From Those Were the Days:

1937 - The Fabulous Dr. Tweedy was broadcast on NBC Radio for the first time. Frank Morgan starred as the absent-minded title character.

1937 - CBS presented the first broadcast of Second Husband. The show continued on the air until 1946.
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“It’s the one burning question that every American who can carry a tune wants answered…”

“…what’s Number One on the Hit Parade?” The term “hit parade” owes its place in the American lexicon to the long-running Your Hit Parade, a popular music program that charted weekly the nation’s top tunes long before Casey Kasem and his disc-jockey brethren (and sistern). Debuting over NBC Radio on April 20, 1935 for Lucky Strike cigarettes, the show became both a Saturday night ritual (particularly during the war years) and an indelible contribution to popular culture for nearly twenty-five years on radio and television.

Your Hit Parade started out as a sixty-minute offering on Saturday nights, and then later split into two broadcasts March 11, 1936, with the second airing on Wednesdays. Two months later, the Saturday show moved to CBS and the Wednesday version chugged along until December 1, 1937 (being whittled down to a half-hour in November 1936). The Tiffany network had an eleven-year hold on the show (broadcast in various 30- and 45-minute formats) until April 26, 1947, when Parade returned to its old NBC haunts; it finally departed the radio airwaves on January 16, 1953. (The television version was seen on both NBC and CBS as well from July 10, 1950-April 24, 1959.)

In his book Raised on Radio, author Gerald Nachman succinctly describes the whys and wherefores of this monster hit:

Long before the onslaught of Top 40 formats, Your Hit Parade was the sole oracle of pop music trends—a kind of weekly Grammy Awards. At first, the songs were the stars; singers, who earned a hundred dollars a show, weren’t even credited.

Let me just break in here quickly to note that even though the vocalists took a back seat to the musical tunes, many of them didn’t do too shabby on their own: Bea Wain (described by Nachman as Parade’s “hot canary”), Buddy Clark, Ginny Simms, Dinah Shore, Martha Tilton, Dick Haymes, Johnny Mercer, Eileen Wilson, Georgia Gibbs, Lanny Ross, Doris Day and Andy Russell were among the many performers employed by the series. The program was also home—from 1943-45 and from 1947-49—to a gentleman named Francis Albert Sinatra; Ol’ Blue Eyes’ participation in the proceedings resulted in ticket scalpings among his bobbysox admirers, and their screams so annoyed both the listeners and the sponsor that policy soon dictated that ticket holders were require to be at least twenty-one years of age.

How songs were surveyed and selected was a secret highly guarded by the agency that ran the show, which insisted that its system was beyond reproach and, as [announcer Andre] Baruch stated smartly each week, was the result of a tally of sheet-music sales, listener requests, and jukebox selections “coast to coast.” In fact, it was fairly random, an allegedly “scientific” sampling put together by hundred of “song scouts” across the country who talked to DJs, bandleaders, and record and sheet-music sales clerks and then reported the week’s best-selling tunes. The show, in turn, boosted record and jukebox sales, so the show’s hits became self-perpetuating.

Your Hit Parade was a no-nonsense kind of program, devoted to the hits and nothing but—no witty banter and no sketches, although there was some continuity (most of it written by a then-unknown Alan Jay Lerner). An exception to this format was made in 1938 when famed film comedian W.C. Fields was prominently featured on the program, appearing weekly in a comedy sketch. Fields would frequently read letters from his son Chester, and it took the Lucky Strike cigarette people some time to catch on that their star had a son named Chester Fields.

Lucky Strike’s longtime sponsorship of the program is integral to any discussion of Your Hit Parade, since the show’s origins can be traced back to an earlier NBC program entitled The Lucky Strike Dance Orchestra (1928-31). The president of the American Tobacco Company (which manufactured Luckies), George Washington Hill, used the show as an experimental ground for what at the time was a controversial method of advertising. From the cigarette’s introduction in 1917, Hill relentlessly promoted the brand with ingenious (but nauseatingly repetitious) slogans and gimmicks like “It’s toasted” and “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” (a sentiment that did not endear him to the candy industry).

Hill’s revolutionary advertising methods reached their apex on Your Hit Parade with what he liked to call the “triphammer commercial.” I don’t think I’m alone in arguing that the method was more “sledgehammer” than “triphammer”; the commercials featured a pair of chanting tobacco auctioneers—L.A. “Speed” Riggs (from Goldsboro, NC) and F.E. Boone (of Lexington, KY)—hawking Lucky Strike’s wares with the grating repetition of “Sol-l-l-l-ld American!” and “L.S.M.F.T” (“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”). These irritating plugs also had the misfortune of being heard on Information, Please (series creator Dan Golenpaul finally had enough of Hill’s tactics and ended up parting company with the sponsor) and The Jack Benny Program (where the best commercials were always the parodies sung by the Sportsman Quartet). Legend has it that Hill’s iron-hand approach extended to Your Hit Parade’s music; the secretarial staff at the American Tobacco Company was encouraged to dance with one another in order to see how “danceable” the tunes were. If you’re curious, the 1947 MGM feature film The Hucksters has a thinly-disguised portrayal of Hill in the character of Evan Llewellyn Evans, played by the great character actor Sydney Greenstreet.

I checked out a December 18, 1943 broadcast of Your Hit Parade last night while at work, a show that featured the Chairman of the Board himself (performing from Philadelphia, of all places), Joan Edwards, the Hit Paraders and Mark Warnow and His Orchestra. The tunes that were ranked #4-9 were represented (including songs like People Will Day We’re in Love, Pistol Packin' Mama and They’re Either Too Young or Too Old), but #10 was missing and so were songs #1-#3. The big moment of suspense on Parade was always the countdown of the top three songs, so I can’t for the life of me figure out why the heck they weren’t on this broadcast. Either the show has been heavily edited from a 45-minute version (it runs about 31 minutes) or the top three tunes were chased off by those damn Lucky Strike commercials.

At the time of this broadcast, Lucky Strike was also sponsoring an offshoot program on Friday nights (beginning February 12, 1943) entitled Your All-Time Hit Parade—a show in a similar mold but concentrating more on “all-time” favorites mixed in with current song hits. Once again, the “triphammer commercial” reared its ugly head here as well—since the program was broadcast from Carnegie Hall, the mind-numbingly relentless slogan “The best tunes of all have moved to Carnegie Hall” was quickly dreamed up by Hill and his minions at A.T.C. The phrase was mercilessly lampooned on shows like Duffy’s Tavern and The Al Jolson Show (when Jolie finishes a rendition of April Showers, he asks regular Monty Woolley how he liked it and the irrepressible Woolley responds “It’s one of the best tunes of all, and I’d appreciate it if you’d move it to Carnegie Hall.”); but even that kind of free publicity couldn’t save the series, and it departed NBC on September 24, 1944.
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