What I watched: The Sunday, November 21, 1948 episode of The Original Amateur Hour, hosted by Ted Mack with his sidekick Dennis James. This episode’s guests included James Fields and Virginia Oswald. This episode aired on the DuMont Network at 7:00 PM and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: We open with a promotional spot for Old Gold cigarettes. The show itself opens with the Sewanhaka Rockettes, a chorus line. Following this, we get a long pitch for the concept of the program. Viewers are encouraged to call or mail in to vote for the act they like the best. The next act is James Fields, a blind singer from Harlem. Mack basically gets him to tell his life story, including growing up in North Carolina and selling peanuts after coming to New York alone. He sings a jazzy version of “The Sunny Side of the Street” with a lot of scatting, and even a little dancing.
The next amateur is Onni Laihanen from Finland, who plays five different instruments and talks slowly. He plays Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 on the accordion. James does a vaudeville singing routine where the performer changes roles by switching hats, which he parlays effortlessly into a cigarette commercial. This is followed by Jack Kurtzman, a mustachioed “musical bones” player from Brooklyn, who makes a tune by snapping two sticks together in each hand. He can even do it with his hands behind his back.
A greaser-esque delivery man gives a crooning performance of “Embraceable You.” Following this is a weird advertisement-esque salute to the city of Dayton, which I assume is the same kind of outreach to affiliate networks we see in some Kukla, Fran, and Ollie episodes. There’s even a letter from the Mayor of Dayton thanking the show. Following this is two very young musicians, both of whom were second place in previous weeks and are now competing together. The younger is on drums while the older one, who looks like the younger kid standing on another kid’s shoulders, plays trombone. The drummer is actually really good.
Jack runs down last week’s results. An operatic singer was first, and an acrobatic dancer who was once unable to walk came second. Guess it wasn’t all that impressive a story. Next up is Brooklyn singer Renee Arnold, who trained to be a dancer but gave it up. She sings “Manana, manana”, and seems to at least be having a lot of fun with it. Jack invites the viewers to apply, and shows the votes so far. James Fields is in first, with the Rockettes 2nd.
James Kenny, a tap dancer who works as a private detective, is next up. Jack has an extended conversation with him about his background, revealing that he used to be a professional fighter. Okay, I want a whole series about this guy. After him is Josephine Tomlin, a singer and typist. She plays piano and sings “Slender, Tender, and Tall.” He reads some dates for touring shows featuring past winners.
Jack Aaron, a draftsman, plays the musical saw, which creates an eerie, haunting sound. He is followed by the Interstate Quartet, whose gimmick is that they’re all from different states. They look kind of like a bowling team, complete with the numbered jackets. They sing the University of Wisconsin fight song. A bit of a narrow audience, there. The sidekick interrupts in a Yale sweater to segue into the next cigarette advertisement, interacting quite a bit with the quartet.
Ruth Allen is a solderer and a yodeler’s daughter who plays a folk-y song n the guitar, with a few yodels of her own. I instantly have a crush. Mack relates some calls he’s received, including a gig offer for Josephine and a $50 donation to buy James a seeing eye dog. The following act is Morty Duffy, a comedian doing a impression of his favourite comedian, Danny Kay. The reference is a bit lost on me, but the routine is pretty fun, similar to Sid Ceasar’s imitations of movies.
The episode concludes with a “graduate guest”, a former contestant who has gone on o success. This week it’s Virginia Oswald, who starred in the Broadway productions of Oklahoma! and Brigadoon. Virginia thanks Ted for the opportunity, and plugs her current production Small Wonders. She provides a rather operatic treatment of two songs, including “Summertime.” We get a run-down of he final votes, with Fields way out in front, and the young duo in second.
What I thought: The Original Amateur Hour was a staple of broadcasting for three decades. The series started out on radio in 1934, when i was hosted by Major Edward Bowes. The host we see on TV, Ted Mack, was his assistant who took over in 1945. It made the transition to TV in 1948, and would remain there until 1970. The show had a simple, endlessly repeatable formula: invite undiscovered talent to come and do their thing, in a very loose competitive format. This is also the first show we’ve seen to use audience in the form of call-ins, something that seems fairly well-implemented.
I generally enjoyed watching this show. Like What’s My Line, it’s kind of a fascinating survey of the lives regular people were leading at the time. The short interviews that Mack does before the performances are often more interesting than the acts themselves. We get whole story arcs in the brief appearances of the singer who turned into a dancer, or the yodeler’s daughter who continued her father’s art.
This is best exemplified through the appearance of James Fields. His story of migrating from the South and living on the street as a blind Black man is so much rawer and realer than almost anything else on television at the time, and the show doesn’t seem quite prepared for it. Ultimately, Fields gives a great performance, and is the runaway winner of the week’s voting. (It’s also nice that there are multiple Black performers on this episode, going even beyond the more progressive variety shows of the era.)
Fields’ story is the type of thing that The Original Amateur Hour’s descendants, reality shows like American Idol and America’s Got Talent constantly strive to engineer. For some reason, though, Fields’ suffering and triumph feel more genuine than the sob-story video packages on modern talent shows. Maybe it’s because not everyone has one, or maybe it’s because the series doesn’t really harp on the idea that successful performers will be big stars. The visit from Virginia Oswald is meant to show that the rise to fame (or fame-ish) can happen, but for the most part the victory here is performers getting gigs they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, not becoming celebrities.
There’s apparently a considerable archive of The Original Amateur Hour in the Library of Congress, but I could only find a few episodes online, scattered from throughout the series’ run. Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t have to find something new to say about hundreds of episodes, but I found his episode really charming in an unpolished way, and it’s something I could easily see becoming a weekly habit. For many millions of Americans, mostly older adults, it was.
Coming up next: Arturo Toscanini returns to conduct some Brahms.
The Eternal Couch Potato 