[78-L] Charles Correll WAS RE: Stephen Foster

[David Lennick]

The interview was a couple of years after Calvin And The Colonel, I'm pretty 
sure, but it was still what we'd today call "damage control". And since he said 
it in Canada and Amos 'n' Andy hadn't been running on Canadian stations for 
years, who was going to argue with him? Incidentally, I'd love to see Calvin 
again..I thought it was hilarious at the time. Beatrice Kay was one of the 
voices as well. Interesting, since I think she was blacklisted. Oh oh, is 
"blacklisted" an offensive word? I meant African-American listed.

Now, how about slinging some of this mud towards Bing Crosby, Johnny Mercer, 
John Charles Thomas, Nelson "Short'nin' Bread" Eddy, James Melton (his version 
of Short'nin' Bread is even more offensive) and company? (Yeah, Mercer was 
raised by a southern mammy and it was really only the Jews he railed against 
when he got hammered.)

dl

Elizabeth McLeod wrote:
> This interview likely comes from the era when Correll and Gosden were 
> trying to keep their careers alive with "Calvin and the Colonel," a sort 
> of post-racial Amos 'n' Andy in animated cartoon form, in which the 
> characters were presented as a Southern fox and bear. Their speech was 
> similar, but not identical to that of Amos 'n' Andy. During this period, 
> when race was becoming an extremely hot-button issue in television, 
> making such a statement would have been seen as necessarily diplomatic, 
> even though it was quite inaccurate.
> 
> During the actual run of "Amos 'n' Andy," there was never any question 
> that the characters were supposed to be black -- they occasionally 
> referred to themselves as "colored," and there were even scenes in the 
> early years of the radio series that obliquely acknowledged the existence 
> of segregation -- even the de-facto sort which prevailed in the North. 
> 
> All of this examined in detail in my book.
> 
> Elizabeth
> 
> 
> On 1/24/09 12:53 AM Mark Hendrix 78L said:
> 
>> Hello, David:
>>
>> You're not kidding, but surely Charles Correll was.  Or was it the
>> well-known and widespread practice of "Southerners" (of all ethnic
>> backgrounds) to wear blackface that led Correll and Gosden to do the same in
>> "Check and Double Check"?  I guess Mr. Correll  was kidding himself.
>>
>> --Mark Hendrix
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: 78-l-bounces at klickitat.78online.com
>>> [mailto:78-l-bounces at klickitat.78online.com]On Behalf Of David Lennick
>>> Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 9:18 PM
>>> To: 78-L Mail List
>>> Subject: Re: [78-L] Stephen Foster
>>>
>>>
>>> That was always my impression. By the way, somewhere in the
>>> thousands of hours
>>> of quarter-track slow-speed half-mil tape recorded by the Lennick
>>> family in the
>>> 60s is the audio from a Canadian TV panel show in which Charles
>>> Correll said
>>> that the voices on Amos 'n' Andy were "not necessarily Negroes,
>>> but merely
>>> Southerners". I kid you not. I'd love to find that tape, but the
>>> wording comes
>>> from a script I wrote in 1966 and I quoted him verbatim at the time.
>>>
>>> So nyaa.
>>>
>>> (Duck, Lenny!)