AMERICA'S BANDSTAND

Long before Elvis got all shook up, television was ushering tap-dancing violinists, all-girl bands, and mambo rhythms into our living rooms. And popular musicians were playing by a brand-new set of expectations.

By Murray Forman

It’s an image fixed in the annals of American culture: Elvis Presley gyrating savagely, luridly, the studio cameras resolutely trained on his upper torso, the infamous pelvic swivel left to the audience’s prurient imagination.

The picture was small and gray, the sound tinny. Yet television viewers were galvanized by the seductive sneer and the hectic rock-and-roll rhythm. Fans and critics alike knew they were watching something new and exciting. Maybe even dangerous.

Elvis’s celebrated “above the waist” performance on The Ed Sullivan Show—his third Sullivan appearance—is branded into our collective memory. But it was actually big band stalwarts Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey who first introduced the twenty-one-year-old to viewers twelve months earlier, on their variety series Stage Show. The date was January 28, 1956; one musical sensibility was passing the baton to the next. Before the year was out, Elvis had made nearly a dozen television appearances, on programs hosted by Steve Allen and Milton Berle, in addition to the Dorsey Brothers and Sullivan shows.

Many historians see Elvis’s first television appearances as a massive, unique eruption in the cultural landscape. The research focus on Elvis, however, obscures an important point: Music was already everywhere on the small screen. Popular music and television had converged during the medium’s formative stage, 1948 to 1955.

In fact, popular music was much more central to early television programming than it is now. Moreover, the music performances featured by the new medium transcended narrow categories, ranging over genres and styles with remarkable flexibility. Without question, music helped shape the young television industry. As it happened, the opposite also proved true.


Digging for artifacts

Most programs shown between 1948 and 1955 were aired live without the use of recording technologies, never to be seen again. A small percentage, though, were captured on kinescope, an unwieldy tape format.

Because “kinnies” are difficult to preserve, several archives (notably the Museum of Television and Radio, in New York and Los Angeles, and the University of California at Los Angeles Film and Television Archive) are diligently transferring them to video, making hundreds of programs from the late 1940s and early 1950s newly available for historical analysis.

Television historians also comb through contemporary television and music trade papers, popular magazines, and newspapers for details about the industry’s early years. Resources such as the NBC collection and the Ed Sullivan papers (improbably housed at the Wisconsin State Historical Archives) are information gold mines, filled with promotional documents and executive memoranda that offer behind-the-scenes glimpses at how programs were conceived and produced, including the role popular music played.

As early as 1937, NBC’s test broadcasts from hot, cramped Studio 3H in midtown New York featured music artists, such as the radio-proven Pickens Sisters, who belted out “Carry Me Back to Old Virginee” and grand-opera parodies. When NBC launched its regular programming schedule on the heels of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the network was quick to offer big band leader Fred Waring his own show.

Though World War II slowed television’s growth, once the war ended, ABC, CBS, and the short-lived DuMont network joined NBC in the competitive fray, aggressively courting corporate sponsors whose investments would ensure the medium’s success. As television and advertising executives squabbled and jockeyed for power, they made decisions that influenced the kinds of music performances seen at first by thousands, eventually millions, of home viewers.

Popular televised-music genres emerged rapidly, including amateur talent shows, big band “cavalcades” and “revues,” musical game shows, variety shows, hillbilly/western variety shows, live ballroom broadcasts, hit-parade shows, DJ shows, teen dance shows. Other programs—such as the sublime Frank Sinatra special Max Liebman Presents “Fanfare: Songs for Young Lovers,” or the celebrity-based Star of the Family (with episodes profiling a young Tony Bennett, Les Paul and Mary Ford, and Benny Goodman, among others)—combined performances across genres.


Star-making machinery

Initially, television relied on veteran musicians with visual appeal, like wide-eyed song-and-dance man Eddie Cantor, musical comedian Spike Jones, and hipster Cab Calloway, who, according to the music industry trade magazine Down Beat, had made over ninety TV appearances by late 1951.

But even as established stars were enticed to appear on the new medium, programming executives and entertainment agents mounted a broad campaign to find and develop promising young performers. Early on, everyone recognized the medium’s voracious appetite for new material, new talent. If formats were too repetitive and faces too familiar, current viewers might tune out, and potential viewers might resist buying their first set.

Amateur talent shows, a carry-over from radio, met two important criteria: They were inexpensive to produce, and they could unearth fresh faces. Last summer’s breakaway hit American Idol follows in a long tradition. From its earliest days, television has been seen as a star-making medium.

The first generation of televised amateur programs included Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour, Chance of a Lifetime, Doorway to Fame, and TV Teen Club (hosted by “symphonic jazz” conductor Paul Whiteman).

Musicianship varied on the Godfrey and Mack shows. Passably talented Irish tenors and female sopranos shared the stage with musical-saw instrumentalists, comb-kazoo players, and tap-dancing violinists. The contestants, usually in their teens or early twenties, performed with verve, if not artistry.

Chance of a Lifetime participants tended to claim prior semiprofessional experience, and the quality of the performances was higher. The show’s formidable prize package included “a trip to New York, to stay at the glamorous Hotel Roosevelt,” an “opportunity” with Universal International Pictures, a “tryout” with Columbia Records, “an engagement at the internationally famous Latin Quarter in the heart of Broadway’s Great White Way,” and $1,000 cash.

For the truly talented, though, the real prize was the chance to use TV exposure to leverage other professional engagements. Baritone Morley Meredith outlined his aspirations in 1953 to Dennis James, the Chance of a Lifetime host: “I’d like to sing on Broadway, and I like television very much, too, and this has certainly given me an opportunity to be seen by a lot of people throughout the country.” A few lucky contestants—usually singers—did surface as guests on other programs.


Video boomed the radio star

According to Down Beat in 1950, one of the first professional ensembles to become “a name act solely as a result of their work on television” was the Kirby Stone Quintet. Stone, a trumpeter and valve trombonist, discovered television’s promotional potential when his group landed a regular slot in the New York broadcast market, appearing on CBS each weeknight between 7:00 and 7:15 (the fifteen-minute program was a staple of television’s early years).

After six months on television—during which Stone introduced novelty songs and comedy skits into the act—the group’s nightclub performances drew bigger crowds and better box office. The quintet eventually landed engagements in larger theaters and an MGM recording contract.

As Stone explained, “We could have knocked around in clubs for ten years and never have been seen by the number of people who have seen us on television. One night on TV is worth weeks at the Paramount.”

West Coast performers benefited from television as much as their eastern counterparts. Pioneering Los Angeles station KTLA launched the television careers of Lawrence Welk and Spade Cooley, “the King of Western Swing,” who in 1950 said, “Television boomed us. . . . We were only moderately successful at the ballroom until the television show caught on.”

The next year, Variety noted KTLA’s sudden impact on the career of Ina Ray Hutton and Her All-Girl Orchestra, reporting, “Last summer, Miss Hutton was virtually unknown on the Coast.” Down Beat concurred: “Television’s power as a talent builder is shown in the skyrocketing Coast career of Ina Ray Hutton.”

Many in the recording industry had feared television would decrease record sales, until an April 1951 performance by Laurie Anders on CBS’s Ken Murray Show added surprising velocity to the sales of her record “I Like the Wide Open Spaces.” It was the first sign that television could be an impressive tool for record promotion, a formula that still holds true for music videos today.

If television stimulated box office, boomed artists, and accelerated record sales, it also harbored potential risks. Televised gaffes and failed shows damaged careers, as the entertainment trades reported with considerable frequency. Many eyes were watching—no one wanted to bomb on TV.

And, with little or no television experience, musicians often found themselves lost before the cameras. Tape archives reveal the foibles of those who had no idea how to perform in front of millions of unseen viewers or how to move in front of the camera. Some performers look like deer caught in the headlights. In the worst cases, fear is clearly etched on their faces (which, owing to the intense heat from the banks of studio lights, are also drenched with perspiration).

Like many “serious” musicians of the day, Ray Anthony, a dance-band leader whose recordings were popular among disk jockeys and jukebox operators, disliked being pressured by producers and sponsors to be a different kind of performer for the camera. Anthony was particularly skeptical of television’s penchant for production numbers and comedy bits, which he regarded as an unsuitable use of his talents.
In a 1951 Down Beat interview (titled “Let Others Have Video—I’ll Stay in the Ballrooms”), Anthony says, “Television? Not for me. Not me at all. That’s for a pioneer, and I’m no pioneer. I’m not going to get my feet wet in television until somebody knows exactly where dance bands fit in.” Even Bing Crosby shared Anthony’s wait-and-see attitude toward the tube.

Others were quick to embrace television. Popular singer Vaughn Monroe, for instance, hosted Camel Caravan from October 1950 to July 1951. Variety reported that, to prepare for his hosting duties, Monroe “had to learn how to act a little and also do a buck-and-wing along with his vocalizing, so that he could take part in the show’s production numbers.”

Despite Monroe’s preparation and game attitude, his television debut was seen as a disaster. In 1951, the jazz magazine Metronome dished up a scathing review of Camel Caravan:

Never has so much ineptness been gathered together and converged on a hapless cathode. Never has so little been made of so little talent. . . . Programs like this make one despair about television, make one feel that the medium is falling fast into a poor imitation of the high school variety show.

Having to perform comedy skits created particular concern among musicians, especially jazz players. Down Beat wondered, “Will the band of tomorrow have to be the type of band in which musical values are sacrificed in favor of funny hat routines?” But television producers continued to prefer musicians who could be amusing. And “funny hats” became a term used to disparage the credibility of musicians who, willingly or not, had sacrificed their reputation for sponsor or audience approval.


The Latin beat goes on

In their search for innovative and visually engaging music, producers regularly turned to Latino musicians, drawn by the style and sheer verve of their performances and their cultural “difference,” including the music’s freshness for audiences used to standard North American pop. Latino artists showed up as guests on hundreds of music and variety programs.

Debonair bandleader Xavier Cugat, mambo and “cu-bop” virtuoso Machito, and, of course, Desi Arnaz benefited enormously from television. Their orchestras were seen and heard by millions who would otherwise have had little exposure to Latin flavors. Mexican corridos, mariachi, and boleros, and Cuban rumba, son, and mambo were nearly unavoidable if you turned on the tube during its formative years.

To introduce Latino artists, program hosts commonly invoked the 1941 film Down Argentine Way, inviting viewers to take a musical trip “down Panama way” or “down Havana way,” invoking images of the exotic, erotic, and romantic lands buried “down” in Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean.

The 1949 variety show Flight to Rhythm offers an early example of television’s portrayal of Latin cultures. After an extreme close-up of a conga drum being beaten ferociously, a filmed vignette shows the host and his music guests boarding a plane (the “flight to rhythm”). A voice-over intones: “Via the drum, the accents of the maracas, listen—it’s the rhythm of Rio calling. So come along with us as we fly the melody airlines to Miami, and then past Mexico, Costa Rica, over the equator and the jungles of the Amazon, and then, Rio.” As the place-name litany suggests, the performances were impressively international, with lyrics sung in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Four years later, a mambo craze swept the United States—described in a 1954 Life magazine feature story entitled “Uncle Sambo, Mad for Mambo”—sparked in part by the many televised appearances of Latino musicians.

I Love Lucy, which premiered in 1951, became TV’s best-known showcase of Latin music; the sitcom’s reruns continue to bring Cuban rhythms to viewers. Desi Arnaz, who costarred with his wife, comedienne Lucille Ball, played singer and orchestra leader Ricky Ricardo, a character based on Arnaz’s years as a performer in upscale New York and Miami nightclubs.

Most of the show’s music performances take place in a fictional club, the Tropicana. Arnaz sings popular Cuban songs and standard ballads in English and Spanish, and leads the Tropicana musicians, dressed in the frilly costumes of a Cuban hotel band, through production numbers. His vocal style is highly affected, and the arrangements are thin versions of rumba or mambo. Still, the songs hint at a Latino authenticity.

Several episodes feature Arnaz performing his signature song, “Babalu.” The cameras pull back for full-body shots, revealing his energetic dancing and earnest conga pounding, then move in for close-ups, which convey the passion of his singing. Though the number is staged to suggest it’s happening in a lush nightclub space, viewers get a closer, more nuanced perspective than the typical clubgoer would enjoy.


Come on-a my house

Close-ups reinforced television’s reputation as an intimate medium. So did a new kind of music performance, one that emphasized subdued, lightly swinging arrangements, everyday settings, and subtle physical gestures, easily read by viewers at home.

This relatively restrained, quiet manner characterized early program hosts such as singers Perry Como and Dinah Shore, pianist Liberace, and guitarist Les Paul and vocalist Mary Ford. In extant Les Paul and Mary Ford Show footage, the real-life husband and wife welcome viewers into their “living room” or “kitchen,” then perform their hit songs while fixing a toaster, feeding a pet bird, or making sandwiches.

Female “chirpers” like Shore and male “crooners” like Como offered audiences a mellow alternative to the Broadway artists who appeared in exhausting theater-style productions on The Colgate Comedy Hour (hosts included Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, and Martin and Lewis) and The Kate Smith Evening Hour.

Critics in 1951 praised Shore for her “engaging homey” manner on camera. Archive tapes confirm her affability—Shore chats easily between songs, speaking directly to the camera. Como, known as “Mr. Casual,” was ideally suited to television’s intimacy, registering particularly well with women viewers. (Even today, television producers cite a relaxed style as a desirable attribute for musical programming.)

While Shore trilled promotional tunes for her sponsor, Chevrolet, and Como sang harmless ditties like “Papa Loves Mambo,” a young man from Memphis was preparing to disrupt television’s relative calm. Elvis’s first small-screen appearances, though in many ways conventional, were also strikingly robust and edgy, far removed from the prevalent laid-back stylings.

By the time Elvis burst onto the scene, television and music were so intertwined that his initial RCA Records contract—now on display at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—cites televised guest spots as part of RCA’s strategy for marketing him to the nation. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, programs such as American Bandstand, Shindig, Midnight Special, Soul Train, and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert solidified the ties between music and television, setting the stage for today’s array of music-television networks.

Now we point a remote at our wide-screen and settle back to watch Britney Spears, Shakira, and Enrique Iglesias cavort in their latest video extravaganzas. Though the packaging is glossier, we’re still watching the living legacy of pioneers who, more than a half-century ago, got rhythm into a tiny, blurry black-and-white tube.

Murray Forman, assistant professor of communication studies, is the author of The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press). He recently received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for the book-length research project One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Music on Television Before Elvis.