Your Hit Parade
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Your Hit Parade was a popular American radio and television program, sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes and broadcast from 1935 to 1955 on radio and telecast from 1950 to 1959. During this 24-year run, the show had 19 orchestra leaders and 52 singers or groups.
Each Saturday evening at 8pm, a hit parade of the more popular and bestselling songs of the week were presented. The original format involved a presentation of the top 15 tunes. Later, a countdown with fanfares led to the top three finalists, with the number one song for the finale. Occasional performances of standards and other favorite songs from the past were known as "Lucky Strike Extras."
Listeners were informed that "Your Hit Parade survey checks the best sellers on sheet music and phonograph records, the songs most heard on the air and most played on the automatic coin machines, an accurate, authentic tabulation of America's taste in popular music." However, the exact procedure of this "authentic tabulation" remained a secret. Some believe song choices were often arbitrary due to various performance and production factors. The show's ad agencies (initially Lord and Thomas and later Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne) never revealed the specific sources or the methods that were used to determine the top hits.
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[edit] Radio
The origins of the show's format can be traced back to the Lucky Strike Dance Orchestra, which aired on NBC from 1928 to 1931, sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes. Led by Benjamin A. Rolfe, the Lucky Strike Dance Orchestra played a random selection of the week's more popular tunes during a 60-minute show on Saturday nights at 10pm. It was this show that introduced the slogan, "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet." In a cross-promotion, Rolfe made recordings for Edison Records as B.A. Rolfe and his Lucky Strike Orchestra.
When Your Hit Parade began on NBC April 20, 1935, it was a 60-minute show with 15 songs played in a random format. Initially, the songs were more important than the singers, so a stable of vocalists went uncredited and were paid only $100 per show. In 1936-37 the program was carried on both NBC and CBS. Script continuity in the late 1930s and early 1940s was written by Alan Jay Lerner before he found fame as a lyricist.
Some years passed before the countdown format was introduced, with the number of songs varying from seven to 15. Vocalists in the 1930s included Buddy Clark, Lanny Ross, Kay Thompson and Bea Wain (1939-44), who was married to the show's announcer, French-born André Baruch. Frank Sinatra joined the show in 1943 and stayed until 1945, returning (1946-49) to co-star with Doris Day.
Hugely popular on CBS through the WWII years, Your Hit Parade returned to NBC in 1947. The show's opening theme, from the musical revue George White's Scandals of 1926, was "This is Your Lucky Day," with music by Ray Henderson and lyrics by Buddy G. DeSylva, Stephen W. Ballantine and Lew Brown.
Orchestra leaders over the years included Al Goodman, Lennie Hayton, Abe Lyman, Leo Reisman, Harry Salter, Ray Sinatra, Harry Sosnik, Ray Sinatra, Axel Stordahl, Peter Van Steeden, Mark Warnow (1949-57). The chorus was led by musical director Lyn Murray.
Dozens of singers appeared on the radio program, including "Wee" Bonnie Baker, Dorothy Collins, Beryl Davis, Gogo DeLys, Joan Edwards (1941-46), Georgia Gibbs, Dick Haymes, Snooky Lanson, Gisèle MacKenzie, Johnny Mercer, Andy Russell, Dinah Shore, Ginny Simms, Lawrence Tibbett, Martha Tilton, Eileen Wilson, Barry Wood and occasional guest vocalists. The show featured two tobacco auctioneers, L.A. "Speed" Riggs of Goldsboro, North Carolina and F.E. Boone of Lexington, Kentucky. The radio series continued until January 16, 1953.
The success of the show spawned a spin-off series, Your All-Time Hit Parade, sponsored by Lucky Strike and devoted to all-time favorites and standards mixed with some current hits. The program began on NBC February 12, 1943, airing Fridays at 8:30pm until June 2, 1944, and then Sundays at 7pm as a summer replacement for Jack Benny, continuing until September 24, 1944. The regular vocalists were Marie Green, Ethel Smith, Martha Stewart, Bea Wain and Jerry Wayne. Lyn Murray led the chorus, and the orchestra was conducted by Mark Warnow.
On December 6, 1948, Lucky Strike introduced yet another musical series, the daytime Your Lucky Strike, aka The Don Ameche Show, since the host was Don Ameche. This 30-minute show, airing weekdays at 3:30pm, was a talent competition with little-known and unknown professional vocalists, backed by Al De Crescent on organ or Bill Wardell on piano. In a low-rent precursor to American Idol, the performers were judged by a trio of random housewives casting votes via long distance phone calls. Winners were booked into the Mocambo, Earl Carroll's or other night clubs. Produced by Bernard Schubert and directed by Harlan Dunning, this show also featured auctioneer Riggs. It went off the air on March 4, 1949.
[edit] Television
André Baruch continued as the announcer when the program arrived on television in 1950, written and produced by William H. Nichols. Norman Jewison and Clark Jones (nominated for a 1955 Emmy) directed with associate director Bill Colleran. Tony Charmoli won a 1956 Emmy for his choreography, and the show's other dance directors were Peter Gennaro (1958-59) and Ernie Flatt (uncredited). Paul Barnes won an Emmy in 1957 for his art direction. In 1953, the show won a Peabody Award "for consistent good taste, technical perfection and unerring choice of performers."
The seven top-rated songs of the week were presented in elaborate TV production numbers requiring constant set and costume changes. However, because the top tunes sometimes stayed on the charts for many weeks, it was necessary to continually find ways of devising a new and different production number of the same song week after week. This could prove challenging with the literal lyrics of a song such as "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?" However, an imaginative staging of a song seen for many weeks sometimes brought audience applause just for the surprise of a fresh concept. Although Tony Bennett claimed to have made the first music video in 1956 with a short film of "Stranger in Paradise," some histories of popular music credit Your Hit Parade's visual story concepts as a major step forward in the evolution of the music video.
On the TV series, vocalists Dorothy Collins (1950-59), Russell Arms (1952-57), Snooky Lanson (1950-57) and Gisèle MacKenzie (1953-57) were top-billed during the show's peak years. During this time, MacKenzie had her own hit record in 1955 with "Hard to Get" which climbed to the #5 ranking in June 1955 and stayed on the charts for 16 weeks.
The line-up of the show's other singers included Eileen Wilson (1950-52), Sue Bennett (1951-52), June Valli (1952-53), Alan Copeland (1957-58), Jill Corey (1957-58), Johnny Desmond (1958-59), Virginia Gibson (1957-58), and Tommy Leonetti (1957-58). All were performers of standards, show tunes or big band numbers. Featured prominently were the Hit Parade dancers and the Hit Paraders, the program's choral singers, who sang the opening commercial jingle:
- Be happy, go Lucky,
- Be happy, go Lucky Strike
- Be happy, go Lucky,
- Go Lucky Strike today!
During the 1950-1951 season Bob Fosse appeared as a guest dancer on several episodes, with partner Mary Ann Niles. From 1950 until 1957, the orchestra was led by well-known bandleader and musician Raymond Scott (who married Dorothy Collins in 1952), and the show's other music supervisor was Harry Sosnik (1958-59) with Dick Jacobs, who was an uncredited music director (1957-58).
The show faded with the rise of rock and roll when the performance became more important than the song. It is said that big band singer Snooky Lanson's weekly attempts to perform Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" hit in 1956 hastened the end of the series. The series went from NBC to CBS in 1958 and expired the following year. While Your Hit Parade was unable to deal with the rock music revolution, the show's imaginative production concepts had an obvious influence on the wave of music videos that began in the decade that followed
CBS also brought it back for a brief summer revival in 1974. That version featured Kelly Garrett, Sheralee and Chuck Woolery, better known as the game show host on Wheel of Fortune, Love Connection and Lingo. The 1974 version of Your Hit Parade also featured hit tunes from a designated week in the 1940s or 1950s.
The show's familiar closing theme was "So Long for A While":
- So long for a while.
- That's all the songs for a while.
- So long to Your Hit Parade,
- And the songs that you picked to be played.
- So long!
[edit] Listen to
- Heritage Radio Theatre: Your Hit Parade (August 26, 1944)
- SPERDVAC Radio 14: Your All-Time Hit Parade (August 20, 1944)
- All Things Considered: "Looking Back at Your Hit Parade" (April 25, 2005)
[edit] References
- Cox, Jim. Music Radio: The Great Performers and Programs of the 1920s through Early 1960s. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005. ISBN 0-7864-2047-2
- Nachman, Gerald. Raised on Radio. University of California Press, 2000.
- Schnabel, Phil and Crowe, William H. Big Band Database: Compilation of Your Hit Parade top tunes (1935-55)
- Williams, John R. This Was Your Hit Parade. Camden, Maine, 1973.
