These below-the-knee shots, ranging between fifteen seconds and a minute in duration, also captured the teenagers’ dance steps during fast songs such as “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors and “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis, and during group dance songs such as “The Stroll” by the Diamonds. Along with dance instruction diagrams in the show’s yearbooks and in teen magazines, these close-ups provided viewers with tutorials on the show’s dance steps and identified American Bandstand as the best source of information about “new” dances. The 1958 American Bandstand Yearbook emphasized this point on a page titled “a new dance every day”: “‘The Chalypso,’ ‘The Walk,’ ‘The Stroll’—the list of new dances you’ve seen first on ‘American Bandstand’ just seems to grow each day. How do they get started? Well, if you ask some of the guests at the program, ‘They just happen.’” 30 Despite the suggestion that “new dances have ‘just grown’ on the program,” most of these dances did not originate on American Bandstand. Rather, many of the dances originated at local teen dances or were performed by the black teenagers on The Mitch Thomas Show.
FIGURE 24. Thanks to daily exposure on American Bandstand, the show’s regular dancers became teen stars. Pat Molittieri and other regulars were featured in “My Bandstand Buddies” published by ‘Teen magazine. 1959.
FIGURE 25. This advertisement for “Dick Clark American Bandstand Shoes” ran in the Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s leading black newspaper, at the same time black teenagers were excluded from American Bandstand. September 13, 1960. Used with permission of Philadelphia Tribune.
Ray Smith, who attended American Bandstand frequently and has done research for one of Clark’s histories of the show, remembers that he and other white teenagers watched The Mitch Thomas Show to learn new dance steps. Describing the “black Bandstand,” Smith recalled:
First of all, black kids had their own dance show, I think it was on channel 12, but one of the reasons I remember it is because I watched it. And I remember that there was a dance that [American Bandstand regulars] Joan Buck and Jimmy Peatross did called “The Strand” and it was a slow version of the jitterbug done to slow records. And it was fantastic. There were two black dancers on this show, the “black Bandstand,” or whatever you want to call it. The guy’s name was Otis and I don’t remember the girl’s name. And I always was like “wow.” And then I saw Jimmy Peatross and Joan Buck do it, who were probably the best dancers who were ever on Bandstand. I was talking about it to Jimmy Peatross one day, when I was putting together the book, and he said, “oh, I watched this black couple do it.” And that was the black couple that he watched.31
FIGURE 26. Close-up shot of dancers’ feet from American Bandstand episode (ca. 1957–58). These tight camera shots emphasized the program as the place to learn about new dances and encouraged viewers at home to follow along. Used with permission of dick clark productions inc.
These white teenagers were not alone in watching The Mitch Thomas Show. Smith’s experience of watching the show supports Mitch Thomas’s belief that “[American Bandstand teens] were looking to see what dance steps we were putting out. All you had to do was look at ‘Bandstand’ the next Monday, and you’d say, ‘Oh yeah, they were watching.’” 32 They were watching, for example, when dancers on The Mitch Thomas Show started dancing the Stroll, a group dance where boys and girls faced each other in two parallel lines, while couples took turns strutting down the aisle. Thomas remembers that the teens on his show “created a dance called The Stroll. I was standing there watching them dancing in a line, and after a while I asked them, ‘what are y’all doing out there?’ They said, ‘that’s The Stroll.’ And The Stroll became a big thing.”33
The Stroll was actually a new take on swing-era line dances, and while the teens on The Mitch Thomas Show did not invent the Stroll, they, along with young fans of black R&B in other cities, were among the first young people in the country to perform the new version of the dance.34 The Stroll was inspired by R&B artist Chuck Willis’s song “C.C. Rider,” itself a remake of the popular blues song “See See Rider Blues,” which was first recorded and copyrighted by Ma Rainey in the 1920s and was subsequently recorded by dozens of others artists. Following Willis, a string of other R&B songs were produced based on the dance. By late 1957, the Diamonds, a white vocal group that frequently recorded cover versions of black R&B songs, released “The Stroll,” a song made specifically for the dance. Dick Clark was a friend of the Diamonds’s manager, Nat Goodman, and told him: “if we could have another stroll-type record, you’d have yourself an automatic hit.”35 The Diamonds’ version outsold the others largely because American Bandstand played the song repeatedly. In addition to helping move the Diamonds’s version of the song up the charts, the frequent spins also falsely established American Bandstand as the originator of the dance. The show offered viewers instruction on how to do the Stroll by showing close-ups on the dancers’ feet during the dance.36 The show’s yearbook offered fans of more explicit instruction on the dance.
FIGURE 27. American Bandstand teens demonstrate their version of the Stroll. American Bandstand Yearbook, 1958.
All this emphasis on American Bandstand as the birthplace of the Stroll upset some of the teenagers on The Mitch Thomas Show. Thomas later recalled that Clark was gracious when he complained to him about American Bandstand taking credit for the dance. “I called Dick Clark and told him my kids were a little upset because they were hearing that the Stroll started on ‘Bandstand’” Thomas remembered. “He said no problem. He went on the show that day and said, ‘Hey man, I want you all to know The Stroll originated on the Mitch Thomas dance show.’” 37 While Clark was courteous in this instance in acknowledging the creative influence of The Mitch Thomas Show on American Bandstand, the television programs remained in a vastly inequitable relationship. The Mitch Thomas Show broadcast to the Delaware Valley on an independent station that was not affiliated with one of the three major networks. American Bandstand, on the other hand, reached a national audience of millions with the financial backing of advertisers, ABC, and Walter Annenberg’s media assets. The question of the Stroll’s origins remained contentious because such new dances were one of the many products that American Bandstand sold to viewers. The appropriation of these creative energies contributed to the frustration felt by black teens who were denied admission to the show. The dance styles perfected by the black teenagers on The Mitch Thomas Show did reach a national audience, but the teens themselves were not depicted as part of the national youth culture American Bandstand broadcast to viewers.
ITALIAN-AMERICAN TEENS AND WHITENESS ON AMERICAN BANDSTAND
At the same time that American Bandstand’s producers excluded black teenagers from the program’s studio audience, the show’s image of youth culture moved ethnicity to the foreground. Whereas television programs with ethnic characters like The Goldbergs, Life of Riley, and Life with Luigi were being replaced with supposedly ethnically neutral programs like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, because of its specific local context, American Bandstand offered, in particular, working-class Italian-American teenagers from Philadelphia access to national visibility and recognition.38 Many of the show’s regulars viewed American Bandstand as a sort of televised audiotopia, a welcoming space that provided a unique exposure for Italian-American teens.
Arlene Sullivan recalled feeling like an outsider in her predominately Irish neighborhood in Southwest Philadelphia. “I was very shy growing up,” Sullivan remembered. “A lot of kids were light eyed and red hair and blonde hair. I was really the only kid in the neighborhood who was kind of dark. I was half Italian and half Irish, but I really looked more Italian than I did Irish. And I always really felt like I was different from them.” In contrast, Sullivan felt that “being on Bandstand of course you meet up with everybody, and you tended to see the love that they have for you. And especially for me, I just embraced them all, because they liked me. I was just surprised, because I was such a loner. And having all
of these people like me.”39 Sullivan became one of the show’s best-known dancers and appeared on the cover of Teen in 1959.
Frank Spagnuola, who grew up in an Italian section of South Philadelphia and danced on American Bandstand from 1955 to 1958, felt that the program introduced teens in other parts of the country to Italians: “When you say Italian, everybody in Philadelphia knew Italians, and in Reading [Pennsylvania], they knew about Italians, they didn’t have any there, but they knew about them. But in the South they never saw an Italian, so this was a big thing. Dark hair, little darker [skin], it was a big thing.”40 Sullivan’s dance partner, Ken Rossi, shared this view. In an interview conducted for one of Clark’s histories of the program, Rossi recalled that “[Arlene and I] both had that ethnic look, dark wavy hair and all that. … I think a lot of people in the viewing audience had never really been exposed to this kind of ethnic concept.”41
These recollections resonate with the 1961 findings of sociologist Francis Ianni, who suggested that “while there is not the same hostility and social distance that existed for the second generation teen-ager, Italo-Americans are still considered to be ‘different,’” and as a result, the Italian-American teenager “does not participate as an equal in teenage culture.”42 While Spagnuola and Rossi may overstate the lack of Italian-Americans in other states, the predominance of these teens would have been unique for most viewers of American Bandstand outside of the three major centers of Italian immigration (New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia). Television, in this case, transcended population patterns, bringing images of white ethnic teens into homes across the country.
In order to fully understand the significance of representing national youth culture through images of Italian-American teens, it is important to pay attention to what historian Thomas Guglielmo calls the distinctions between race and color before World War II, and between race and ethnicity in the postwar era. From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, Guglielmo argues that Italian immigrants and their offspring experienced prejudice based on their perceived difference from Anglo Saxon, Nordic, or Celtic “races,” but they were never systematically denied the institutional and material benefits of their “color” status as whites. As the definition of race shifted in the World War II era to refer to large groups such as “Caucasians,” “Negroes,” and “Orientals,” Americans of Italian descent became an ethnic group, and many Italian-Americans began to organize around a white identity.43 Guglielmo concludes: “In the end, Italians’ firm hold on whiteness never loosened over time. They were, at different points, criminalized mercilessly, ostracized in various neighborhoods, denied jobs on occasion, and alternately ridiculed and demonized by American popular culture. Yet, through it all, their whiteness remained intact.”44 While Guglielmo focuses on Chicago, available evidence from Philadelphia supports his argument. Italian-Americans did face incidents of housing and educational discrimination in Philadelphia, but these incidents were neither as sustained nor as systematic as the discrimination against the city’s black and Puerto Rican residents.45 While the visibility of Italian-American teens was unique within the late 1950s television landscape, it served primarily to alleviate ethnic rather than racial prejudice. Italian-American teenagers did not need American Bandstand to become “white,” but the show did help to cement their racial status.
The recognition American Bandstand offered to working-class Italian-American teenage girls and other girls across the country is also significant. American Bandstand recognized teenage girls for their interest in music and dancing and offered an after-school activity in an era when budget allocations limited the range of extracurricular activities available to young women in Philadelphia’s public schools. American Bandstand became an integral part of the peer culture in the Italian neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, where many teens watched the show religiously. Like other teens across the country, they talked about the program’s regulars, music, and fashions with friends during school, and they looked to the show to learn new steps that they could use at local dances, or to see which steps the show’s regulars had picked up from these same local dances. Unlike most other viewers, however, several of the show’s teenage regulars and musical guests came from their high schools or neighborhoods, offering a unique perspective on the show’s local and national popularity. In each of these respects, American Bandstand became part of the daily lives of teenagers. Anita Messina, for example, remembers American Bandstand being an important point of connection among her friends at Southern High School. Asked how often she watched the show, Messina recalled:
Every day. It was like bible. You’d run home from school, because then you became interested in the dancers, they became like your friends. “Oh so and so is dancing with this one, he was dancing with this other one for three days, I wonder if they broke up?” It was just like a way of life, if they were wearing something you had to go out and buy it. “Oh they had this kind of top, we’re going to buy that kind of top.” And Dick Clark, whatever records he put on, we had to go out in buy the records. It was big. It was really important to all of us to watch that show. … Usually everybody would go home after school to watch American Bandstand, and then they’d come out. I can’t remember too many of my friends not watching American Bandstand. It was a big part of our lives in my age group. It was a topic of conversation. If you saw something on Bandstand you’d go to school the next day and talk about it. “Did you hear what Dick Clark said? Did you see Frannie Giordano? Did you see that this one was dancing with that one?” If they did a new dance, “did you see the dance they did?” It was really big.46
The televisual boundaries of American Bandstand were also blurry for Messina and her friends. For example, when Messina entered and won the show’s contest to meet actor Sal Mineo, she remembers: “When my name came on it was like blood curdling screams. … And the next thing you know, because you live in the city, you heard screaming all down the block because everyone was watching it on TV. And there are like fifty kids banging on the door.” Messina’s friend and classmate Carmella Gullon also remembered American Bandstand as an integral part of the lives of teenage girls in her neighborhood. “Oh, god yeah, everybody [watched it],” Gullon remembered.
You’d come home from school and you’d watch it on television and you’d dance. If your girlfriends were there you would dance with your girlfriends, and if not you’d dance with your banister. … That’s what kids did. And I think girls more than guys. And the guys we knew were real good dancers, but I think more so girls, that’s just what they did.47
Messina’s and Gullon’s recollections speak to American Bandstand’s power to shape the consumption decisions and interests of teenage girls. More important, however, in the context of their peer groups, American Bandstand was important because it reflected their interest in music and dancing. These music-centered peer relationships resemble what musicologist Christopher Small calls “musicking” to describe the totality of a musical performance. “The act of musicking,” Small suggests, “establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies.”48 Television enabled American Bandstand to connect teenagers across the country, and at the same time, local teens in places like South Philadelphia felt intimately connected to this musical venue.
American Bandstand was especially important for Messina and Gullon because in the years they attended Southern High School (1958–61), the school offered only a limited number of after-school activities for girls. Darlina Burkhart, a friend of Messina’s who was in the same graduating class, remembered that while the Southern football team and other boys’ sports teams were a big deal, “there was nothing like that for girls.”49 Messina recalled, “My extracurricular activity was finding the closest dance to go to.”50 These dances, held at churches, school gymnasiums, social clubs, and recreational centers, were frequent gathering places for teens on both weeknights and weekends. Neighborhood churches in South Phi
ladelphia, such as Bishop Neumann and St. Richard’s, hosted small dances, and St. Alice’s in suburban Upper Darby (just outside West Philadelphia) hosted some of the largest dances, with more than two thousand teens filling the church’s social center on Friday and Sunday nights.51
While the white teens at these dances shared an interest in rock and roll and R&B, class and ethnicity sometimes divided them. Gullon recalled one such incident:
We went to a dance in Upper Chichester in our senior year, and the suburbs were a lot different from South Philly. We went into the dance with high heels and teased hair and crinoline. And everybody there was flat hair, very collegiate … and we were in there and we were dancing and we just made up a dance and everybody started to follow us, and it was a lot of fun. We had a great time. But we were just so different looking when we went in there. We didn’t realize how different we would be until we went there. We stuck out like sore thumbs. Even when we went to St. Alice’s [in Upper Darby] … you didn’t really mingle with the [kids] from other schools.52
This clash in dress and hair styles between working-class and lower-middle-class teens from South Philadelphia and their wealthy and upper-middle-class suburban peers highlights the heterogeneity among different local peer groups in the Philadelphia area.
In its pursuit of a national audience, however, American Bandstand relied on the creative energy of Italian-American teens in constructing the show’s image of youth culture. While the styles American Bandstand allowed young people to wear were more conservative than those teens selected for neighborhood dances, by providing a daily television spotlight for music and dancing, American Bandstand validated the extracurricular activities valued by these working-class teenage girls from South Philadelphia. With American Bandstand, market formation and identity formation occurred simultaneously. The marketability of Italian-American teens and young women helped the show cultivate a national youth culture, while it also offered these teens a way to connect with their local peers and a way to imagine themselves as part of a national youth culture in which working-class Italian-American teens played a central role. American Bandstand, of course, was invested in selling products, not ethnic pride or gender equity, but the particular images through which the show sold youth culture elevated some teens while they also obscured others.
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