One night on TV is worth weeks at the Paramount : popular music on early television
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
One night on TV is worth weeks at the Paramount : popular music on early television
（Console-ing passions : television and cultural power / edited by Lynn Spigel）
Duke University Press, 2012
- : pbk
Available at 1 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [363] -387) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Elvis Presley's television debut in January 1956 is often cited as the moment when popular music and television came together. Murray Forman challenges that contention, revealing popular music as crucial to television years before Presley's sensational small-screen performances. Drawing on trade and popular journalism, internal television and music industry documents, and records of audience feedback, Forman provides a detailed history of the incorporation of musical performances into TV programming during the medium's formative years, from 1948 to 1955. He examines how executives in the music and television industries understood and responded to the convergence of the two media; how celebrity musicians such as Vaughn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Fred Waring struggled to adjust to television; and how relative unknowns with an intuitive feel for the medium were sometimes catapulted to stardom. Forman argues that early television production influenced the aesthetics of musical performance in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly those of emerging musical styles such as rock and roll. At the same time, popular music helped to shape the nascent medium of television-its technologies, program formats, and industry structures. Popular music performances were essential to the allure and success of TV in its early years.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Popular Music and the Small Screen Frontier: An Introduction 1
1. Music, Image, Labor: Television's Prehistory 17
2. "Hey TV!": Musical Pioneers and Pessimists 51
3. Harmonizing Genres 115
4. The Look of Music 169
5. Music in a "Sepia" Tone 231
6. Maracas, Congas, and Castanets 273
Conclusion: Rocking the TV Conventions 319
Appendix 341
Notes 343
Bibliography 363
Index 389
by "Nielsen BookData"