One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount

Murray Forman is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop and a coeditor, with Mark Anthony Neal, of That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader.

"One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount is an important contribution to the history of TV, popular music, and the relation between television and musical performance. It is clearly well researched, and it includes fascinating information and many delightful tidbits."-Pamela Robertson Wojcik, author of The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 "One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount is an impressive industrial and cultural history of the dazzling range of musical performances and genres on early television. Filling a much-neglected area of television studies, Murray Forman focuses not only on network shows but also on regional productions and local stations. His discussion of raced representations provides important new insights into television history, as do his accounts of regional tastes, amateur shows, and the significance of stage settings and nightclub venues."-Lynn Spigel, author of TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television "One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount will be the standard work on postwar U.S. music and television. Murray Forman gives us a full picture of cultural change in a key period of media transition. Reading his book, we witness the breakup of the big bands, the dismantling of the Hollywood system, the rise of network television, and the tense politics of race and ethnicity that marked popular American entertainment in the 1940s and 1950s."-Will Straw, author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America “One Night on Television is Worth Weeks at the Paramount is a rich resource. The detailed descriptions of television musical performances and the analysis of such a wide range of archival sources provides a comprehensive account of the emerging practices and processes of television music in the U.S.A: this is valuable to any scholar interested in the history of television, popular music, and music on screen.” - Lauren Anderson (Screening the Past) “[A] recollection and examination of what exactly went into the first days of that ground-breaking marriage between music and television, far before the first episode of 120 Minutes even aired. The book takes an impressively researched look at how much effort went into making sure this combination could even get off the ground, let alone explode into the massive fixture it is today, by focusing on the technological and developmental advancements of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s as it related to utilizing this particular form of media.” - Colin McGuire (PopMatters) “Forman’s deft analysis of historical materials amounts to a considerable contribution to our knowledge of postwar American popular culture, and the book’s theoretical concerns bring television studies, American studies, and popular music studies into a productive dialogue.” - Jacob Smith (Journal of American Studies) “In One Night on TV, Murray Forman offers an intelligent history of popular music’s place on early TV.  In the process, he fills a significant gap in our understanding of early television in America…. One Night on TV should be of value to all of those interested in television’s most important moment.” - JamesL. Baughman (Business History Review) “[A] fascinating and rich account…. Forman’s study is a welcome contribution to a neglected topic within both popular music and television history.  The study offers astute insights on the period from 1930-1955, which are generated from his combination of industrial and cultural history with theoretical reflections and close analysis…. [T]he study significantly redresses numerous orthodoxies in the respective histories of popular music and television.” - Carolyn Birdsall (Screen)

• Acknowledgments xiPopular Music and the Small Screen Frontier: An Introduction 11. Music, Image, Labor: Television's Prehistory 172. "Hey TV!": Musical Pioneers and Pessimists 513. Harmonizing Genres 1154. The Look of Music 1695. Music in a "Sepia" Tone 2316. Maracas, Congas, and Castanets 273Conclusion: Rocking the TV Conventions 319Appendix 341Notes 343Bibliography 363Index 389