the South. Buddy Deane show was another 'dance-to-the-hits' show broadcast 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). Clarence Burton Jr., defending the station and raising a question about the teen dance show that predated Teenarama. Nationally, American Bandstand blocked black teens from entering the studio during its years in Philadelphia, despite host Dick Clark's claims to the contrary. Most important, American Bandstand defined what teenagers looked like for a generation of viewers. Black students from Philadelphia high schools and junior high schools danced on Bandstand starting in 1952 when Bob. Gwendolyn Horton recalled, "We would practice all week so we'd be ready on Saturday," while Lena Horton noted, "just to get out there, you thought you were something that could be shown on TV. And the image Clark presented in those early years was exclusively white. Despite this, Clark claimed for years that he integrated Bandstand by the late 1950s. '"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. cancelled. While the Chubby Checker craze lastly only a few years, the singer is credited with transforming pop music dance from the jitterbug rock n rock style to an open dancing format, which, unlike the jitterbug, didnt require a partner.7. American Bandstand also helped invent the demographic that still dominates popular culture: teenagers. a. While Black artists were permitted to perform, only white dancers were allowed. In rejecting the blues' relationship to big-city showbusiness, the conventional narrative all but erased women's voices and experiences. The Video Beat, 2015. 3. Rainey performed in ostrich feathers and a triple necklace of gold coins. The qualities represented by the classic female blues singers resilience, solidarity, community, fun could not compete. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. While The Grady and Hurst Showbroadcast five times perweek, the weekly Mitch Thomas Show proved to be more influential. "American Bandstand"1956-2007 | The Pop History Dig King's mention of "Funtown" is preceded by references to lynch mobs, police brutality and the "airtight cage of poverty," and followed by references to hotel segregation and racial slurs. a. Roy Orbison Then people like Presley came along and began to change it . a. accusations of Communism Answer.Yes Dick Clark did have segregation on American Band Stand. 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. Finally, the visibility these shows offered to teenagers was closely tied to the salability of teen music culture. History of R&R CH 3 Flashcards | Quizlet Did Dick Clark have segregation on American Bandstand? 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. selected went together as a group. "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. In January 1962, it topped the chart again. While black people who migrated from the Jim Crow South were looking for a better future, the folklorists sentimentally fetishised the agony and mystery of the past they had left behind. Before Cole, shows hosted by black singers Lorenzo Fuller(1947) and Billy Daniels (1952) and the variety program Sugar Hill Times (1949) also fared poorly. Matthew Delmont, "The Nicest Kids in Town." And his nationally televised American Bandstand influenced music, dance and fashion, establishing Clark as one of the savviest businessmen of the 20th century. a. a smooth rhythm and blues influence in their harmonies
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