One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount

Murray Forman is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop and a coeditor, with Mark Anthony Neal, of That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader.

Acknowledgments xi Popular Music and the Small Screen Frontier: An Introduction 1 1. Music, Image, Labor: Television's Prehistory 17 2. "Hey TV!": Musical Pioneers and Pessimists 51 3. Harmonizing Genres 115 4. The Look of Music 169 5. Music in a "Sepia" Tone 231 6. Maracas, Congas, and Castanets 273 Conclusion: Rocking the TV Conventions 319 Appendix 341 Notes 343 Bibliography 363 Index 389

"One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount is an important contribution to the history of TV, popular music, and the relation between television and musical performance. It is clearly well researched, and it includes fascinating information and many delightful tidbits." Pamela Robertson Wojcik, author of The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 "One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount is an impressive industrial and cultural history of the dazzling range of musical performances and genres on early television. Filling a much-neglected area of television studies, Murray Forman focuses not only on network shows but also on regional productions and local stations. His discussion of raced representations provides important new insights into television history, as do his accounts of regional tastes, amateur shows, and the significance of stage settings and nightclub venues." Lynn Spigel, author of TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television "One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount will be the standard work on post-war U.S. music and television. Murray Forman gives us a full picture of cultural change in a key period of media transition. Reading his book, we witness the breakup of the big bands, the dismantling of the Hollywood system, the rise of network television, and the tense politics of race and ethnicity that marked popular American entertainment in the 1940s and 1950s." Will Straw, author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America