Ain't That a Knee-Slapper: Rural Comedy in the Twentieth Century

Chapter One: Let’s See What’s Going on Down in Pine Ridge

- 7 Let 's See What's Going on Down in Pine Ridge A s we tune our vintage 1920s crystal set radios, we search in vain for some sort of programming to emerge from the mishmash of static and whine coming through our headphones. The world of commercial radio has changed little during the first five or six years of its existence: no one quite seems to know just what sort of programming the listeners—presuming there are listeners out there somewhere—actually want to hear. Music always seems to be a safe bet, whether classical, popular, or that emerging new brand out of the hill country known as hillbilly music. Programming that depends heavily on the spoken word is less common , possibly because the primitive conditions for transmission and reception make it doubtful that anyone can understand two or more consecutive sentences. That was the status of radio in the middle of its first decade. Prior to the formation of the giant broadcasting networks, NBC and CBS, local stations provided whatever entertainment they felt was appropriate for their respective markets. Although most if not all of the early radio stations were based in large cities, station officials always seem to have believed that much of the audience lived in the surrounding countryside. Rural families, with less everyday contact with Chapter One - 8 the great outside world, especially relied on radio for entertainment and news, and the stations did not hesitate to play to the room, as it were. By the mid-1920s, such weekly “hillbilly music” extravaganzas as Chicago’s WLS Barn Dance and Nashville’s WSM Barn Dance (soon to become known as the Grand Ole Opry) were firmly established, but they were primarily showcases for instrumental performances, with almost no vocals or other essential verbal communication that could be obscured by static. The concept of radio programming took a dramatic turn in January 1926, thanks to Chicago’s station WGN. According to radio veterans, since WGN was owned by the powerful Chicago Tribune (the call letters stood for World’s Greatest Newspaper), company executives decided that the station would be programmed as if it were a newspaper, with the day divided up into segments that roughly paralleled a single edition of the Tribune. To correspond to comic strips, WGN initially wanted to produce a radio version of Sidney Smith’s popular strip The Gumps. The two novelty singers assigned to the new show, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, quickly convinced management that they knew little about domestic humor, which was the mainstay of the Gump family’s funny papers existence. What Gosden and Correll did know from vast professional experience was blackface comedy, so they concocted a show called Sam ’n’ Henry that would run in nightly ten-minute episodes and carry a continuing story line. Broadcasting historian Elizabeth McLeod has made a very valid point that applies to our discussion here. “While Sam and Henry are primarily remembered as ‘black characters,’” she wrote, “it is often forgotten that they were also ‘rural characters’—born and raised in a small town outside Birmingham, Alabama—and much of the early humor in Sam ’n’ Henry stemmed from the characters’ adjustments to the complexities of city life.” (If this sounds like the show was prefiguring a theme that would later manifest itself in a hit TV show called The Beverly Hillbillies, well, you’re just too smart for us.) When Gosden and Correll had the opportunity to jump from WGN to another Chicago station, WMAQ, they found Let’s See What’s Going on Down in Pine Ridge it necessary to change their characters’ names, inasmuch as WGN owned Sam ’n’ Henry. The new title was Amos ’n’ Andy. Another historian of the show, Melvin Patrick Ely, has pointed out that both sets of characters derived much of their humor from their intellectual shortcomings: “Amos and Andy, even when they pooled their powers, could barely manage to write a letter and fared even worse when confronted by an arithmetic problem.” Ely does not mention that such obtuseness was characteristic of all rural, unsophisticated characters, be they black or white. In fact, when the situation came up at all in their scripts, Sam and Henry and Amos and Andy were more likely to be belittled for their rural origins than for their racial background. Ely cites the example of one of the first Sam ’n’ Henry episodes, in...