Duke University Press One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Console-ing Passions)

Elvis Presley's television debut in January 1956 is often cited as the moment when popular music and television came together. Murray Forman challenges that contention, revealing popular music as crucial to television years before Presley's sensational small-screen performances. Drawing on trade and popular journalism, internal television and music industry documents, and records of audience feedback, Forman provides a detailed history of the incorporation of musical performances into TV programming during the medium's formative years, from 1948 to 1955. He examines how executives in the music and television industries understood and responded to the convergence of the two media; how celebrity musicians such as Vaughn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Fred Waring struggled to adjust to television; and how relative unknowns with an intuitive feel for the medium were sometimes catapulted to stardom. Forman argues that early television production influenced the aesthetics of musical performance in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly those of emerging musical styles such as rock and roll. At the same time, popular music helped to shape the nascent medium of television―its technologies, program formats, and industry structures. Popular music performances were essential to the allure and success of TV in its early years. Review " One Night on Television is Worth Weeks at the Paramount is a rich resource. The detailed descriptions of television musical performances and the analysis of such a wide range of archival sources provides a comprehensive account of the emerging practices and processes of television music in the U.S.A: this is valuable to any scholar interested in the history of television, popular music, and music on screen."--Lauren Anderson "Screening the Past" " One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount will be the standard work on postwar U.S. music and television. Murray Forman gives us a full picture of cultural change in a key period of media transition. Reading his book, we witness the breakup of the big bands, the dismantling of the Hollywood system, the rise of network television, and the tense politics of race and ethnicity that marked popular American entertainment in the 1940s and 1950s."-- Will Straw, author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America "[A] fascinating and rich account.... Forman's study is a welcome contribution to a neglected topic within both popular music and television history. The study offers astute insights on the period from 1930-1955, which are generated from his combination of industrial and cultural history with theoretical reflections and close analysis.... [T]he study significantly redresses numerous orthodoxies in the respective histories of popular music and television."--Carolyn Birdsall "Screen" "[A] recollection and examination of what exactly went into the first days of that ground-breaking marriage between music and television, far before the first episode of 120 Minutes even aired. The book takes an impressively researched look at how much effort went into making sure this combination could even get off the ground, let alone explode into the massive fixture it is today, by focusing on the technological and developmental advancements of the late '40s and early '50s as it related to utilizing this particular form of media."--Colin McGuire "PopMatters" "Forman's deft analysis of historical materials amounts to a considerable contribution to our knowledge of postwar American popular culture, and the book's theoretical concerns bring television studies, American studies, and popular music studies into a productive dialogue."--Jacob Smith "Journal of American Studies" "In One Night on TV, Murray Forman offers an intelligent history of popular music's place on early TV. In the process, he fills a significant gap in our understanding of early television in America.... One Night on TV should be of value to all of those interested in television's