Perhaps, but the exact method was never revealed, and sometimes the #1 song of the week seemed mystifyingly high in the rankings. " Your Hit Parade survey checks the best sellers on sheet music and phonograph records, the songs most heard on the air and most played on the automatic coin machines, an accurate, authentic tabulation of America's taste in popular music." The details of exactly how these songs were ranked each week were only vaguely alluded to. Snooky Lanson ( who should get extra points for using his boyhood nickname), Russell Arms, Dorothy Collins, Gisele McKenzie, and a cast of largely uncredited singers and dancers would perform what the producers of the show assured us were the scientifically tabulated ` Top 7 Songs of the week'. The music landscape belonged to the likes of Elvis Presley, Bill Halley, and Chuck Berry.īut the heyday of YOUR HIT PARADE, those years up until 1956, are something worth remembering. It has been said that Snooky Lanson's whitebread rendition of ` Hound Dog' sealed the show's fate, but the truth is, America's tastes were changing.īig band music was dying, show tunes and standards no longer filled the juke boxes. Whether it was due to contempt or dread, you could see the discomfiture of these established singers trying to `cover' these rock & roll songs. They thought it was a fad, a passing phase. ![]() The song was Heartbreak Hotel, and quite frankly, the singers and the producers of this venerable show had no idea how to deal with Rock & Roll. While the show would remain on the air for another two years, it was obvious that after a nearly 30 year run on radio, and then television, that rigor mortis was setting in. This moribund scene from the summer of 1956, with Gisèle McKenzie doing a lame Morticia Addams impression, was perhaps the first sign that the long running show YOUR HIT PARADE's days were numbered. Luckily, the show is better than the clip above would suggest.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |