Many years ago I played the Spike Jones recording of "The Tennessee Waltz" on my deejay show in Flint, Michigan. It featured a wildly exaggerated, stereotypical Yiddish Dialect by Sarah Berner, whose list of radio, film, TV and record credits is one of the longest I've seen. I thought it was hilarious, and so did all those who made it a best seller. I got a long letter from a very offended listener who wanted me to apologize and break the record. Did Berner ever wish she had not made the record?
Mickey Katz, who worked with Spike Jones on "Cocktails for Two" specialized in broken Yiddish-English material. And Fannie Brice used a pretty heavy dialect in her early recordings.
Listening to some old Jack Benny shows with Artie Auerbach's "Mr. Kitzel" character, I wonder if some listeners were offended at the time or they are now if they hear the old shows. Would that character play today?
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Old Age Test: Berlin and Greenwood
You know you're old when you ask a guy in his 50s if he knows anything about Irving Berlin and Kate Smith and he says they are dead people that his grandparents talk about. You know it's time to call the undertaker when you read that Lee Greenwood wrote "the greatest patriotic song of the century." I read someplace that Greenwood said God Bless America is too old fashioned and the new generation needed a song they can relate to. What sends me into a major depression is that he's probably right.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
High Ideals for Flint's Rebirth
WMRP, FLINT, MICHIGAN, 1950, where my less than spectacular almost 50 years in radio started. Was I cute, or what? That station no longer exists. Most of the stations I worked at are long gone. I don't think I killed them. Things changed. Flint is still there,more or less, its once great auto factories all gone.
Like Detroit, Flint is in deep trouble. But there's a creative write-in mayoral candidate who has it all figured out. Ronald Higgerson proposes to turn the recently closed Flint Central High School building into a big plant. I use "plant" advisedly. The particular plant is marijuana. That's right, If Higgerson gets the votes, good old Flint Central will become a big medical marijuana growing factory, employing hundreds, pulling Flint out of its doldrums and presumably making its clients feel real good. I learned of this through Gordon Young's great site of interest to us who lived and worked in Flint in better days. Flint Expatriates.
Does Michael Moore know about this?
Friday, June 26, 2009
Ethel and me
Let me see now, how can I relate this one about my mid-sixties interview with Ethel Waters, the first Black superstar, to early radio history. You oughta know that I have an ace in the hole.
Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear and Jazz Age Evangelism. It's the Roaring Twenties and a fiery preacher, Paul Rader, is sermonizing on the air from a wooden building atop the Chicago city Hall, beginning what will become the electronic church. He will later become the pastor of the historic Moody Memorial Church, named for Dwight L. Moody. After that he is a high powered entrepreneur of evangelism, building big Christian campgrounds and tabernacles that attract thousands. The biggest and best is the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle. Of special interest to historians of early religious radio, Paul Rader preached for three months at the Angelus Temple of the most colorful of evangelists, Aimee Semple McPherson, during her strange and still questioned disappearance. I'm still working on a post about her.
In the late twenties, Rader journeys across Lake Michigan to Muskegon, my town, and buys 200 acres on the big Lake where he builds Camp Chi-Co-Tab, named for his Chicago Tabernacle. By 1936 the facility was sold and became Maranatha Bible and Missionary Conference.
By the mid '60s, after getting canned from Grand Rapids station WMAX, I was in Muskegon at an Evangelical Christian station, WKJR.
Ethel Waters, then in her 70s and not in good health, was here for an appearance at Maranatha. My interview has not been preserved but I'm sure it was mostly about her personal story and her commitment to her religious work, including her appearances in the Billy Graham Crusades. I don't recall if I asked her what she thought of the "Cabin in the sky" film from twenty years earlier. She continued to sing the title song, along with her beloved signature song, "His eye is on the Sparrow," also the title of her autobiography, throughout her lifetime. She sang "Sparrow" with young Brandon De Wilde and Julie Harris in the 1952 film, "Member of the Wedding." Here is a You Tube of it. If it doesn't make you blubber or at least get all misty, you're not as sentimental as this silly old blogger. The film did not get great reviews, with complaints that Julie Harris was too old to play a 12 year old. Who cares. I love what I love and I don't care if nobody else loves it.
Ethel Waters lived until 1977, so she certainly experienced the civil rights movement but I don't know if she spoke of it.
Update July 1: I found Ethel's Lp on the Word label that I thought I had sold when I was all hot to restore the antique radio. "Just a little talk with Ethel." There's a brief talk track, recorded at her home not long before she died, before each song. Now I must find a thrift store record player so I can listen to it. Thank goodness I didn't get totally stupid and let that one go when I sold off my precious junk.
One biographer wrote that Ethel Waters "got religion," a demeaning phrase that I don't like very much. There have certainly been questionable "conversions" by the famous and not-so=famous. I have doubts about Hustler Magazine's Larry Flynt and I will reserve judgment on Jane Fonda and for Bettie Page, who also worked with Billy Graham. But for Ethel Waters it was a genuine and deep commitment to a faith that she believed and practiced for the rest of her life.
Ethel Waters kissed me on the cheek after that interview. Looking back at almost 50 years in the wacky, wildly unstable radio business, that memory makes it all worthwhile.
Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear and Jazz Age Evangelism. It's the Roaring Twenties and a fiery preacher, Paul Rader, is sermonizing on the air from a wooden building atop the Chicago city Hall, beginning what will become the electronic church. He will later become the pastor of the historic Moody Memorial Church, named for Dwight L. Moody. After that he is a high powered entrepreneur of evangelism, building big Christian campgrounds and tabernacles that attract thousands. The biggest and best is the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle. Of special interest to historians of early religious radio, Paul Rader preached for three months at the Angelus Temple of the most colorful of evangelists, Aimee Semple McPherson, during her strange and still questioned disappearance. I'm still working on a post about her.
In the late twenties, Rader journeys across Lake Michigan to Muskegon, my town, and buys 200 acres on the big Lake where he builds Camp Chi-Co-Tab, named for his Chicago Tabernacle. By 1936 the facility was sold and became Maranatha Bible and Missionary Conference.
By the mid '60s, after getting canned from Grand Rapids station WMAX, I was in Muskegon at an Evangelical Christian station, WKJR.
Ethel Waters, then in her 70s and not in good health, was here for an appearance at Maranatha. My interview has not been preserved but I'm sure it was mostly about her personal story and her commitment to her religious work, including her appearances in the Billy Graham Crusades. I don't recall if I asked her what she thought of the "Cabin in the sky" film from twenty years earlier. She continued to sing the title song, along with her beloved signature song, "His eye is on the Sparrow," also the title of her autobiography, throughout her lifetime. She sang "Sparrow" with young Brandon De Wilde and Julie Harris in the 1952 film, "Member of the Wedding." Here is a You Tube of it. If it doesn't make you blubber or at least get all misty, you're not as sentimental as this silly old blogger. The film did not get great reviews, with complaints that Julie Harris was too old to play a 12 year old. Who cares. I love what I love and I don't care if nobody else loves it. Ethel Waters lived until 1977, so she certainly experienced the civil rights movement but I don't know if she spoke of it.
Update July 1: I found Ethel's Lp on the Word label that I thought I had sold when I was all hot to restore the antique radio. "Just a little talk with Ethel." There's a brief talk track, recorded at her home not long before she died, before each song. Now I must find a thrift store record player so I can listen to it. Thank goodness I didn't get totally stupid and let that one go when I sold off my precious junk.
One biographer wrote that Ethel Waters "got religion," a demeaning phrase that I don't like very much. There have certainly been questionable "conversions" by the famous and not-so=famous. I have doubts about Hustler Magazine's Larry Flynt and I will reserve judgment on Jane Fonda and for Bettie Page, who also worked with Billy Graham. But for Ethel Waters it was a genuine and deep commitment to a faith that she believed and practiced for the rest of her life.
Ethel Waters kissed me on the cheek after that interview. Looking back at almost 50 years in the wacky, wildly unstable radio business, that memory makes it all worthwhile.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Bettie Page and Errol Flynn??
How about that for an unlikely pairing on the silver screen. But it might have happened if things had gone differently for the queen of the pin-up girls. Asked in an undated interview if there was anything she wished she had done, Ms. Page said she wanted to be a movie star but her marriage kept her from answering Jack Warner's offer of a screen test. She had failed an earlier test at 20th Century Fox. She said, "I would like to be in Errol Flynn's swashbucklers." There's a thought to wrap your mind around.
It's not easy being ...
Finish that title for yourself. What is it not easy being? Green like Kermit, my favorite frog, who decided he liked being what he is? Old? Young? Black? White? Male? Female? Gay? Straight? Etc. Etc Etc.
In the '30s and early '40s I was a White, country kid, laughing along with my father at the hilarious radio misadventures of Amos 'n' Andy. I suppose I knew, on some level, that the characters were played by White Men using what we might now call stereotypical Negro Dialect. At that time and place, that was beside the point. We laughed because it was funny. For those who came along 25 or more years after I did, racial stereotyping is the point, dwarfing whatever entertainment value the program offered at its time in history.
My ten year old African American Grandson loves the old, classic Disney and Warner Brothers Cartoons. They are full of racial and ethnic stereotypes and violence, with characters getting flattened and immediately springing back to life without so much as a scratch. Many of the DVDs in his huge collection include an apologetic disclaimer for the content that is deemed no longer acceptable. The boy has zero interest in that. Maybe that will change as he gets older. But for now, he laughs at those cartoons because they're funny. He found an old Muppets video that we watched last night. Kermit, Piggy and the whole crew that was hatched in the brilliant mind of Jim Henson did their version of the classic fairy tales. That show has taken some lumps from critics, too. My kids loved it and I couldn't be happier that the grandson does, too. I laugh myself silly every time Miss Piggy decks poor Kermie. My very favorite such pig-to-frog violence happens when Kermit serenades
Lydia the Tatooed Lady. That song was such a favorite of Henson's that it was performed at his memorial service.
In the '30s and early '40s I was a White, country kid, laughing along with my father at the hilarious radio misadventures of Amos 'n' Andy. I suppose I knew, on some level, that the characters were played by White Men using what we might now call stereotypical Negro Dialect. At that time and place, that was beside the point. We laughed because it was funny. For those who came along 25 or more years after I did, racial stereotyping is the point, dwarfing whatever entertainment value the program offered at its time in history.
My ten year old African American Grandson loves the old, classic Disney and Warner Brothers Cartoons. They are full of racial and ethnic stereotypes and violence, with characters getting flattened and immediately springing back to life without so much as a scratch. Many of the DVDs in his huge collection include an apologetic disclaimer for the content that is deemed no longer acceptable. The boy has zero interest in that. Maybe that will change as he gets older. But for now, he laughs at those cartoons because they're funny. He found an old Muppets video that we watched last night. Kermit, Piggy and the whole crew that was hatched in the brilliant mind of Jim Henson did their version of the classic fairy tales. That show has taken some lumps from critics, too. My kids loved it and I couldn't be happier that the grandson does, too. I laugh myself silly every time Miss Piggy decks poor Kermie. My very favorite such pig-to-frog violence happens when Kermit serenades
Lydia the Tatooed Lady. That song was such a favorite of Henson's that it was performed at his memorial service.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Jon and Kate ... How we relate
The world is blubbering over Jon and Kate's divorce. The network brass are jumping up and down almost as high as the ratings that went through the roof. Frustrated women are saying to bewildered spouses, "See? That's where we're headed, but we could fix it if you would just talk to me." Bewildered spouses are thinking, "If I spill my guts will I be in bigger trouble than I already am?" The great marital impasse.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Ethel on a VCR
I am about to watch that wonderful Ethel Waters film, "Cabin in the Sky" again. One of my thrift store VCRs recorded it for me while I was away. Yes, I actually enjoy the challenge of programming those primitive machines. I wonder how many of the young pups who are so quick at texting and tweeting could do that.
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