The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon.(Book Review)

The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon. Melvin Patrick Ely. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.

Melvin Patrick Ely's perceptive, entertaining account of America's most popular radio program is back in print in this tenth anniversary edition. The book's volatile career since its original 1991 publication has now earned an explanatory preface describing the ambivalent public reaction to what is often perceived as an abhorrently racist program. Yet its enduring popularity, argues Ely, indicates that it deserves a fresh look, starting with its two creators. Ely illuminates the early twentieth-century history of amateur minstrel and vaudeville shows out of which came the live blackface act of Freeman Gosden (Amos) and Charles Correll (Andy), through meticulous archival research and personal interviews with family, friends, writers, and production staff of the radio and television shows.

Gosden and Correll's blackface creations went on-air in 1926 as Sam 'n' Henry over Chicago's WGN station. By 1928, the program had become Amos 'n' Andy, whose Chicago misadventures in the fraternal lodge of the Mystic Knights of the Sea became daily fare for millions after 1929, when the program went to NBC. By then, radio sales shot up and the show became "a powerful locomotive pulling all of commercial radio along behind it" (4) with its engaging serial format, contributing a range of consumer products and slang expressions to popular culture. Ely compellingly details the early days of serial radio from both listeners' and performers' perspectives. Eventually, the format changed the show into a weekly half-hour radio sitcom in the 1940s, and then a variety show before the radio program ended around 1960.

In 1951, Amos 'n' Andy was reinvented as a black-cast television program, over the formidable opposition of the NAACP, who eventually succeeded in driving the show off the air after two seasons (though not preventing its ...