Andy, being a dreamer, tended to let Amos do most of the work. Andy was more blustering, with overinflated self-confidence. At the same time, the serial's central characters - Amos, Andy and George "The Kingfish" Stevens - relocated from Chicago to New York City's Harlem.Īmos was naïve but honest, hard-working and (after his 1935 marriage to Ruby Taylor) a dedicated family man. Under special arrangements "Amos 'n' Andy" debuted coast-to-coast November 28, 1929, on NBC's Pacific "Orange" Network and continued on the "Blue". Western listeners complained to NBC that they wanted to hear the show. At this time the Blue Network was not heard on stations in the West. With the listening audience increasing in the spring and summer of 1928, the show's success prompted the Pepsodent Company to bring it to the NBC Blue Network on August 19, 1929. With four ham and cheese sandwiches and $24, they bought train tickets and headed for Chicago, where they lived in a State Street rooming house and experienced some rough times before launching their own business, the Fresh Air Taxi Company. It was the first radio program to be distributed by syndication in the United States, and by the end of the syndicated run in August 1929, at least 70 stations besides WMAQ carried the program by means of recordings.Īmos Jones and Andy Brown worked on a farm near Atlanta, Georgia, and during the episodes of the first week, they made plans to find a better life in Chicago, despite warnings from a friend. With the episodic drama and suspense heightened by cliffhanger endings, "Amos 'n' Andy" reached an ever-expanding radio audience. Marsh.įor the program's entire run as a nightly serial, Gosden and Correll portrayed all the male roles, performing over 170 distinct voice characterizations in the show's first decade. "Amos 'n' Andy" began March 19, 1928, on WMAQ, and prior to airing each program they recorded their show on 78 rpm disks at Marsh Laboratories, operated by electrical recording pioneer Orlando R. The creators later told an anecdote that they named the new characters Amos and Andy after hearing two elderly African-Americans greet each other by those names in a Chicago elevator.
#AMOS AND ANDY WIKI SERIES#
When WMAQ, the " Chicago Daily News" station, hired the team and their WGN announcer, Bill Hay, to create a series similar to "Sam 'n' Henry", they offered higher salaries than WGN and the rights to pursue the "chainless chain" syndication concept. Contractually, their characters belonged to WGN, so when Gosden and Correll left WGN, they performed in personal appearances but could not use the character names from the radio show.
When WGN rejected the idea, Gosden and Correll quit the show and the station that December. That series became popular enough that in late 1927 Gosden and Correll requested that it be distributed to other stations on phonograph records in a "chainless chain" concept that would have been the first use of radio syndication as we know it today. Their new series, " Sam 'n' Henry", began January 12, 1926, fascinating radio listeners throughout the Midwest. They instead proposed a series about "a couple of colored characters" and borrowed certain elements of "The Gumps". He suggested to Gosden and Correll that they adapt "The Gumps" to radio. Since the "Tribune" syndicated Sidney Smith's popular comic strip " The Gumps", which had successfully introduced the concept of daily continuity, WGN executive Ben McCanna thought the notion of a serialized drama could also work on radio. They met in Durham, North Carolina, in 1920, and by the fall of 1925, they were performing nightly song-and-patter routines on the " Chicago Tribune"'s station WGN. "Amos 'n' Andy" creators Gosden and Correll were white actors familiar with minstrel traditions. A television adaptation ran on CBS-TV from 1951 until 1953, and continued in syndicated reruns from 1954 until 1966.
#AMOS AND ANDY WIKI SERIAL#
The program ran on radio as a nightly serial from 1928 until 1943, as a weekly situation comedy from 1943 until 1955, and as a nightly disc-jockey program from 1954 until 1960.
After the series was first broadcast in 1928, it grew in popularity and became a huge influence on the radio serials that followed. The show began as one of the first radio comedy serials, written and voiced by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll and originating from station WMAQ in Chicago, Illinois. "Amos 'n' Andy" was a situation comedy based on stereotypes of African-Americans and popular in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s.
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