Amos 'n' Andy

Amos 'n' Andy was a situation comedy popular in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s. The show began as one of the first radio comedy serials, written and voiced by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll and originating from station WMAQ in Chicago, Illinois. After the series was first broadcast in March 1928, it grew in popularity. At its peak, it was heard six times a week by an audience of 40,000,000 listeners, one-third of the total U.S. population.

Amos 'n' Andy creators Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll were white actors familiar with minstrel traditions. They met in Durham, North Carolina, in 1920, and by the fall of 1925, they were performing nightly song-and-patter routines on the Chicago Tribune's station WGN. 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 the notion of a serialized drama could also work on radio. He suggested to Gosden and Correll that they adapt The Gumps to radio. They instead proposed a series about "a couple of colored characters," borrowed certain elements of The Gumps and their series Sam 'n' Henry began January, 1926, fascinating radio listeners throughout the Midwest. That series became popular enough that Gosden and Correll demanded in late 1927 that it be distributed to other stations on phonograph records in a "chainless chain" concept that would be the first use of radio syndication as we know it today; when WGN turned the idea down, Gosden and Correll quit the show and the station that December. Contractually, these characters belonged to WGN, so when Gosden and Correll left WGN, they performed in personal appearances but could not use the character names from the radio show.

WMAQ, the Chicago Daily News station, hired the team and their WGN announcer, Bill Hay, to create a series like Sam 'n' Henry, offering a higher salary than WGN and the rights to pursue the "chainless chain" syndication concept.

Characters

Amos Jones and Andy Brown worked on a farm near Atlanta, Georgia, and during the episodes of the first week, they began planning a move to Chicago, despite warnings from a friend. With four ham and cheese sandwiches and $24, they bought train tickets and headed for the Windy City where they did indeed have some rough times before launching their own business. Amos was naïve but honest, hard-working, and (after his 1933 marriage to Ruby Taylor) a dedicated family man. Andy was more blustering, with overinflated self-confidence. After a lack of success finding work in Chicago, they started their Fresh Air Taxi Company, although Andy, a dreamer, tended to let Amos do most of the work. Other regular characters included their lodge leader George "The Kingfish" Stevens, who was always trying to lure the title characters into get-rich-quick schemes, and "Lightning", a slow-moving Stepin Fetchit-type character. Kingfish's catchphrase "Holy mackerel!" quickly entered the American lexicon.

Radio

Amos 'n' Andy debuted on WMAQ in March 1928. In the early days of the program, Gosden and Correll portrayed all the male roles. Between the two, they voiced over 170 distinct characterizations in the show's first decade.

With the episodic drama and suspense heightened by cliffhanger endings, Amos 'n' Andy reached an ever-expanding radio audience. It was one of the earliest success stories of radio syndication, and at least 70 stations besides WMAQ carried the program using prerecorded records. In August 1929, the serial moved onto the Blue Network of NBC while continuing to originate over WMAQ, otherwise a CBS affiliate at the time. The NBC connection offered them higher pay and an ongoing sponsorship by Pepsodent. The first NBC broadcast was on August 19, 1929. At the same time. the storyline of Amos 'n' Andy had the title characters move from Chicago to Harlem, New York City, where they were soon joined by the rest of the regular characters. The story arc of Andy's romance (and subsequent problems) with the Harlem beautician Madame Queen entranced some 40,000,000 listeners during 1930 and 1931.

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 in April 1939.

In 1943, after 4,091 episodes, the radio program went 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 (for the first time in the show's history) and orchestra. More outside actors, including many African American comedy professionals, were brought in to fill out 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, Amos became a peripheral character to the more dominant Andy and Kingfish duo, although Amos was still featured in the traditional Christmas show where he explains the Lord's Prayer to his daughter.

Controversy

While the depiction of African Americans in the sitcom version of the show is regarded as racially offensive by today's standards, the characterizations on the daily serial version were actually much more sympathetic and rounded than that of other shows of the 1930s, which perpetuated 19th-century minstrel show stereotypes and did not equal the immense success of Amos 'n' Andy. Prominent were the blackface act, the Two Black Crows, who did two-man comedy routines in vaudeville, short subjects and comedy records, and minstrel headliner Emmett Miller, who recorded a series of popular songs for Okeh Records in the late 1920s.

Film

In 1930, RKO brought Gosden and Correll to Hollywood to do an Amos and Andy motion picture. This was entitled Check and Double Check (a catch phrase from the radio show). The cast included a mix of white and black performers (the latter including Duke Ellington and his orchestra) with Gosden and Correll disconcertingly playing Amos and Andy in blackface. The film pleased neither critics nor Gosden or Correll themselves, but became RKO's biggest box office hit prior to King Kong. RKO offered Gosden and Correll a contract to do a sequel, which they declined (although they did lend their voices to a pair of Amos 'n' Andy cartoon shorts in 1934: The Rasslin' Match and The Lion Tamer). Years later Gosden was quoted as calling Check and Double Check "just about the worst movie ever." Gosden and Correll also posed for publicity pictures in blackface.

Television

Adapted to television, The Amos 'n Andy Show, was produced from 1951 to 1953, with 78 filmed episodes. The TV series used African American actors in the main roles, although the actors were instructed to keep their voices and speech patterns as close to Gosden and Correll's as possible. Produced at the Hal Roach Studios for CBS, it was one of the first television series to be filmed with a multicamera setup, four months before the more famous I Love Lucy used the technique. The classic theme song is "Angels' Serenade".

The main roles in the television series were played by the following African-American actors:

Amos Jones - Alvin Childress
Andrew Hogg Brown (Andy) - Spencer Williams (actor)
George "Kingfish" Stevens - Tim Moore (comedian)
Sapphire Stevens - Ernestine Wade
Ramona Smith (Sapphire's Mama) - Amanda Randolph
Madame Queen - Lillian Randolph
Algonquin J. Calhoun - Johnny Lee
Lightin' - Horace Stewart (aka, Nick O'Demus)

While African American advocacy groups had protested the radio show on several occasions, progressive groups such as the NAACP were a primary factor in getting the TV series cancelled. The show was repeated in syndicated reruns until 1966 when CBS acquiesced to pressure from the NAACP and the growing civil rights movement and withdrew the program. Until recently, the television show has only been released on videotape in bootleg versions, but by 2005, 71 of the 78 known TV episodes are available in DVD sets.

Later years

In 1955 the format of the radio show was changed to include playing recorded music in between skits, and the show was renamed The Amos 'n' Andy Music Hall. The final Amos 'n' Andy radio show was broadcast on November 25, 1960. Although by the 1950s the popularity of the show was well below its peak of the 1930s, Gosden and Correll had managed to outlast most of the radio shows that came in their wake.

In 1961, Gosden and Correll attempted one last televised effort, albeit in a "disguised" version. They were the voices in a prime time animated cartoon, Calvin and the Colonel, featuring anthropomorphic animals whose voices and situations were almost exactly those of Andy and the Kingfish. This effort at reviving the series in a way that was intended to be less racially offensive ended after one season on ABC, although it remained quite popular in syndicated reruns in Australia for several years afterwards.

In 1988, the Amos 'n' Andy program was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. Maine broadcast historian Elizabeth McLeod examined thousands of radio script pages in order to write her authoritative 223-page study, The Original Amos 'n' Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll and the 1928-1943 Radio Serial, published in 2005 by McFarland.

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