Nationally, American Bandstand blocked black teens from entering the studio during its years in Philadelphia, despite host Dick Clarks claims to the contrary. Nicknamed "Buddy" as a child, Deane . With the 1960s came a whole new set of stars, some with names that seemed like gimmicks, but werent: Concetta Comi, the popular sister team of Yetta and Gretta Kotik. Evanne and her brother run the John Brock Benson Dance Studios, in Pasadena, and have a line of dancers who appear at clubs all over the state. The main thing was your hair was flat, the antithesis of Buddy Deane, she says, chuckling. August 8, 2022 at 3:55 a.m. Because Buddy Deanes competition was soap operas, the budding teenage romances were sometimes played up for the camera. Checking back with the studio, no one had information concerning footage of African American dancers. Thats what really happened, and the show shut down.. Or Snuggle Dolls? This program is a tribute to long-time Maryland radio announcer Buddy Deane, who passed away in August, 2003. Why? Id wonder. She wasnt even a fan of the show. Ninfa O. Barnard Special to The Commercial These dances included the Mashed Potato, the Stroll, the Pony, the Waddle, the Locomotion, the Bug, the Handjive, the New Continental and the Madison. [citation needed]. . The Stupidity, where you act mentally ill. The Bugs easy, you just catch a disease and throw it to someone else, Waters said. So the NAACP targeted the show for protests. From then on, all bare shoulders were covered with a piece of net. For the rest of the time, the show's participants were all white. In Hairspray (1988), Tammy Turner assists Corny Collins on the show. Joe remembers a sport coat I bought for $5 from somebody who got it when he got out of prison. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. Still, as an historian of the television era that Hairspray so lovingly recreates, I believe the story also presents a more nuanced vision of how popular culture helped to educate white and black teenagers about racial hierarchies. The Buddy Deane Show was a show from the late 50's to the mid 60's. The show was a teen dance television show, similar to Philadelphia's American Bandstand. Friday, February 19 at 7PM. . 'Buddy' Deane; www.WashingtonPost.com -- The Messy Truth of The Real 'Hairspray.' Every week she had a different dothe Double Bubble, the Artichoke, the Airlifteach topped off by her special trademark, suggested by her mother, the bow. In 1950, Deane moved to Baltimore to host 1230 AM WITH after Stan Kenton, a performer and guest he was interviewing, informed him of the opening at the radio station. Today they seem opposites. In 2003, "Hairspray" went on to sweep the 57th Annual Tony Awards, winning a total of eight awards. "If you first appeared on The Buddy Deane Show then you could not appear on The Dick Clark Show," Deane said. But an intrepid group of local and . Here, Clark's memories of American Bandstand are nested in an overview of important events in U.S. history from the 1950s and 1960s. Over lunch at the Thunderball Lounge, in East Baltimore, Kathy remembers, I could never get used to signing autographs. In meetings with the show's white performers, the producers realized that though most of the dancers were in favor of integration, their parents would not be. In 1958 the Buddy Deane Show lost support from the Baltimore City Board of Education due to it's segregation policies, and in 1964 it went off the air instead of choosing to integrate. The Hairspray Live! And according to Arlene, Buddy encouraged one popular Committee member (Buzzy Bennet) to teach himself to read so he could realize his dream of being a disc jockey. It was similar to Philadelphia's American Bandstand. In 1957, Deane was chosen by former WITH associate Joel Chaseman to host "The Buddy Deane Show," a dance show for teenagers on WJZ-TV Channel 13. As with the drapes and squares of the previous decade, she explains, there were two classes of people thenDeaners and Joe College. On the last day of the show, January 4, 1964, all the most popular Committee members through the years came back for one last appearance. Buddy: Deane in the 50s when she worked for a record wholesaler and he was the top-rated disc jockey on WITHthe only DJ in town who played rock n roll for the kids. Buddy could take his seat beneath the famous Top 20 Board, and the tension would build. You werent one of them anymore. Outsiders envied the fame, especially if they lost their steadies to Deaners, and many were put off by boys who loved to dance. That's one of the things that the Black Lives Matter movement is talking about. (97) Kings mention of Funtown is preceded by references to lynch mobs, police brutality, and the airtight cage of poverty, and followed by references to hotel segregation and racial slurs. These were the first role models I knew. He wanted me to go to a summer training session to be a trapeze artist. The Buddy Deane Show was a highly visible regional program that asserted a racially segregated public culture. SOUL! http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2016/03/how-madison-line-dance-got-its-name-and.html, http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2016/03/al-brown-and-ray-bryant-madison-records.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Deane_Show, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairspray_(2007_film), http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2015/06/timeline-for-cultural-use-of-saying.html, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/on-hairsprays-25th-anniversary-buddydeane-committee-looks-back/2013/01/17/a45a1cc2-5c23-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html, http://theurbandaily.com/2011/06/01/black-music-moment-96-short-lived-integration-of-the-buddy-deane-show/. A big strong line!) up the hill to the famous dance party set, the one that now houses People Are Talking. Id hook and have to dance in the back so the teachers couldnt see me, says Helen. When Mary Lous husband gave me the long and complicated directions to their home on the phone, he ended with And there you will find, yes, Mary Lou Raines. He later confided that when he first started dating her, he had no idea of her early career. We used to go to stand in front of Reads Drugstore, and people would ask for our autograph.. The show featured only white kids dancing, so Scruggs wrote him a letter in the fall of 1958 to . Hairspray was the actors first film, before Dead Poets Society, which came out the next year. Influencers: Profiles of a Partnership 2022, How to Pitch Stories and Articles to IndieWire, John Waters Shares His 10 Favorite Films of 2022, 'Peter Von Kant' Tops List, John Waters to Write and Direct 'Liarmouth' from His Own Novel, Quentin Tarantino's Favorite Movies: 50 Films the Director Wants You to See, Oscars 2023: Best Animated Feature Predictions. The big garage-type door they remember would open, and theyd all pile in, past George and Mom, the Pinkerton guards who used to keep attendance, and crowd into Arlenes office to comb their hair, confide their problems, and touch up their make-up. . Deane helped the Bill Haley and the Comets song "Rock Around the Clock" become a hit in Baltimore a full year before it became a worldwide success by promoting their music while at WITH. Yes, I miss it very much. The Corny Collins Show, is a teen dance show in Baltimore's WYZT /WZZT Network. Buddy Deane, a native of Pine Bluff, was one of the first radio hosts to understand the appeal of Rock n' Roll in its infancy, the host of a popular 60s teen dance show, the inspiration for a film and musical character in Hairspray, and so much more. You learned how to be a teenager from the show. Pixie was barely five feet tall, but her hair sometimes added a good six to eight inches to her height. Some kids on the show went a little nuts, with stars in their eyes; they thought they were going to go to Hollywood and be moviestars.. All of those dances were real, they were real dances, we didnt make any of them up and two were cut out. Theatre producer, Margo Lion, saw a television broadcast of the film in 1998 and started to conceive it as a stage musical. So the rules were bent a little; the big ones, the ones with the fan mail, were allowed to stay. The regulars . I focused on the 1957-1964 television series The Buddy Deane Show in part because I'm interested in documenting old school African American originated line dances, and the Buddy Deane Show's 1958 or 1959 clip of The Madison appears to be the earliest surviving film of that dance.I believe that The Buddy Deane Show is important in part because it documents aspects of Americana such as the way the teenagers (or at least White teenagers] in the late 1950s and early 1960s dressed, danced, interacted, and also documented (through retrospective interviews such as the one quoted in Excerpt #2 of this post) attitudes and values of that time. The introductory essay in Dick Clark's American Bandstand (1997) is illustrative in this regard. Fran Nedeloff (debuting at 14 in 61, Mervo, cha-cha) remembers the look: Straight skirt to the knee, cardigan sweater buttoned up the back, cha-cha heels, lots of heavy black eyeliner, definitely Clearasil on the lips, white nail polish. Or dancing with other Committee members when you were supposed to be dancing with the guests (a very unpopular rule allowed this only every fourth dance). as its newest live-television musical adaptation. Buddy Deane, a native of Pine Bluff, was one of the first radio hosts to understand the appeal of Rock n Roll in its infancy, the host of a popular 60s teen dance show, the inspiration for a film and musical character in Hairspray, and so much more. Winston "Buddy" Deane was a broadcaster for more than fifty years, beginning his career in Little Rock, Arkansas, then moving to the Memphis, Tennessee, market before moving onto Baltimore . Ninfa O. Barnard wrote this article for explorepinebluff.com. It would be a treasure to pass down to my future generations. I used to lie in bed at my parents house, and there was an African-American community up the street and they went by singing along to the radio. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Baltimore Magazine. It aired for two and a half hours a day, six days a week. Jones). Buddy himself, the high priest, returned for the event. Chaseman had this idea for a dance party show, with Buddy as the disc jockey, and Buddy asked Arlene to go to work for him. "Hairspray" is set in the 1960s and is based on a TV show called "The Buddy Deane Show," which featured Baltimore-area teenagers dancing to popular music but was canceled in 1964, after the . Deane died in Pine Bluff, Arkansas on July 16, 2003, after suffering a stroke. So the NAACP targeted the show for protests. On the show you were either a drape or a square, explains Sharon. Eating the refreshments (Ameches Powerhouses, the premiere teenage hangouts forerunner of the Big Mac), which were for guests only. However, unlike during the song "The New Girl in Town" where the Dynamites get there song stolen by 3 committee members, the Buddy . Several local art contests were also held on the show, with viewers submitting their own art work. I was playing bongos on them in between takes because it was hilarious and he thought it was hilarious and I didnt stop to think, what the hell am I doing?, shared actor Holter Graham, who was 15 years old during filming. It ran two hours a day, six days a week. Mary Lou, the Annette Funicello of the show, was the talk of teenage Baltimore. The Buddy Deane Show was taken off the air because home station WJZ-TV was unwilling to integrate black and white dancers. They kept their figures, look nice, and are very kind people, says Marie in her lovely home on Falls Road before taking off for the University of Maryland, where she attends law school. IndieWire is a part of Penske Media Corporation. "I told him I thought it was terrible," Melva Lee Scruggs said about the "Buddy Deane Show." Everybody wanted to kick a Buddy Deaners a, says Gene, recalling thugs waiting to jump Deaners outside the studio. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to what it meant for young black people to be excluded from entertainment spaces like the Buddy Deane Show. I still believe that footage is out there somewhere. Deane began his broadcasting career at KLXR in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1957, Deane was chosen by former WITH associate Joel Chaseman to host "The Buddy Deane Show," a dance show for teenagers on WJZ-TV Channel 13. were the highest rated local TV show in America." Amazingly, Deane's show was aired live, two-and-a-half hours each day on five days a week with three hours on Saturday. By representing this realityin bubble-gum, technicolor clarityHairspray does something that pure documentation, at times, cant: It makes a difficult part of a nations history accessible (and entertaining) to millions of viewers. Although he never appeared on Deane's show, Waters attended high school with a "Buddy Deaner" and later gave Deane a cameo in the film, in which Deane played a TV reporter who tried to interview the governor who was besieged by integration protesters. An then there was teased hair, replacing the 50s drape with a Buddy Deane look that so pervaded Baltimore culture (especially in East and South Baltimore) that its effect is still seen in certain neighborhoods of this great Hairdo Capital of the World. We hung around with black and whites together, which you couldnt do. The Buddy Deane Show was over. John Waters, a Baltimore filmmaker and Deane Show fan, loosely based "The Corny Collins' Show" in his movie "Hairspray" on Deane's show. Im a typical housewife, says Peanuts. If you leaned on one side, the next day youd just pick it out into shape. A devoted fan of the Buddy Deane Show, Waters drew on this history to write and direct the original film version of Hairspray. Once a month the show was all black. The movie was eventually turned into a musical by the same name. And if you dared to dance the obscene Bodie Green (the Dirty Boogie), you were immediately a goner. He was one of the first disc jockeys in the area to regularly feature rock and roll. "I remember it well," recalls Evanne. He got a great review in The New York Times. has the chance to resurface a forgotten history of how discrimination in pop culture intimately shaped the lives of young people 50 years ago. You could throw her down on the ground, and her hair would crack, recalls Gene. I saw the show as a vehicle to make something of myself, remembers Joe. From 1968 into 1973, the public television variety show SOUL! Maybe that was a good choice because Divine was 40 then., She played against-type, certainly. The inspiration for this movie was born out of an afternoon teen dance show, The Buddy Deane Show, which aired on Baltimore's WJZ-TV from 1957-1964 until it was taken off the air because the owner did not want to integrate. The musical is based on John Waters' 1988 campy movie of the same name. The information used was obtained from WJZ. But something unforeseen happened: The home audience soon grew attached to some of these kids. That she has an affluent life-style surprises no one on the Committee. If Im ever depressed, sometimes I think, Well this will make me feel better, and I go and dig in the box., Holding onto the memories more than anyone is Arlene Kozak, who is by far the most loved by all the Committee members. He was 16 at the time of filming. 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