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Fans of OTR will surely be familiar with the Amos & Andy radio shows. They were so extraordinarily popular and woven into the fabric of the lives of legions of Americans that everything stopped when the show was scheduled to air. Restaurant conversations halted; even the motion picture houses stopped the film long enough to air Amos & Andy for the audience (or risk having patrons just stay home so as not to miss the broadcast).
I've been reading an excellent book. The Original Amos 'n' Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll And The 1928-1943 Radio Serial. The author, Elizabeth McLeod, has produced a deft and scholarly look at a bit of radio history that was in great danger of being lost forever.
The radio show went beyond those years, but it is the early episodes (thousands) that warrant the attention of this book. What I found fascinating is that, while the Amos & Andy series is often regarded in modern commentary as patently racist and a propagation of stereotypes, the creators of the two characters, Gosden and Correll, took great pains to achieve just the opposite. The author addresses this early on and powerfully. Both Amos and Andy were treated as real people and given multi-layered story lines and and dignified treatment. They could easily have bent to sponsor pressure and allowed the characters to become silly minstrels doing gag lines. Instead, the programs followed the two as their own lives followed the pattern of many African-Americans of the time: migration from the southern US to Chicago in search of work, and from there to New York. They fell in love, got taken by slicksters, felt hunger, pain, and joy, got and lost work, cried at loss, and expressed it all through amazingly real story lines that hooked a generation of listeners. Astonishingly, Gosden and Correll voiced virtually all of the shows dozens of characters!
Amos & Andy received wheelbarrows full of not just fan mail, but objects that had to do with the story line of the shows, attesting to the way listeners thought of them - as real individuals about whom they came to care.
Sadly, none of the early, and if this book is to believed (and it is), best, original broadcasts remain in audio form, only the scripts survive. Ms. McLeod has done obvious, painstaking, laborious research, including the transcriptions of the early scripts.
The result is a truly excellent, well-executed telling of a fascinating story. She has accomplished something very difficult for a writer: she has presented in a very immediate and attention-keeping way what is actually a quite scholarly narrative. Her affection for the material is obvious and it is hard to imagine this book would have been as deliciously readable if that were not the case.
This is by our own LizzieMaine. I hope you will find a copy and read it. An excellent history of Old Time Radio.
The Original Amos 'n' Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll And The 1928-1943 Radio Serial
I've been reading an excellent book. The Original Amos 'n' Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll And The 1928-1943 Radio Serial. The author, Elizabeth McLeod, has produced a deft and scholarly look at a bit of radio history that was in great danger of being lost forever.
The radio show went beyond those years, but it is the early episodes (thousands) that warrant the attention of this book. What I found fascinating is that, while the Amos & Andy series is often regarded in modern commentary as patently racist and a propagation of stereotypes, the creators of the two characters, Gosden and Correll, took great pains to achieve just the opposite. The author addresses this early on and powerfully. Both Amos and Andy were treated as real people and given multi-layered story lines and and dignified treatment. They could easily have bent to sponsor pressure and allowed the characters to become silly minstrels doing gag lines. Instead, the programs followed the two as their own lives followed the pattern of many African-Americans of the time: migration from the southern US to Chicago in search of work, and from there to New York. They fell in love, got taken by slicksters, felt hunger, pain, and joy, got and lost work, cried at loss, and expressed it all through amazingly real story lines that hooked a generation of listeners. Astonishingly, Gosden and Correll voiced virtually all of the shows dozens of characters!
Amos & Andy received wheelbarrows full of not just fan mail, but objects that had to do with the story line of the shows, attesting to the way listeners thought of them - as real individuals about whom they came to care.
Sadly, none of the early, and if this book is to believed (and it is), best, original broadcasts remain in audio form, only the scripts survive. Ms. McLeod has done obvious, painstaking, laborious research, including the transcriptions of the early scripts.
The result is a truly excellent, well-executed telling of a fascinating story. She has accomplished something very difficult for a writer: she has presented in a very immediate and attention-keeping way what is actually a quite scholarly narrative. Her affection for the material is obvious and it is hard to imagine this book would have been as deliciously readable if that were not the case.
This is by our own LizzieMaine. I hope you will find a copy and read it. An excellent history of Old Time Radio.
The Original Amos 'n' Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll And The 1928-1943 Radio Serial
