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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. It was first broadcast in March of 1928.
The characters were represented as African Americans, or more accurately blackface minstrel show caricatures of African Americans. Gosden and Correll were white actors who came up through the minstrel tradition. Godsden and Correll were highly skilled voice actors. In the early days of the program they played all the male character roles. Between the two, they voiced over 170 distinct characterizations in the show's first decade.
Today Amos & Andy is mostly remembered for its stereotypes of African Americans. However, most of the humor of the show came from silly situations, bad puns, and commentary on current events rather than racial mockery. In the early period of the show, there were dramatic overtones as well. While the depiction of African Americans in the show is racially offensive by today's standards, the characterizations were more sympathetic and rounded than that of most other shows of the 1920s, which continued to use the old minstrel show stereotypes of the 19th century and did not enjoy the success of Amos & Andy. It should also be noted that the program was the first (and, for many years, the only) on-the-air depiction of African-American small businessmen and the community in which they lived.
The most prominent immediate predecessor to Amos & Andy was the blackface act, the Two Black Crows, who did two-man comedy routines without dramatic elements in vaudevilleVaudeville is a style of theater, also known as variety which flourished in North America from the 1880s through the 1920s. Its popularity rose in step with the rise of industry and the growth of North American cities during this period, and declined with, film short s, and comedy record s.
The title characters, Amos Jones and Andrew H. "Andy" Brown, were depicted as being undereducated blacks from rural GeorgiaThis article is about Georgia the U. For alternative meanings, see: Georgia. Georgia ( In Detail) (Full size) State motto: Wisdom, Justice, Moderation ''State nickname: Peach State or Empire of the South Other U. States Capital Atlanta Largest City Atlant coming North to find work in the big city of Chicago (a format similar to Gosden and Correll's earlier show Sam & HenrySam & Henry (also rendered as Sam 'n' Henry was a radio show which aired in 1926 and 1927 by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. It is often considered to be the first situation comedy. In late 1925 radio actors Gosden and Correll had been approached abou). Amos was naive but honest, hard-working, and (after his marriage to Ruby Taylor in 1933Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s Years: 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 See also 1933 in aviation 1933 in film 1933 in literature 1933 in mu) a dedicated family man. Andy, blustering with overinflated self-confidence. After a lack of success finding work, they started the 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 FetchitStepin Fetchit ( May 30, 1902 November 19, 1985) (real name Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry was a comic character actor whose name has become synonymous with degrading racial stereotypes in Hollywood movies of the first half of the 20th century.-type character.
Amos & Andy was one of the earliest success stories of radio syndicationIn the entertainment and news industries, syndication is a method of making content available to a range of outlets simultaneously. Syndication is important in several different forms of mass media. In television syndication individual stations buy progra, and many stations besides WMAQ carried the program using prerecorded records. In August of 1929Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s Years: 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 See also 1929 in aviation 1929 in film 1929 in literature 1929 in mu Gosden & Correll moved the show to NBCSteff Geissbuhler. The feathers are said to represent the network's six divisions. NBC Universal Television is an American television network based in New York's Rockefeller Center. As of May 2004, it became part of NBC Universal. NBC supplies programming which offered them higher pay (the first NBC broadcast was on August 19). At the same time the storyline of Amos & 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 program was very popular. Sponsors over the years included Pepsodent toothpaste, Campbell's Soup, Rinso detergent, and the Rexall drugstore chain. President Calvin Coolidge was said to be among the devoted listeners. Huey P. Long took his nickname of "Kingfish" from one of the characters on the show. By 1931 an estimated 40 million Americans were regular listeners. Many movie theaters began the practice of stopping the films for the 15 minutes of the Amos 'n Andy show and playing the program over the sound system, then resuming the film.
In 1930, RKO brought Gosden and Correll to Hollywood to do an Amos & 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 Amos & Andy's creators, but turned a tidy profit for RKO. RKO offered Gosden and Correll a contract to do a sequel, which they declined. Years later Gosden was quoted as calling Check and Double Check "just about the worst movie ever".
(Godsden and Correll also posed for publicity pictures in blackface.)
In 1943, after 4,091 episodes, the radio program went from 15 minutes 5 days a week to a half-hour once a week format. 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 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, and 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 this 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.
A television version of Amos & Andy was produced from 1951 to 1953, with 78 episodes filmed. The tv show used African American actors in the main roles, although the actors were instructed to keep their character's voices and speech patterns as close to Gosden & Correll's as possible. 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 show taken out of production and removed from the air.
Meanwhile, the radio show had managed to escape the latter-day furor relatively unscathed. In 1955 the format of the radio show was changed to include playing recorded music in between skits, and the show renamed The Amos 'n' Andy Music Hall. The final Amos & Andy radio show was broadcast on November 25, 1960. Although by the 1950s the popularity of the show was well below its peak in the 1930s, Gosden and Correll had managed to outlast most of the radio shows that came in their wake.
In 1961, Gosden and Correll essentially made one last effort to bring to program to television, albeit in a "disguised" version. They were the voices in a prime time animated cartoon, Calvin and the Colonel, featuring anthropmorphic animals whose voices, and whose situations, were almost exactly those of Andy and The Kingfish. This effort at reviving the series in a way that was somehow supposed to be less racially offensive ended after one season.
In 1988, the Amos & Andy program was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame .
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