Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

The third rail of old-time radio

Having recently performed a favor for Charlie Summers—moderator of the Old-Time Radio Digest and resident curmudgeon at Nostalgic Rumblings—by sending him some OTR-related printed material in which I thought he would be interested, he reciprocated in kind by mailing me a pair of homemade DVD’s.  One of these discs was a copy of Smashing the Money Ring (1939), a B-programmer (one in a series of four) that stars Ronald Reagan as Secret Service Agent Brass Bancroft and how he attempts to foil a group of counterfeiters ballsy enough to operate out of a federal prison.  As a rule, the future POTUS’ film appearances aren’t my cup o’tea, but I did enjoy this quickie because Margot Stevenson (a one-time Margo Lane on radio’s The Shadow) played the female lead.  (Charlie also threw in as a bonus a pair of MGM Pete Smith Specialties to boot.)

The other movie was a pristine copy of Check and Double Check (1930), and when I say pristine, I’m referring to the film itself and not its content.  The movie—which ended up being RKO’s top box-office grosser that year—was produced to cash in on the phenomenal success of radio’s Amos ‘n’ Andy, and because I had never seen it I put it on for its historical/curio value.  It’s not a movie I’ll need to watch again—actors performing in blackface tend me to make me wince (Will Rogers, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and Buster Keaton are just a few of my favorite performers who did so in less enlightened times), and apart from a great musical number by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra the movie has no other redeeming value whatsoever.  The plot is non-existent, the script is devoid of humor and the film itself seems longer than its running time of seventy-five minutes.

I’ve mentioned Amos ‘n’ Andy in passing here on the blog, but I’ve always been hesitant to delve deeper into the show because…well, I think the title of this post will explain why I’ve always been reluctant to open that can of worms.  You can’t deny that Amos ‘n’ Andy was one of the most popular programs in radio’s history—and also one of the its most controversial.  Its tenure on the air spanned the entirety of Radio’s Golden Age from 1928 to 1960 until—as Gerald Nachman puts it in Raised on Radio—“the civil rights movement overtook its innocent world and finally put Amos Jones and Andrew H. Brown out of the taxicab business after thirty-two years.”

The origins of Amos ‘n’ Andy begin with Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, a pair of small-time vaudevillians who—at the suggestion of a friend—decided to try their luck in the newfangled medium of radio.  Stints at several small stations gradually led to a lucrative gig at Chicago’s WGN, where the management (the station was owned and operated by The Chicago Tribune) asked them to do a radio version of their popular comic strip The Gumps.  The two men were able instead to persuade the newspaper to let them do an original comedy serial about two luckless but lovable black guys struggling to make a living in the big city.  The result was Sam ‘n’ Henry, which ran for a total of 586 episodes from January 12, 1926 to December 18, 1927.  Gosden and Correll came to a parting of the ways with WGN when their benefactor balked at their idea to record their program in advance and distribute it to other individual stations (an early form of syndication the two men dubbed a “chainless chain”)—forcing the duo to relocate the show to rival station WMAQ.  Since WGN owned the title of Sam ‘n’ Henry, Gosden and Correll changed the program’s name to the more alliterative Amos ‘n’ Andy; the program debuted on March 19, 1928, and a year-and-a-half later, it went nationwide over NBC Blue on August 19, 1929 for Pepsodent toothpaste.

Amos ‘n’ Andy showcased the continuing saga of Amos Jones (Gosden) and Andrew H. Brown (Correll), and like its WGN predecessor it focused on two black men who operated their own taxicab business (since their rattletrap jalopy had no top, their concern was called the “Fresh Air Taxi” Company) after migrating to Chicago from the Deep South.  (The locale eventually shifted to New York's Harlem community when the program went national over NBC.)  Amos was the “Gallant” of the team; a hard-working and upright family man of impeccable character—Andy was his less-motivated “Goofus” counterpart who considered himself the “brains” of the business and was more often than not on the lookout for a get-rich-quick scheme.  The comedy serial focused on the difficulties of the two men to make ends meet during the economically turbulent times of Depression-era America, and Gosden and Correll functioned as a two-men operation—writing every one of the show’s quarter-hour episodes and performing practically all of the characters which numbered nearly 150 by 1935.

To use an expression often associated with today’s popular television programs, Amos ‘n’ Andy was the “watercooler” show of its day.  When it was on the air, phones would go dead and water flow activity dropped dramatically—movie theaters even arranged to have the broadcast piped in during film showers, stopping the feature in progress.  It has been speculated that a person could take a walk around his or her neighborhood on a warm spring evening and never miss a word of the program—every window would be open and every radio tuned to the broadcast.  Amos ‘n’ Andy demonstrated that radio as a medium could be both commercially viable and an alternate means of entertainment that could compete with movies and vaudeville.  Audiences became slavishly devoted to the program’s storylines—waiting on tenterhooks to learn if Amos would be convicted of murder (he wasn’t, by the way; the events ended up being an early version of “it was all a dream” device) or if Andy would end up being manacled in holy matrimony to the unforgettable Madame Queen.

Amos ‘n’ Andy introduced a colorful cast of memorable characters, some of which (like Sylvester and Brother Crawford) had a short shelf-life and others that managed to stick around for the series’ entire run.  The most famous of these was George Stevens—who was known as “the Kingfish” since he headed up The Mystic Knights of the Sea Lodge, a fraternal organization to which Amos and Andy belonged.  Kingfish was the show’s resident con man; a glib, fast-talking hustler whose bravado and gift of gab inspired real-life Louisiana governor Huey Long to appropriate the character’s nickname.  Other participants in Amos ‘n’ Andy’s world included the snobbish Henry Van Porter, Lightnin’ (the lodge hall’s janitor), newspaperman Fred Gwindell and lawyer Gabby Gibson.  In the show’s early years, female characters were usually referred to off-mike—but with the passage of time, they were eventually brought forth front and center and included Ruby Taylor (Amos’ girlfriend and eventual spouse, portrayed by Elinor Harriot) and Sapphire Stevens (Kingfish’s battleaxe of a wife, played by black actress Ernestine Wade).

Amos ‘n’ Andy’s audience began to wane by the mid 1930s, and longtime sponsor Pepsodent soon relinquished the bill-paying duties to Campbell Soup in 1938.  A year later, the show jumped networks to CBS (April 3, 1939), but the move failed to reverse its steady decline in the ratings.  Gosden and Correll voluntarily took the program off the air in February 1943, and returned in the fall with a revamped, slicker version—a half-hour situation comedy performed in front of a live audience, featuring a new sponsor (Rinso detergent) and a full orchestra and chorus.  The duo also handed over the writing chores to a team of professional comedy writers—headed up by Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, who would not only be in charge of Amos ‘n’ Andy’s futures on the television version but also laid claim to Leave It to Beaver and The Munsters as well.  The program’s serialized plots gave way to a self-contained story each week—sadly, most of these plots reverted to a cookie-cutter formula usually centering on Kingfish’s getting Andy involved in some sort of ethically-challenged swindle or scheme.  The Kingfish character became so prevalent that he gradually squeezed Amos out of the program’s proceedings, relegating him to walk-on parts on the show with his name in the title.  (Nachman observes that this ploy was Kingfish’s “ultimate con job.”)  Formula or not, Amos ‘n’ Andy returned to a lofty position in the Hooper ratings, running on NBC for five years before a celebrated move to CBS in 1948—part of chairman William Paley’s “talent raids.”

Even during its radio heyday, Amos ‘n’ Andy served as a lightning rod for controversy, seeing as how the main and subsidiary characters were voiced by two white actors performing in black dialect.  Gosden and Correll tried to blunt this criticism by hiring black actors, including Wade, Duffy’s Tavern’s Eddie Green (who played one of my favorite characters, Stonewall the lawyer), James Baskett, Johnny Lee, Roy Glenn and Jester Hairston.  But while the radio show certainly had its share of detractors, it couldn’t compare to the uproar that resulted when it made the inevitable leap to television.  Gosden and Correll had originally considered playing the main characters themselves (an idea that was wisely dropped) but instead decided to hire an all-black cast that included Alvin Childress (Amos), Spencer Williams (Andy) and vaudeville veteran Tim Moore (who made a perfect Kingfish).  (Johnny Lee, who played shyster lawyer Algonquin J. Calhoun, reprised his radio role on the TV version, as did Wade as Sapphire Stevens, Amanda Randolph as Mama and Lillian Randolph as Madame Queen.)  The TV version was a ratings smash when it debuted June 28, 1951, but pressure from the NAACP and other groups forced the show to fold up its tent two years later (Blatz Beer, the show’s sponsor, pulled out—giving CBS a excuse to give the show the axe).  Unfortunately for the program’s critics, the show became an even bigger hit in syndication, and remained so until 1966 when CBS withdrew the series permanently.  Gosden and Correll would resurface in 1961 with an animated version of Amos ‘n’ Andy entitled Calvin and the Colonel—which used cartoon animals with the same voices of Andy and the Kingfish.  Strangely enough, the radio show continued on during the TV controversy—the half-hour situation comedy wouldn’t leave the airwaves until May 22, 1955, and Amos ‘n’ Andy managed to chug on in another incarnation entitled The Amos ‘n’ Andy Music Hall, a weekday comedy-disc jockey program that was heard on CBS from September 13, 1954 to November 25, 1960.

Today, Amos ‘n’ Andy continues to have both its admirers and detractors; comedian Redd Foxx was a champion of the program (his hit television sitcom Sanford & Son was in many ways an updated version of A&A) and even D.L. Hughley expressed admiration for the show on a recent edition of Real Life With Bill Maher (though I’m pretty certain he was probably praising the TV show and not the 1930 RKO release).  Other comedians, like Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor (who labeled A&A “an outrage”) expressed dissenting opinions.  I sort of drift toward Foxx’s view of the program—convinced by Gerald Nachman’s chapter (“A Voice of Another Color”) in Raised on Radio and the work of OTR historian Elizabeth McLeod.  Elizabeth’s life-long work on the history of Amos ‘n’ Andy (she will forget more about the show than I’ll ever learn) has not only produced the definitive website but will generate a must-read next year by publisher McFarland Books: The Original Amos ‘n’ Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll, and the 1928-43 Serial.  (Many individuals in the OTR community have tried to gently nudge Liz into writing a book of this sort for many years now, and it goes without saying that its arrival is being much anticipated by OTR buffs.)

- Posted by Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. - 9:21:21 PM - comment []

Don't feel much like writing today...

I'm still pretty bummed about the election, so I have nothing esoterically witty to offer up today.  I did manage to finish an essay on what I like to call "the third rail of old-time radio" which I will try to post here later on this evening but for the time being, I need a little extra time to brood.

In the meantime, I Love Lucy fans might enjoy taking a peek at what the third season DVD box set will look like, and fans of B-Westerns should check out Bill Crider's post on Dixie Cup lids.

My copy of Looney Tunes: The Golden Collection Volume 2 came in yesterday's mail--perhaps that might put me in a more jovial mood.

- Posted by Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. - 10:40:37 AM - comment []