Introduction

Around twenty years ago a buzz about a "new" and "innovative" art form crackled through the music industry. This form, music video, paired popular songs with series of incoherent images held together by thin narratives. It became a unique promotional tool for performing artists and their record companies. Cable channel MTV offered an outlet for these videos and in doing so helped fuel the hype surrounding them. The hype focused primarily on the visual--cutting-edge editing, eye-popping special effects, and jolting imagery; the music became almost an afterthought. But, despite the hype, music video was, and is, not necessarily new or even innovative. Instead, it represents a step in the ever-evolving relationship between music and television, one that dates to early 1950s music-variety programming. According to Andrew Goodwin, "We cannot make sense of music video without locating its development within a nexus of far-reaching changes inside mass media" (24). One site for this development is the transition from radio to television in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and programming on WCPO-TV, channel 9 in Cincinnati, offers a creative space within which to explore it. To show how this station's programming fits in the evolution of music video, I shall consider the early relationship between popular music and radio; the transition period from radio to television and the music-variety genre's place within it; the innovations of WCPO-TV and its programming in the context of another 1950s music-variety show Your Hit Parade; and the visual and aural links between this programming and contemporary music video.

Popular music and radio

Rothenbuhler and McCourt divide radio-programming history into two eras: network and format (368). In the 1920s, before the networks began airing shows and series, live music dominated the radio airwaves (Douglas 153) for it provided an easy, inexpensive way to fill time (Roman 56). Many stations opted for "safe" classical compositions, string quartets, and operas instead of the more popular jazz, though the genre eventually got airplay later in the decade (Douglas 166). When the networks organized programming during the 1930s, music served as a conceptual foundation for many shows. The music-variety genre proved popular with such favorites as The Kraft Music Hall, hosted by Bing Crosby; Metropolitan Opera Broadcast; and The Grand Ole Opry, a country music show with "fiddlers, pickers, and singers" (Nachman 157). Your Hit Parade debuted on April 20, 1935 (Shaw 47). While many shows sought alternatives to popular music, "Your Hit Parade was the sole oracle of pop music trends" (Nachman 170). The show counted down the top ten (later top seven) songs of the week according to a purportedly scientific method of calculation. Songs were not sung by their original artists, but covered by the show's cast, including, at one time or another, Frank Sinatra, Buddy Clark, Lanny Ross, Bea Wain, Dinah Shore, Georgia Gibbs, Doris Day, Dorothy Collins, and Snooky Lanson (Shaw 49; Nachman 170). The March 20, 1948, radio episode, starring Frank Sinatra, featured such songs as "Ballerina," "I'm Lookin' Over a Four-Leaf Clover," and "Beg Your Pardon." The episode's sponsor, the American Tobacco Company, spared no efforts in selling its Lucky Strike cigarettes, including spots during the countdown, before the opening theme, and in the orchestra's name.

The transition from radio to television

Radio's shift to format coincides with the beginnings of television in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In an effort to develop programming for television, networks began to abandon their radio programming. To make the transition easier, faster, and especially cheaper, many networks adapted their radio shows for television (Rothenbuhler and McCourt 376). Early reactions to the new medium indicate many people viewed television as merely radio with pictures and its programming as a "simple extension of radio shows" (Chester, Garrison, and Willis 58). Since music served as a foundation for many radio shows, it makes sense that "nearly half" of the televisions series aired during the 1950s fit the music-variety genre (Scheurer 307). Adapting music for the small screen still posed challenges, however, since "television [could not] handle music programming easily--not records, certainly, and even orchestral concerts presented television with problems that radio never had to face" (Chester, Garrison, and Willis 58). A basic question faced TV producers: What do you show with the music?

WCPO and its early programming

Cincinnati holds an important place in the history of broadcasting with the pioneering efforts of its early radio and television stations, and the most relevant to the development of music video comes from WCPO-TV, channel 9. In the early 1950s, three television stations were broadcasting in Cincinnati: WLWT (channel 5), WKRC (channel 12), and WCPO. According to current programming director Jim Timmerman, the staff of WCPO at the time received the charge to find ways to program and air more hours than channel 5 (personal interview, 22 March 2002). Two shows, The Paul Dixon Show and The Dotty Mack Show (formerly Girl Alone), resulted from this charge. Both shows aired locally for extended hours, got picked up nationally by the network for shorter time periods, and featured a similar format: actors pantomiming skits to popular music of the day.

The Paul Dixon Show aired in both prime-time and daytime hours. The primetime edition ran from August 8, 1951 to September 24, 1952 on ABC, though the variety show began locally in 1949. The weekday edition ran from February to May 1952 on ABC and then from October 1952 to April 1955 on Dumont. The show featured Paul Dixon, who "contorted his face and mouthed the words as the top singers of the day sang their big hits on record" (Brooks and Marsh 788-89). Other cast members included Len Goorian, Wanda Lewis, and Dotty Mack, who later was replaced by Sis Camp. I watched one partial episode of this show; its segments were interspersed with interviews of cast members during a WCPO 50th anniversary special broadcast on December 17, 1999.

The Dotty Mack Show began as Girl Alone on February 16, 1953; the fifteen-minute program ran on the Dumont network until June 1953. In July 1953 the show was expanded to half an hour, and Bob Braun and Colin Male were added to the cast. The title was changed to The Dotty Mack Show, and it aired on ABC until September 3, 1956 (Brooks and Marsh 278). I watched two complete episodes of each show in the WCPO archives.

Your Hit Parade made the transition from radio to television during the 1950s. It debuted in July 1950 and ran until August 1950 on NBC, and then ran from October 1950 to June 1958, still on NBC. From October 1958 to April 1959, the show aired on CBS. The television version retained the radio version's countdown format, with show singers still covering the songs, but "the 1950s video version was a more elaborately produced affair, with each number framed by an inventive, often gimmicky, dramatic or comic device" (Nachman 171). I watched a sampling of episodes dating from 1951 to 1956, all of which are available on videocassette through online auctions.

Television sound and image

The television sound and the television image are inextricably linked; each depends on the other to convey a complete message and create a form for music video. According to Gow, form is "the overall relationship around which a music clip's aural and visual elements are structured" (44). The salience of this relationship varies depending on the closeness of the song's lyrics to the images. Tight (and, some argue, dull) translations try to create a literal representation of the lyrics, while loose (and, some argue, more creative) translations start with the lyrics and move beyond them. Sometimes "there may not even be any relationship between the way the record sounds and the style of video" (Lynch 54). The aural-visual relationship serves as the foundation of the form, and separating how sound and image function in these programs illustrates how the two parts work together.

Many critics privilege television's image, but television sound plays a more important role than we may think. According to Rick Altman (570), television sound serves several functions, including providing information even without the image, conveying the sense that the most important information will be cued by it, and offering a means of providing continuity. The importance of sound increases when we consider the relatively low picture quality of television, especially during the 1950s. Sound clued viewers in to what they might be missing, for it "tend[ed] to carry the details" (Ellis 128-29).