NRR Archives on YouTube started posting old rock and roll clips from Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show. Clips feature Johhny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Connie Francis, Dion and the Belmonts, Bobby Darin, Annette Funicello, The Platters, Sam Cooke, The Everly Brothers, Conway Twitty, Ronnie Hawkins, Jackie Wilson and many others. Check out the NRR Archive link to see the clips. Here is Roy Orbison singing “Uptown” (the clip also includes Anita Bryant singing “Paper Roses”).
Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show, also known as “The Dick Clark Show,” ran on ABC at 7:30-8:00 p.m. (EST) on Saturdays (of course) from February 15, 1958 through September 10, 1960. During this same period, Clark also hosted the show for which he is most remembered, American Bandstand, which ran on weekdays. Bandstand, which in contrast to the Beech-Nut Show featured dancing, was mainly broadcast from Philadelphia, requiring Clark to travel back and forth to Manhattan, from where the Beech-Nut Show was generally broadcast.
Although the Saturday show sponsored by “the brightest and the happiest gum there ever was” may be less remembered than some of Clark’s other work, the show had a lot of great classic music. Check out Johnny Cash singing “The Rebel (Johnny Yuma)” below and then check out the other clips.
What is your favorite clip in the archive? Leave your two cents in the comments.
It has been awhile since I spent a Sunday in church, and the last time I visited, the preacher spent more time talking about politics than about faith. But I do love to hear beautiful gospel songs. You do not need to be religious to open yourself up to these songs, which at the heart, are really love songs. In this three-part series, we are discussing the Best Gospel Songs by Pop Singers. We start off with songs by Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan.
Nearer to Thee, Sam Cooke
Yes, I’m cheating. The Soul Stirrers were a gospel group. But this song is featured because their lead singer Sam Cooke, who is one of my favorite singers, went on to popular secular success on his own.
The song builds gradually with the hypnotic background vocals and Cooke’s fantastic voice. On this recording you can hear Cooke gradually working up the crowd, slowly, slowly, building . . . building . . . building . . . toward release and salvation. Beautiful.
Although Cooke recorded many great popular songs as a secular artist, few reached the intensity of “Nearer to Thee.” The one secular song that reaches a similar frenzy is his live version of “Bring It On Home to Me,” available on One Night Stand: Live at the Harlem Square Club 63.
Pressing On, Bob Dylan
I was too young to notice when Bob Dylan first became a phenomenon, but I do remember when everyone was surprised that he became a born-again Christian in the late 1970s. His music from this period includes a number of outstanding original gospel songs, including “Gotta Serve Somebody.”
One song from this period that is less well-known than some others is “Pressing On.” As Sam Cooke did in “Nearer to Thee,” Dylan effectively uses repetition. He repeats “I’m pressing on” throughout the song to provide a hypnotic quality not unlike a moving church service.
Here is the version of “Pressing On” by John Doe that was featured in the very good movie “about” Bob Dylan, I’m Not There (2007). Doe, founder of the punk bank X, does an excellent cover.
In this scene, Christian Bale does a great job of playing the singing Dylan and capturing the hypnotic nature of the song. Critic Greil Marcus wrote that the Doe-Bale combination is the place where the song found its voice. (“Themes from a Summer Place,” New West, July 28, 1980).
Another great gospel song by Bob Dylan, and perhaps his greatest, is “Every Grain of Sand.” For other great gospel songs by popular artists, check out upcoming posts in this series of Best Gospel Songs by Pop Singers. ..
What are your favorite gospel recordings by popular artists? Leave a comment.
After Homer Plessy sat down in a car for white riders only, Plessy was then arrested. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day this March 17, which also is the birthday of Homer Plessy, who was born in New Orleans on March 17, 1862 and is one of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. His work and action of trying to take a train led to one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history.
Homer Plessy’s Train Ride
Thirty years after his birth, Plessy bought a first-class ticket on a Louisiana railroad on June 7, 1892. Plessy, who was part African-American, was working with the civil rights group Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans to challenge segregation laws.
The Committee had notified the railroad of what was happening. And when Plessy sat down in a car for white riders only, a conductor asked him about his race. Plessy was then arrested.
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. In the case, Plessy overwhelmingly lost by a vote of 7-1. In the case, the Court upheld the state’s segregation law under a doctrine permitting “separate but equal” facilities.
Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the majority, claiming that if one views separate facilities for the races as implying one is inferior, that was “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” (163 U.S. at 551.) Justice John Marshall Harlan, who was from Kentucky, was the lone dissenter on Plessy’s side.
“A Change Is Gonna Come”
Sam Cooke’s famous song, “A Change Is Gonna Come” may have been partly inspired by an incident similar to Plessy’s that happened in the same state. According to Peter Guralnick’s Cooke biography Dream Boogie, in 1963 Cooke and his band tried to check into a segregated Holiday Inn hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana.
The clerk would not let them check in. Cooke argued with the clerk until his wife and others convinced him to leave because they feared reprisals. Soon thereafter, the police tracked them down and charged them with creating a public disturbance.
Cooke wrote and recorded “A Change Is Gonna Come” the same year as the hotel incident. In the song, Cooke wrote, “Somebody keep telling me ‘don’t hang around.’ / It’s been a long, a long time coming, /But i know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.” Other national factors also inspired Cooke to write the song, such as Bob Dylan’s songs and sit-in protests taking place in the south.
The Legacy of Homer Plessy
Homer Plessy died on March 1, 1925, so he did not get to see Plessy v. Ferguson, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history, overruled. But his cause did eventually win. The Supreme Court overruled the case in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, which was later followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Not long ago, the descendants of Homer Plessy got together with the descendants of Louisiana Judge John Howard Ferguson, the other named party in Plessy v. Ferguson. The two families created the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation to work for equality.
Around 60 years after Homer Plessy took a seat on the train, another person helped inspire the Civil Rights Movement like Plessy did, by refusing to give up her seat in 1955. In that year, Rosa Parks’s refusal led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a landmark moment in the struggle for Civil Rights.
When years later Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Rosa Parks sought comfort in listening to Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” She said Cooke’s voice was “like medicine to the soul. It was as if Dr. King was speaking directly to me.” (Guralnick, p. 651.)
There is a little of Homer Plessy’s voice in the song too.
What do you think? Leave a comment and give a Stumble if you like.
NRR Archives on YouTube started posting old rock and roll clips from Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show. Clips feature Johhny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Connie Francis, Dion and the Belmonts, Bobby Darin, Annette Funicello, The Platters, Sam Cooke, The Everly Brothers, Conway Twitty, Ronnie Hawkins, Jackie Wilson and many others. Check out the NRR Archive link to see the clips. Here is Roy Orbison singing “Uptown” (the clip also includes Anita Bryant singing “Paper Roses”).
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