{"id":2801,"date":"2005-04-21T19:13:26","date_gmt":"2005-04-21T23:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/04\/21\/2801.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:50:01","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:50:01","slug":"your-hit-parade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/04\/21\/your-hit-parade\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Hit Parade"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger happened to be listening to All Things Considered<\/a> t’other day, and I heard a twelve-minute piece by John McDonough called “A Look Back at ‘Your Hit Parade’<\/a>”. The piece focused on what killed the show, rather than (as you might expect) on what kept the show alive for more than twenty years. Mr. McDonough identifies two trends which he seems to muddle with each other, both of which are highly dubious, and he misses two things which seem obvious to me and which seem to have been far more likely to bring about the ultimate demise of Your Hit Parade.\n\n

I should start, as Mr. McDonough appropriately did, by pointing out the distinction of Your Hit Parade, which is that the songs were performed anew each week by the Hit Parade orchestra and singers, unlike Casey Kasem<\/a>’s later countdown show America’s Top 40<\/I>, which played popular recordings. There is a big difference between a show that highlights songs and one that highlights recordings. Another way of looking at it is that the cast of Your Hit Parade was simply not as successful as the cast of America’s Top 40, the latter of which was by definition the most successful recording artists of the time. So if we’re looking at what killed Your Hit Parade, the answer has got to answer the question of why Your Hit Parade died, but ten years later, America’s Top Forty flourished.\n

The first killer that Mr. McDonough identifies is the stylistic change from jazz and theater based songs to blues and rock, which he claims was a shift from writing to performance. “The blues was either a performance or it was nothing at all.” Unlike the previous two decades, he claims, the songs that became popular were associated with their writers, and with a particular performance. “It [rock and roll] was a place where authenticity was valued over artifice, where singers would become their own songwriters and vice versa, where only the author would have the authority to render the authentic version, where the performance would become the central product and the song, accessory or worse [a statement?].” I have no idea what he’s talking about, and it’s not just that I can’t make out the last word in the sentence. In 1959, when Your Hit Parade was cancelled for the last time, Bob Dylan was a Minnesotan nobody named Zimmerman; in 1959, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had recorded nothing. Yes, Chuck Berry had a hit with his self-written “Maybelline”, and Buddy Holly had recorded “Peggy Sue” and “Rave On”, but the singer-songwriter was scarcely common. In 1958, the Everly Brothers had two massive hits: “All I Have To Do Is Dream” and “Bird Dog”. These were added to their two hits of the previous year: “Bye Bye Love” and “Wake Up Little Susie”. All four of those songs were written by Boudleaux and Felice Bryant<\/a>. I’m not convinced that the success of Buddy Holly clearly signaled the rise of the singer-songwriter more than Johnny Mercer’s or Hoagy Carmichael’s hit recordings of their own songs. That rise happened, and would clearly have signaled the end of a house-band style of countdown, but it hadn’t happened by 1959.\n

It’s also, by the way, possible to say that while the ‘authenticity’ of the singer-songwriter hadn’t been a big deal, songs were associated with stars in a way they hadn’t been earlier, and that the house-band style worked against that. The problem there is that it doesn’t seem to be true. In 1938 the house band played “Ti-Pi-Tin” 12 times on its way up to and down from the number one position. The Andrews Sisters had recorded it in March, and although there were several recordings both before and after, it’s hard to escape the fact that “Ti-Pi-Tin” was on Your Hit Parade pretty much because of the Andrews Sisters. Ella Fitzgerald recorded “A-Tisket A-Tasket” in 1938; it was on Your Hit Parade for eleven weeks. “Whistle While You Work” never got to the top place, peaking at # 2 in 1938, but as it climbed up and down it was broadcast eleven times, all shortly after 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs<\/I>. Again, none of these were singer-songwriters, but all of them were stars, or from a blockbuster movie, just as they are now, and the house band version was clearly a reference to those recordings. And yet, Your Hit Parade survived. Anyway, Mr. McDonough doesn’t mention the issue of the star or of the star recording outside of the context of the singer-songwriter.\n

(The information about what was played when comes via The BigBands Database<\/a>, by the way, and although it seems plausible enough, I have no way of verifying it.)\n

The second killer, according to Mr. McDonough, was simply that popular music after 1955 or so sucked. “The Hit Parade might have survived if enough good tunes had come along, but in 1955, the American Songbook was about to be challenged from below by a rudimentary folk form called the blues.” He then says that the 12-bar blues of hits such as “Dance with me, Henry” was, you know, boring. He quotes Russell Arms, who was on the show from 1952 until 1957, calling the last years “kind of a tug of war between rock and good songs”. Now, I happen to like the popular music of the thirties and<\/I> the popular music of the fifties. And I can’t deny that a fair amount of the popular tunes of the fifties are stupid songs that, divorced from blistering performances, have little to recommend them. But how is that different from “A-Tisket A-Tasket”? And then there’s “Elmer’s Tune” (fifteen weeks in 1943), and “How Much is That Doggie in the Window” (twelve weeks in 1953), and “Jeepers Creepers” (eleven weeks in 1938), and “Mairzy Doats” (eleven weeks in 1940), and “Sam’s Song” (twelve weeks in 1950), and “The Umbrella Man” (eleven weeks in 1939), and “Woody Woodpecker” (only nine weeks in 1948). \n

Mr. Arms asks “How many weeks in a row can you do ‘Blue Suede Shoes’?” How many weeks in a row can you do “Peg o’my Heart”? They did it for twenty weeks in 1947, without killing the show. In 1953, Mr. Arms and his colleagues performed “Vaya con Dios” twenty-three times without killing the show. In 1954, Mr. Arms and his colleagues performed “Mister Sandman” eighteen times without killing the show. And the problem was a tug of war between rock and good songs? In 1955, Mr. Arms and his colleagues performed “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” fifteen times without killing the show. The problem was neither the prevalence of lousy songs nor the dearth of good ones, or the show would not have lasted twenty years. There’s got to be some other reason.\n

By the way, one of the legends of the Great American Songbook that Mr. McDonough is that Frank Sinatra pretty much invented it out of the frustration of being the boy singer for Your Hit Parade. The format of the show meant that even as the star, he got only very limited choices. Sure, he got to sing such magnificent songs as “Don’t Fence Me In” and “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Paper Doll” and also such ... other ... songs as “The Trolley Song” and “Shoo Shoo Baby”, not to mention “Swinging on a Star”. He sang “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” and “Besame Mucho”. He sang “Milkman Keep Those Bottles Quiet”. He evidently sang “No Love No Nothin'” four times<\/I> in January and February of 1944 in addition to the six other performances the band did with other singers that year. Later, after his career died and he had his first great comeback, he decided to have his own damn’ record company and not record any more crappy songs just because they were popular. As a result, he wound up selecting the basis for what became known as the Great American Songbook, and defining what was a standard and what was not. This isn’t true, in any significant sense, but it is illustrative. It also points out one reason the show lasted as long as it did: Frank Sinatra.\n

Anyway, Mr. McDonough does not notice a couple of things that I think are much more likely to have killed the show. The most important, I think, is simply the generation gap. The baby boom started in 1946 (more or less); by the late fifties, the baby boomers were entering their teens, and starting to have a significant impact on popular music. They pull the ratings (particularly of television shows, but also of music), because there are so damn many of them. So unlike the situation from 1935 to 1955, when the radio-listening population changes only gradually, from 1955-1959 the television-watching population changes quickly and drastically. Things become old-fashioned much quicker. And old-fashioned things get cancelled quicker. Meanwhile, there is suddenly a ton of competition. By 1957, ABC is broadcasting American Bandstand. As Rodney Buxton writes for the Museum of Broadcasting<\/a>, “the increased spending power of American teenagers in the 1950s attracted advertisers and companies marketing products specifically targeting that social group.” Their parents were, perhaps, watching the Lawrence Welk show, which premiered in 1955. These two shows were hugely successful for a long time, in part (I suspect) by carving up the audience, and sharpening their appeal. This was something Your Hit Parade couldn’t do. The problem wasn’t that people wouldn’t tune in for “Blue Suede Shoes” every week, it was that the people who tuned in for “At the Hop” or “Hard Headed Woman” weren’t tuning in to hear “Volare” or “It’s Only Make Believe”. No music show was ever going to bring parents and children together to enjoy the same music. Ten years later, when the boomers could fully dominate the music scene, the countdown came back.\n

The other thing that I think killed Your Hit Parade is that it just wasn’t very good. Really, why would you think it would be a good television show? What about the thing makes for good TV? Honestly, it’s much harder to understand why Lawrence Welk stayed on television than to understand why Your Hit Parade got cancelled. Lawrence Welk was, however inexplicably, a star; Your Hit Parade had, um, Gisele MacKenzie. And Russell Arms. And Snooky Lanson. Seriously, Ms. MacKenzie was the closest thing to a star they had during the TV years, and she left in 1957, shortly before the show was axed for the first time. Coincidence? You be the judge.\n

I suspect that even if Your Hit Parade had stayed on the radio, it would have died in the sixties, when Elvis, Dylan and the Beatles completed the shift from song to recording. But it would have had a chance. On TV, it had no chance. And it didn’t have much to do with the rise of the singer-songwriter or the death of the popular song.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger happened to be listening to All Things Considered t\u2019other day, and I heard a twelve-minute piece by John McDonough called \u201cA Look Back at \u2018Your Hit Parade\u2019\u201d. The piece focused on what killed the show, rather than…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[200],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-music-music"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17389,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801\/revisions\/17389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}