[1] Larry Lehmer,Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll(Mechanicsburg, PA: Sunberry Press), 55. a. Avalon and Vinton One musician even claimed Rainey and Smith were romantically involved at one point. We don't want to remember all-American American Bandstand as discriminating against black teenagers. We're going to make them do it in the glaring light of television. Black students from Philadelphia high schools and junior high schools danced on Bandstand starting in 1952 when Bob. Like other white teens that protested the desegregation of Central High, Hazel Bryan danced regularly on Steve's Show. the show's powers-that-be refused and the show was subsequently Filming & Production Courtesy of Matthew F. Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town. A WOOK-TV advertisement in the 1965 Broadcasting Yearbook highlights the promise and precarity of the station that broadcast Teenarama Dance Party. In the 1920s US, glamorous, funny black female singers were the blues' first and revolutionary hitmakers. While The Grady and Hurst Showbroadcast five times perweek, the weekly Mitch Thomas Show proved to be more influential. Washington, DC: Kendall Productions, 2007. I'm thinking it was either Bo Diddley or Ben E. King. Release Dates Lewis (WRAL), June 24, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; Daniel Jackson, letter to J.D. Show," Philadelphia Tribune, November 19, 1957. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_18', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_18').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Thomas promoted large stage shows as well as small record hops at skating rinks.19On Mitch Thomas' concerts, see Archie Miller, "Fun & Thrills," Philadelphia Tribune, December 4, 1956; "Rock 'n Roll Show & Dance," Philadelphia Tribune, April 19, 1958; "Swingin' the Blues," Philadelphia Tribune, August 5, 1958; "Mitch Thomas Show Attracts Over 2000," Philadelphia Tribune, August 18, 1958; "Don't Miss the Mitch Thomas Rock & Roll Show," Philadelphia Tribune, July 2, 1960. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_19', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_19').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); These events were often racially integrated,"The whites that came, they just said, 'Well I'm gonna see the artist and that's it.' All kids are creative, but we don't let them express it . Colchester, VT: VPR, July 11, 2009. "23Black Philadelphia Memories,dir. white dancers on the same dance floor. Why were they then relegated to the sidelines, asks Dorian Lynskey. Please enable Javascript and reload the page. 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." Teenarama Dance Party received top billing in this advertisement and ultimately the show's fortunes would rise and fall with WOOK's. Smith's experience supports Mitch Thomas's belief that [American Bandstand teens] "were looking to see what dance steps we were putting out. d. harmonies sung at the high end of the male vocal range, Musical influences on the Beach Boys include all of the following EXCEPT: Screenshots (1 and 2) from Black Philadelphia Memories, directed byTrudi Brown (WHYY-TV12, 1999). What the show didn't do was fully integrate its studio audience as soon as he became host, as Clark has claimed. As a new generation of black female singers broke through in the 1930s Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Memphis Minnie some of the first wave sought refuge in other branches of showbusiness. By 1973, the show drew many of the top R&B performers and competed with American Bandstand for viewers on Saturday afternoons. Read about our approach to external linking. WOOK-TV advertisement for Teenarama host Bob King,1965. 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. 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. "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. This pocket Bluetooth printer lets you print your precious memories before they hit Instagram. 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. Black students from Philadelphia high schools and junior high d. "Surfin' U.S.A.". And that says more about our desire to embrace a more comforting narrative of racial progress than it does about Clark's legacy. d. It is an example of a surf song. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. While Black artists were permitted to perform, only white dancers were allowed. After Grant took a big drink of the soda and delivered the sales pitch ("Never too heavy, never too sweet, always just right"), he asked two teenagers to help hand out bottles of the sponsor's drink to the dancers. That was incentive enough for Clark and Chancellor Records engineers to figure out how to record Fabians voice and then manufacture it into a sound that would excite his audience. Themselves - Pop Band 1 episode, 1957 Bob Crewe . 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. b. Phil Spector Then it was hosted by Bob Horn and was called Bob Horn's Bandstand.On July 9 of 1956 the show got a new host, a clean-cut 26 year old named Dick Clark. Who was first black artist on American bandstand? He was 82. Lee Andrews and the Hearts was the first black singer to appear on American Bandstand, which went national with ABC in 1957. Once some decent songs were funneled through this process, notably Turn Me Loose, Fabulous Fabian was on his way to stardom. One of the challenges with analyzing The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama is that no visual traces of the shows are known to exist. That is the show that had With black performers only a few feet away from the white teenage dancers in the studio, the picture-in-picture technique demarcated the racial boundary between performers and audiences and offered one strategy for televising black musicians while maintaining racial segregation. 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. Enter your comment below. "45Donald Hodge, letter to J.D. Black teenagers were banned. 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. As if their enforced retirement weren't bad enough, these women suffered the double indignity of being retrospectively sidelined. Among local programs, the Al Benson Show and Richard Stamz's Open the Door Richardboth had brief periods of success in 1950s Chicago.24J. a. the Drifters A. J. 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.33Clarence Williams, "JD Lewis Jr.: A Living Broadcasting Legend," Ace: Magazine of the Triangle, SeptemberOctober 2002, 1214, 70. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_33', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_33').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Unlike The Mitch Thomas Show and Teenarama, Teenage Frolics aired on a VHF (very high frequency)station with a network affiliation (WRAL-TV had a primary affiliation with NBC and a secondary affiliation with ABC).34"WRAL-TV," 1960 Broadcasting Yearbook,A73 tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_34', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_34').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Despite these network ties, WRAL proved challenging in other ways. Which aspects of "Leader of the Pack" indicate it is a playlet? Steve's Show, Little Rock, Arkansas, late 1950s. Among these four programs, only one recording is known to exist,a 1957 episode of The Milt Grant Show recorded to sell the show to sponsors. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_37', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_37').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); He served as a Pepsi public relations and sales representative for the Raleigh area from 1965 to 1968. The failure of the station that broadcast The Mitch Thomas Show underscores the tenuous nature of such unaffiliated local programs. Lewis (WRAL), June 21, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; Guadalupe Hudson, letter to J.D. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_49', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_49').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Whereas all television sets could pick up VHFstations, which carried major network programming, UHF (ultra high frequency) stations required viewers to have special UHF tuners. 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. show). c. "Only the Lonely" 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. 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. b. sweet soul Company Credits Like The Milt Grant Show, Baltimore's Buddy Deane Show,the inspiration for John Waters's Hairspray film and the later Broadway musical and Hollywood film,was officially segregated and only allowed black teens to enter the studio on specific days. Aperformance later in the show by white singer Jeri Renay did not use this technique. 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,". Directed by Herb Grimes. Thus the first black singer to record anything also became the first to record the blues. In addition to viewer letters, Lewis received mail from local music groups that watched and wanted to appear on the show. As a teenager though, she was very talented in performing arts. That is the show that did not mingle Black and 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. It wasn't until the 1920s that record . By the time Clark delivered a revampedBandstandto national audiences asAmerican Bandstandin 1957, the show was ostensibly squeaky clean. c. the Everly Brothers Each show featured musical performances and records alongside dancing teenagers. was more politically and aesthetically adventurous than The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama, these teen dance shows fostered a similar compact between their audiences and performers. Despite its success among black and white teenagers, Thomas's show remained on television for only three years, from 1955 to 1958. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. . But all he had to do was lip-sync and wiggle a bit and the screaming would start. Museum of Broadcast Communications. this meant airing black music performances while maintaining a segregated studio audience that would appeal to sponsors. Clark was well aware that advertisers were eager to reach teenagers, and his show offered daily access to young consumers. Please be respectful. American Bandstand was Enter your comment below. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 6263, 7778; Barlow, Voice Over, 98103. My question ismay they appear on your 'Dance Party'? Mapping a partial list of the groups that visited the studio highlights how many young people wanted to appear on the show and participate in its creation of black youth music culture. In Norfolk in 1951 and 1952, they began calling it rhythm and blues. Posted November 21, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AD76LwR2JA. The qualities represented by the classic female blues singers resilience, solidarity, community, fun could not compete. selected went together as a group. Like much of American popular music, Willis and his songs had deep roots in the South. For black, working-class women, the classic blues was an unprecedented new arena of self-expression which gave voice to overt sexuality, the peril of abusive men (like Bessie Smith's husband), and even queer perspectives. d. Jan and Dean, Which of the following cities produced an especially high number of teen idol hits from 1957-1963? 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. Only a handful were still making blues records in the 1930s. To comment, enter your name and text below (you can also sign in to use your Scalar account).Comments are moderated. 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. When Clark initially referred to American Bandstand's "integration," he emphasized black musical artists performing on the show. | 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. 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. Why were they then relegated to the sidelines, asks Dorian Lynskey. 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. It imagined the performers as men who sang their pain without concern for attention or financial reward, even though, in reality, they would very much have liked both. Clark revamped Horn's show for national broadcast by ABC. 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. In January . Most early television shows were recorded over or discarded because storage was too expensive. Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay is published on 18 February. Despite its ban on black teenagers, the show regularly featured black R&B performers who were in town to perform at the Howard Theater. "46Guthrie Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_46', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_46').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); From this perspective, localism was a virtue for Teenage Frolics rather than a detriment, because it offered young people a community connection that was not possible with national television. 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. a. one-hit wonders "He attends sales meetings, store openings and maintains close identification with his sponsors' products off the air as well as on. And the image Clark presented in those early years was exclusively white. . The Dick Clark Showwas broadcast live from ABCs Little Theater in Manhattan. American Bandstandwas by no means Dick Clarks only entrepreneurial venture. Music was the glue that held together a carnival of consumption. "We had eight weeks to get these kids taught," Lindsay-Johnson remembered, "and when it came time to shoot the reenactments I wasn't sure they got it." 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." I would appreciate your information by telling me if we can come and when we can come. 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. For The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama Dance Party this meant trying to attract sponsors to advertise to black television audiences. She recalled that this changed when they got period clothing,"It was a community effort, there was a guy who used to dance on Teenarama who worked at the Salvation Army and he said, 'come in and get anything you want'when the kids had the clothes onthe kids got it, I knew they had it. Which folksinger was a member of the Weavers? All of the following were populist characteristics of the folk song movement EXCEPT: Which song initiated the folk music revival in mainstream pop? Another regular, William Clemmons recalled, "We couldn't go on The Milt Grant Show on a regular basis. Broadcast locally during the 1957 school integration crisis, the show featuredexclusively white dancers, includingHazel Bryan. Recognizing the songs potential, but also that the dance in the Ballard version, with its very suggestive horizontal hip movement, wasnt appropriate for prudish national television. From another, however, these shows were spaces that celebrated the creative potential and everyday lives of black youth. "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. schools danced on Bandstand starting in 1952 when Bob Horn was the Differences in terms of station power and stability shaped the duration of each program. Record companies routinely ignored African-American musicianswith only a few exceptions, such as singer Bert Williams and bandleader James Reese Europe. 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. http://www.museum.tv/eotv/musicontele.htm. Trudi Brown. One editorial in the Washington Afro-American complained that WOOK-radio was "monotonous" because it played "rock 'n roll 17 hours a day," and described "'Colored' radio" as having "dedicated itself to a low-mentality level of programming which dispenses musical slop to remind colored people that's all they want to hear. For. J. D. Lewis' Teenage Frolics, which aired from 1958 to 1983, stayed on the air longer than any other local teen dance program. Buddy Deane show was another 'dance-to-the-hits' show broadcast 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. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Bodroghkozy, Aniko. ", Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was one of several black women who dominated the classic blues African-American culture's first mainstream breakthrough (Credit: Getty Images). The program that preceded Dick Clarks American Bandstand at WFIL-TV was deejay Bob Horns locally popular Bandstand. But now it doesn't interest anyone." Teenage. The history of the blues is dominated by men. She was later signed to the Decca Recordings and later Verve Records. 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. Themselves - Musical Guest 1 episode, 1981 Scott Baio . Second, television technology worked to enhance and/or limit the visibility of different youth musical cultures. 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. "In the southern context, congregation was important because it symbolized anact of free will, whereas segregation represented the imposition of another's will." 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. From 1976 to 2011, however, Clark became progressively bolder, and . Even if The Milt Grant Show carefully managed the positioning of black singers and white dancers, television viewers in the greater Washington area saw Baker perform and this exposure was one step towards establishing her as a crossover star in the late-1950s and early-1960s. b. Boston The Milt Grant Show dedicated almost every minute to selling products, and Grant, as this message to potential sponsors makes clear, was a compelling and unabashed salesman. Eustace Gay, "Pioneer In TV Field Doing Marvelous Job Furnishing Youth With Recreation,". 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. 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. b. doo-wop-style backing vocals Bessie Smith was the first African-American singer. The man who published the sheet music for Crazy Blues was WC Handy, a songwriter, businessman and self-proclaimed "Father of the Blues". 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. And that was the black couple that he watched.21Ray Smith, interviewwithauthor, August 10, 2006. a. the Ronettes 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. . 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. 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. In addition to a dress code, Clark's show required visitors to write in advance to request tickets, and these applications were screened by name and address. xamines four programs that brought music and dance to southern and border state television audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. 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. We do not intend to assume a controversial role. Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, vocal performance of"See See Rider Blues" by Ma Rainey and Lena Arant, recorded October 16, 1924, byParamount, catalogue number 12252, 78 rpm. . DVD. Self - Singer 1 episode, 1979 Firefall . tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_25', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_25').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Storer frequently bought and sold stations and, at the time of the WPFH acquisition, it also owned stations in Toledo, Cleveland, Atlanta, Miami, and Portland. Delmont also explores Washington, DC's whites-only program, The Milt Grant Show (19561961), to highlight the pronounced color lines that informed the experience of teenage dancers, as well as the home and studio audiences that flocked to these hit shows. Rainey was dropped by Paramount in 1928 and returned to the Southern tent circuit, her stolen gold necklace replaced by imitation pearls. 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. I brought Ray Charles in there on a Sunday night, and it was just beautiful to look out there and see everything just nice. More than 20 million people watched the coronation on the BBC . . "Frolic Fan," letter to J.D. 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. "12Otis Givens, interview withauthor, June 27, 2007. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1562_1_12', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1562_1_12').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Similarly, South Philadelphia teen Donna Brown recalled in a 1995 interview,"I remember at the same time that Bandstand used to come on, there used to be a black dance thing that came on, and it was The Mitch Thomas Show . "TV Jockey Profile: The Milt Grant Show,". I asked your daughter to tell you to call me, please. Donald Hodge, letter to J.D. I didn't get the exposure. Who were the first African Americans to perform on American Bandstand? My Place. Broadly speaking, the playing was slick, the rhythms hot, the songwriting polished, the lyrics tough and ironic, the stagewear glamorous and the stars overwhelmingly female. We couldn't go on American Bandstand on a regular basis. When the Buddy Deane Show was pressured to integrate white a. Mike Stoller 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. Like the man WC Handy spotted at Tutwiler station, their alienation guaranteed their authenticity. http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/segregated-america.html. 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.