Monday, September 9, 2024

September 9, 2024: Classic TV Studying: Amos ‘n’ Andy

[This week marks the anniversaries of the premieres of two classic TV shows: the 50th anniversary of Little House on the Prairie and the 70th of Lassie. So I’ll AmericanStudy those and other classic TV shows and contexts, leading up to a special post on what we can learn from a couple current hits I finally got around to checking out this summer!]

On a strikingly different way the early sitcom could have gone, and why the difference matters.

By the time the television adaptation of Amos ‘n’ Andy premiered on CBS in June 1951, it had been a popular radio program for nearly a quarter-century. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the two white Vaudeville actors and radio hosts who had met in North Carolina in 1920, transitioned to work at Chicago’s WQJ radio station in 1925, and then created Amos ‘n’ Andy and its main characters in the late 1920s and been central to the program ever since, had been working since the mid-1940s on whether and how to transition the show to the emerging medium of TV. Apparently their working goal throughout those early years, and indeed per a December 1950 Pittsburgh Press article their plan when the show was in its initial production phase, was for the two of them to continue providing the voices of the characters (as they had throughout its radio run, and not just Amos and Andy; they provided as many as 170 different character voices), and for Black actors to be seen on screen but only to lip sync the parts.

Supposedly (per Melvin Patrick Ely’s excellent book The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon [2001]) Gosden and Correll recognized that they would not work as well as television actors (not least because their one attempt to bring the show to the big screen, the 1930 film Check and Double Check, had been an unmitigated flop that Gosden would later call “just about the worst movie ever”) but wanted to be paid more than the TV show’s Black performers, and since speaking lines make a part more substantive and thus higher-paying they devised this plan. But even without that overtly racist motivation, the lip syncing plan was a truly awful idea. At the very least, it would have made the show’s Black performers into quite literally minstrel show characters, stand-ins for the racist stereotypes created by white artists. It’s even possible to see Black actors in this plan as an inverted but just as gross form of the longstanding cultural tradition, in but also well beyond such minstrel shows, of Blackface performance.

Fortunately, Gosden and Correll’s plan did not come to pass, and when the show premiered in June 1951 it not only featured exclusively Black actors—including Alvin Childress as Amos, Spencer Williams as Andy, and the well-known Vaudeville comedian Tim Moore as their shady friend Kingfish—but they also spoke all the lines. The show only ran for two seasons (totaling 52 episodes), and was unquestionably controversial throughout that time, as illustrated by the NAACP’s 1951 publication “Why the Amos ‘n Andy TV Show Should Be Taken Off the Air.” But it also seems to have represented a positive influence for many African American viewers and communities, at least according to historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. who wrote in his 2012 American Heritage essay “Growing Up Colored” that “everybody loved Amos ‘n’ Andy—I don’t care what people say today. What was special to us was that their world was all colored, just like ours.” That would have technically still been true if the Black actors had only lip synced their lines, I suppose, but hearing their voices was of course part and parcel of their presence, and so I’m very glad that this early TV show went that way.

Next TV Studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other classic TV you’d analyze?

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