Amos 'n' Andy
Amos 'n' Andy is an American radio sitcom about black characters, initially set in Chicago then later in the Harlem section of New York City. While the show had a brief life on 1950s television with black actors, the 1928 to 1960 radio show was created, written and voiced by two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who played Amos Jones, Andrew Hogg Brown, and George "Kingfish" Stevens as well as incidental characters. On television from 1951 to 1953, black actors took over the majority of the roles; white characters were infrequent.
Amos 'n' Andy began as one of the first radio comedy series and originated from station WMAQ in Chicago. After the first broadcast in 1928, the show became a hugely popular series, first on NBC Radio and later on CBS Radio and Television. Later episodes were broadcast from the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, California. The show ran as a nightly radio serial, as a weekly situation comedy and as a nightly disc-jockey program. A television adaptation ran on CBS and continued in syndicated reruns. It was not shown to a nationwide audience again until 2012.
Origins
Gosden and Correll were white actors familiar with minstrel traditions. They met in Durham, North Carolina in 1920. Both men had some scattered experience in radio, but it was not until 1925 that the two appeared on Chicago's WQJ. Their appearances soon led to a regular schedule on another Chicago radio station, WEBH, where their only compensation was a free meal. The pair hoped that the radio exposure would lead to stage work; they sold some of their scripts to local bandleader Paul Ash, which led to jobs at the Chicago Tribune station WGN in 1925. This lucrative offer enabled them to become full-time broadcasters. The Victor Talking Machine Company also offered them a recording contract.Since the Tribune syndicated Sidney Smith's popular comic strip The Gumps, which had successfully introduced the concept of daily continuity, WGN executive Ben McCanna thought a serialized version would work on radio. He suggested that Gosden and Correll adapt The Gumps for radio. The idea seemed to involve more risk than either Gosden or Correll was willing to take; neither was adept at imitating female voices, which would have been necessary for The Gumps. They were also conscious of having made names for themselves with their previous act. By playing the roles of characters using minstrel dialect, they would be able to conceal their identities enough to be able to return to their old pattern of entertaining if the radio show proved to be a failure.
Instead, they proposed a series about "a couple of colored characters" that borrowed certain elements from The Gumps. Their new show, Sam 'n' Henry, began on January 12, 1926 and fascinated radio listeners throughout the Midwestern United States. It became so popular that in 1927 Gosden and Correll requested that it be distributed to other stations on phonograph records in a "chainless chain" concept that would have been the first radio syndication. When WGN rejected the proposal, Gosden and Correll quit the show and the station; their last musical program for WGN was announced in the Chicago Daily Tribune on January 29, 1928. Episodes of Sam 'n' Henry continued to air until July 14, 1928. Correll's and Gosden's characters contractually belonged to WGN, so the pair was unable to use the characters' names when performing in personal appearances after leaving the station.
WMAQ, the Chicago Daily News station, hired Gosden and Correll and their former WGN announcer Bill Hay to create a series similar to Sam 'n' Henry. It offered higher salaries than WGN as well as the right to pursue the syndication idea. The creators later said that they named the characters Amos and Andy after hearing two elderly African-Americans greet each other by those names in a Chicago elevator. Amos 'n' Andy began on March 19, 1928 on WMAQ, and prior to airing each program, Gosden and Correll recorded their show on 78-rpm discs at Marsh Laboratories, operated by electrical recording pioneer Orlando R. Marsh. Early 1930s broadcasts of the show originated from the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, California.
For the program's entire run as a nightly series in its first decade, Gosden and Correll provided over 170 male voice characterizations. With the episodic drama and suspense heightened by cliffhanger endings, Amos 'n' Andy reached an ever-expanding radio audience. It was the first radio program to be distributed by syndication in the United States, and by the end of the syndicated run in August 1929, at least 70 other stations carried recorded episodes.
Early storylines and characters
Amos Jones and Andy Brown worked on a farm near Atlanta, Georgia, and during the first week's episodes, they made plans to find a better life in Chicago, despite warnings from a friend. With four ham-and-cheese sandwiches and $24, they bought train tickets and headed for Chicago, where they lived in a rooming house on State Street and experienced some rough times before launching their own business, the Fresh Air Taxi Company. By 1930, the noted toy maker Louis Marx and Company was offering a tin wind-up version of the auto, with Amos and Andy inside. The toy company produced a special autographed version of the toy as gifts for American leaders, including Herbert Hoover. There was also a book, All About Amos 'n' Andy and Their Creators, in 1929 by Correll and Gosden, and a comic strip syndicated by the Chicago Daily Press.Naïve but honest Amos was hardworking, and, after his marriage to Ruby Taylor in 1935, also a dedicated family man. Andy was a gullible dreamer with overinflated self-confidence who tended to let Amos do most of the work. Their Mystic Knights of the Sea lodge leader, George "Kingfish" Stevens, would often lure them into get-rich-quick schemes or trick them into some kind of trouble. Other characters included John Augustus "Brother" Crawford, an industrious but long-suffering family man; Henry Van Porter, a social-climbing real estate and insurance salesman; Frederick Montgomery Gwindell, a hard-charging newspaperman; Algonquin J. Calhoun, a somewhat crooked lawyer added to the series in 1949, six years after its conversion to a half-hour situation comedy; William Lewis Taylor, Ruby's well-spoken, college-educated father; and Willie "Lightning" Jefferson, a slow-moving Stepin Fetchit–type character.
There were three central characters: Correll voiced Andy Brown while Gosden voiced both Amos and the Kingfish. The majority of the scenes were dialogues between either Andy and Amos or Andy and Kingfish. Amos and Kingfish rarely appeared together. Since Correll and Gosden voiced virtually all of the parts, the female characters, such as Ruby Taylor, Kingfish's wife Sapphire, and Andy's various girlfriends, did not initially appear as voiced characters, but entered plots through discussions among the male characters. Prior to 1931, when Madame Queen took the witness stand in her breach-of-promise lawsuit against Andy, a feminine voice was heard only once. Beginning in 1935, actresses began voicing the female characters, and after the program converted to a weekly situation comedy in 1943, other actors were recruited for some of the supporting male roles. However, Correll and Gosden continued to voice the three central characters on radio until the series ended in 1960. Two black actresses continued their radio roles on the television series: Ernestine Wade, who played Sapphire, Kingfish's wife, and Amanda Randolph, who played her mother.
With the listening audience increasing in spring and summer 1928, the show's success prompted sponsor Pepsodent Company to bring it to the NBC Blue Network on August 19, 1929. With the Blue Network not heard on stations in the Western United States, many listeners complained to NBC that they wanted to hear the show but could not. Under a special arrangement, Amos 'n' Andy debuted coast-to-coast November 28, 1929, on NBC's Pacific Orange Network and continued on the Blue. WMAQ was then an affiliate of CBS and its general manager tried, to no avail, to interest that network in picking up the show. At the same time, the serial's central characters – Amos, Andy and Kingfish – relocated from Chicago to Harlem. The program was so popular by 1930 that NBC's orders were to only interrupt the broadcast for matters of national importance and SOS calls. Correll and Gosden were earning a combined salary of $100,000, which they split three ways to include announcer Bill Hay, who had been with them when they began in radio.
The story arc of Andy's romance with Harlem beautician Madame Queen entranced some 40 million listeners during 1930 and 1931, becoming a national phenomenon. Many of the program's plotlines in this period leaned far more to straight drama than comedy, including the near-death of Amos's fiancée Ruby from pneumonia in the spring of 1931 and Amos's brutal interrogation by police following the murder of cheap hoodlum Jack Dixon that December. Following official protests by the National Association of Chiefs of Police, Correll and Gosden were forced to abandon that storyline, turning the entire sequence into a bad dream, from which Amos gratefully awoke on Christmas Eve.
The innovations introduced by Gosden and Correll made their creation a turning point for radio drama, as noted by broadcast historian Elizabeth McLeod:
As a result of its extraordinary popularity, Amos 'n' Andy profoundly influenced the development of dramatic radio. Working alone in a small studio, Correll and Gosden created an intimate, understated acting style that differed sharply from the broad manner of stage actors – a technique requiring careful voice modulation, especially in the portrayal of multiple characters. The performers pioneered the technique for varying both the distance from, and the angle of their approach to, the microphone to create the illusion of a group of characters. Listeners could easily imagine that they were in the taxicab office, listening to the conversation of close friends. The result was a uniquely absorbing experience for listeners, who, in radio's short history, had never heard anything quite like Amos 'n' Andy.
While minstrel-styled wordplay humor was common in the formative years of the program, it was used less often as the series developed, giving way to a more sophisticated approach to characterization. Correll and Gosden were fascinated by human nature, and their approach to both comedy and drama was drawn from their observations of the traits and motivations that drive the actions of all people. While their characters often overlapped popular African-American stereotypes, there was also a universality to their characters which transcended race; beneath the dialect and racial imagery, the series celebrated the virtues of friendship, persistence, hard work, and common sense, and as the years passed and the characterizations were refined, Amos 'n' Andy achieved an emotional depth rivaled by few other radio programs of the 1930s.
Above all, Gosden and Correll were gifted dramatists. Their plots flowed gradually from one to the other, with minor subplots building in importance until they overtook the narrative, before receding to give way to the next major sequence; in this manner, seeds for storylines were often planted months in advance. This complex method of story construction kept the program fresh and enabled Correll and Gosden to keep their audiences in constant suspense. The technique that they developed for radio from that of the narrative comic strip endures as the standard method of storytelling in serial drama.
Only a few dozen episodes of the original series have survived in recorded form. However, numerous scripts from the original episodes have been discovered and were used by McLeod when preparing her previously cited 2005 book.
Amos 'n' Andy was officially transferred by NBC from the Blue Network to the Red Network in 1935, although the vast majority of stations carrying the show remained the same. Several months later, Gosden and Correll moved production of the show from NBC's Merchandise Mart studios in Chicago to Hollywood. After a long and successful run with Pepsodent, the program changed sponsors in 1938 to Campbell's Soup; because of Campbell's closer relationship with CBS, the series switched to that network on April 3, 1939.
In 1943, after 4,091 episodes, the radio program transformed from a 15-minute CBS weekday dramatic serial to an NBC half-hour weekly comedy. While the five-a-week show often had a quiet, easygoing feeling, the new version was a full-fledged sitcom in the Hollywood sense, with a regular studio audience and an orchestra. More outside actors, including many black comedy professionals, such as Eddie Green and James Baskett, were recruited for the cast. Many of the half-hour programs were written by Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, later the writing team behind Leave It to Beaver and The Munsters. In the new version, the Amos character became peripheral to the duo of Andy and Kingfish, although Amos was still featured in the traditional Christmas show, which also became a part of the later television series. The later radio program and the TV version were advanced for the time, depicting blacks in a variety of roles, including those of successful business owners and managers, professionals and public officials, in addition to the comic characters at the show's core.
By the fall of 1948, the show was airing on CBS again. In that same year, Correll and Gosden sold all rights to Amos 'n' Andy to CBS for a reported $2.5 million.