Ric Ocasek as the Beatnik cat; Pia Zadora as the Beatnik chick; Production. I couldnt be bothered with education. Arlene Kozak, Buddys assistant and den mother to the Committee. Some fifty years later, the mindset is STILL the same. You will be redirected back to your article in, Get The Latest IndieWire Alerts And Newsletters Delivered Directly To Your Inbox. In 2003, "Hairspray" went on to sweep the 57th Annual Tony Awards, winning a total of eight awards. Greetings, Pat Brun.Thanks for commenting in this pancocojams discussion thread. This assessment proved true when on Aug. 12, 1963 a group of black and white kids stormed the stage of "The Buddy Deane Show" and danced together. No! she answers, with a conviction that gives me the chills. Ninfa O. Barnard wrote this article for explorepinebluff.com. That show featured local teens who danced to the hits of the era, although the entire cast was white except for one episode every other Friday for Black kids. The buddy dean show debuted on Sep. 9. Its host was Winston "Buddy" Deane (1924-2003), who died in Pine Bluff, Arkansas after . And it was not unique: Dick Reids Record Hop in Charleston, West Virginia; Ginny Paces Saturday Hop in Houston, Texas; John Dixons Dixon on Disc in Mobile, Alabama; Bill Sanderss show in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Dewey Phillipss Pop Shop in Memphis, Tennessee; and Chuck Allens Teen Tempo in Jackson, Mississippi, were all segregated dance shows. 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 . I was with this guy named Jeff. Whats great about the choreography in [You Cant Stop the Beat] is that, subtly, the black dancers and the white dancers have the same choreography, the executive producer Neil Meron said in the DVD commentary for the 2007 film. . Plot. In Little Rock, white teens went from protesting integration at Central High School to dancing in the afternoon on Steves Show. The Buddy Deane Show was over. BLACK MUSIC MOMENT #96: Short-Lived Integration Of The Buddy Deane Show, Jun 1, 2011 By TheUrbanDaily Staff. Advertisement. Although the show has been off the air for more than twenty years, a nearly fanatical cult of fans has managed to keep the memory alive. It was similar to Philadelphia's American Bandstand. 'Buddy Deane' really did have "Negro day" once a month -- it was called worse in some neighborhoods in Baltimore. I even won the twist contest with Mary Lou Raines (one of the queens of The Buddy Deane Show) at the Valley Country Club. . Kathy switched to a great beehive that resembled a trash can sitting on top of her head. Pixie was barely five feet tall, but her hair sometimes added a good six to eight inches to her height. Buddy Deane was the host of a Baltimore dance show that ran on TV from 1957 to 1964 six days a week. The show featured only white kids dancing, so Scruggs wrote him a letter in the fall of 1958 to . Deane died in Pine Bluff, Arkansas on July 16, 2003, after suffering a stroke. One girl yelled Buddy Deaner and then threw her plate at me. Mary Lou, the Annette Funicello of the show, was the talk of teenage Baltimore. Most Deaner girls wouldnt even tongue-kiss, claims Arlene, remembering the ruckus caused by a Catholic priest when the Committee modeled strapless Etta gowns on TV. His childhood nickname was Buddy. The Buddy Deane Show was a teen dance television show, created by Zvi Shoubin, hosted by Winston "Buddy" Deane (1924-2003), and aired on WJZ-TV (Channel 13), the ABC affiliate station in Baltimore from 1957 until 1964. Owing to Deane's mid-South roots and work history, he featured many performers from the ranks of country and western music (e.g., Skeeter Davis, singing "The End of the World" and Brenda Lee singing "Sweet Nothin's"), who then achieved cross-over hits among rock and roll fans. Almost all dancers wore swim wear and beach attire, with music provided by WJZ-TV. Just once. The show's format mirrored Philadelphia's "American Bandstand." And the whole concept of the Committee changed. A devoted fan of the Buddy Deane Show, Waters drew on this history to write and direct the original film version of Hairspray. WJZ's show aired from 1957 to 1964 and was popular among Baltimore teens, promoting dances like the twist, mashed potato, and the Madison. Special appearances. Vanessa Udon plays Motormouth Maybelle, who hosts the monthly Negro Day on the Corny Collins Show. Joe remembers a sport coat I bought for $5 from somebody who got it when he got out of prison. A big strong line!) up the hill to the famous dance party set, the one that now houses People Are Talking. Even doing commercials was expected. August 8, 2022 at 3:55 a.m. Nicknamed "Buddy" as a child, Deane . I was totally star-struck and had as much fun that night as I did at the Cannes Film Festival. Everybody wanted to kick a Buddy Deaners a, says Gene, recalling thugs waiting to jump Deaners outside the studio. You cant do this. I remember once we all got arrested at the drive-in for underage drinking, and the black kids didnt get out and the white kids did. Hairspray was the actors first film, before Dead Poets Society, which came out the next year. It was difficult with your peers, recalls Peanuts. Both black and white activists picketed the . Nicknamed "Buddy" as a child, Deane developed an early love for radio. The movie was eventually turned into a musical by the same name. Buddy offered to have three or even four days a week all black, but that wasnt it. Im the biggest ham. Although she denies being conscious of the camera, she admits, I did try to dance up front. 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. I remember it well, recalls Evanne. Committee members included Mike Miller, Charlie Bledsoe, Ron Osher, Mary Lou Raines, Pat(ricia) Tacey, and Cathy Schmink. The action of the musical takes place in 1962 and centers around Baltimore's teenage obsession with the television program The Corny Collins Show, a stand-in for an actual Baltimore production of the day, The Buddy Deane Show. You are history. As Marie puts it, The rewards were so great emotionally that you didnt have to ask for a monetary award., Many had difficulties dealing with the void when the show went off the air. She became so popular that she was written up in the nationwide Sixteen Magazine. Every weekday afternoon, in each of these broadcast markets, these shows presented images of exclusively white dancers and rendered black youth as second-class teenagers. 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. The television news reporter covering the Corny Collins Show in the film sums up the climactic scene: Youre seeing history being made today. The black cops would stop us and say: This isnt Greenwich Village, you know. That show featured local teens who danced to the. Why not do The Deane Show on TV again? The more hair spray, the better. But as more and more kids (even Deane fans) did tum Joe College, many of the Committee made the mistake of not keeping up with the times. The Buddy Deane Show: With Channing Wilroy, Buddy Deane. Or Hartford Motor Coach Company? While he wasnt on the committee, Waters occasionally danced on the show as a guest. The Stupidity, where you act mentally ill. The Bugs easy, you just catch a disease and throw it to someone else, Waters said. The regulars . Before long I started getting lots of fan mail: I think youre neat. The Deane program set aside every other Friday for a show featuring only black teenagers. I must have had ten different phone numbers, says Helen, and somehow it would get out. Deaners seem to come out of the woodwork, drawn by the memory of their stardom. Id get letters saying, If you show up at this particular hop, youre gonna get your face pushed in. So a year later when he had his own show, it seemed only right that "Rock Around the Clock" premiered on "The Buddy Deane Show.". Once a month the show was all black. The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll, sponsored by Matt Palumbo's MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN for Friday shows that 46% of Likely U.S. Integration ended The Buddy Deane Show. Powers was a particularly special addition, having disappeared in the years since the films release. The Buddy Deane Show was taken off the air because home station WJZ-TV was unwilling to integrate black and white dancers. Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! 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 Funtown reference is powerful because it captures one of the ways that Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy played out for children and teenagers. . The story also locates racial prejudice in a single character, Velma Von Tussle (played in the live musical by Kristin Chenoweth), which enables the other white characters to remain largely innocent bystanders to the discrimination faced by the programs black teenagers. I was able after a while to afford some clothes from Lees of Broadway (whose selection of belted coats and pegged pants made it the Saks Fifth Avenue of Deaners). 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. This town just wasnt ready for that. There were threats and bomb scares; integrationists smuggled whites into the all-black shows to dance cheek to cheek on camera with blacks, and that was it. . "If you first appeared on The Buddy Deane Show then you could not appear on The Dick Clark Show," Deane said. [2], https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Buddy_Deane_Show&oldid=1101079819. The introductory essay in Dick Clark's American Bandstand (1997) is illustrative in this regard. The AP will not be held liable for any delays, inaccuracies, errors or omissions therefrom or in the transmission or delivery of all or any part thereof or for any damages arising from any of the foregoing. Not a real one. All the choreography in the movie prior to this was segregated by race, and now its all together, which is a very, very subtle reference to the theme of this movie.. In mixed marriages (with non-Deaners), many of the outsiders resented their spouses pasts. One time I was going with this guy, and he was dancing with this guest I didnt like, says Evanne. But an intrepid group of local and . And the other ladies in Allentown blue-collar neighborhood in Baltimore were talking to her and saying, Yeah, what kind of movie is this? They thought she was a real woman that lived on the street, you know. Only white teens became members of the elite Committee the Buddy Deane equivalent of the Mouseketeers. Im still a fana Deaner groupie. Yeah it was Cosenel, says Joe. Buddy Deane. Buddy noticed my eyes staring and said, Do the same eyes. And the camera got it. Kathy went even further. Many top acts of the day, both black and white, appeared on The Buddy Deane Show. I graduated from an HBCU, lived through racism, marched on Washington with Martin Luther King, and was active in fighting injustices in Baltimore County at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1950, he moved to Baltimore to WITH. The show was a teen dance and music show and ran from 1957 to until 1964 on WJZ-TV until the show was canceled. I dont think Ill ever get over missing it, if you want to know the truth., Many of the Committee members spouses faced an even bigger adjustment. Clip from Shake, Rattle, and Roll: The Buddy Deane Scrapbook Friday, February 24, 2023. Once a Deaner, always a Deaner, as another so succinctly puts it. I'm sure they could have reached out to me via these posts, but did not. Why Europeans Dont Get Huge Medical Bills. Although WJZ-TV, owned by Westinghouse Broadcasting (now CBS since January 2, 1995), was an ABC affiliate, the station "blacked out" the network broadcast of American Bandstand in Baltimore and broadcast the Deane program instead, reportedly because Bandstand showed black teenagers dancing on the show (although black and white teenagers were not allowed to dance together until the show was moved to California in 1964). On the show you were either a drape or a square, explains Sharon. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Baltimore Magazine. So that was all true in a way, in a weird way., The girls hair was higher, the pants were tighter, and in real life it went off the air because they wouldnt integrate it. I used to get death threats on the show. In Hairspray (1988), Tammy Turner assists Corny Collins on the show. Originally aired 11/5/1986. January 4, 1964. Waters took inspiration from the real-life Buddy Deane Show, a local dance party program that ran from 1957 to 1964 in the Maryland area. Every day after school kids would run home, tune in, and dance with the bedpost or refrigerator door as they watched. In December 1963, producers at Baltimores WJZ-TV cancelled the Buddy Deane Show rather than integrate the popular teen dance program. The Buddy Deane Show was taken off the air because home station WJZ-TV was unwilling to integrate black and white dancers. His running joke with listeners was that he ran the town from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. until the city's real mayor took over. The very first day on the set, I didnt recognize Divine, the filmmaker said. From 1964 to 1984, Deane hosted a show and owned KOTN-FM and KOTN-AM radio stations at Pine Bluff. 'The Buddy Deane Show' was over . With the rising pressures of integration, the producers decided that the show must either be integrated or canceled. Because Buddy Deanes competition was soap operas, the budding teenage romances were sometimes played up for the camera. He wanted me to go to a summer training session to be a trapeze artist. At 21, I married a professional football player, Helen remembers, and he made me burn all the fan mail. This move would have been a footnote in the annals of television if not for the director and Baltimore native John Waters, whose 1988 film Hairspray offered up an alternate history, with its fictional Corny Collins Show and rose-tinted, lets-all-dance-together ending. This sentiment carries through to the songs lyrics. The first and maybe the biggest Buddy Deane queen of all. But Hairspray also resonates for at least one of the same reasons it did in the 80s: It shows how seemingly innocent moments in popular culture were also sites of struggle over who was worthy of being a counted as a somebody in America. The Buddy Deane Show was a teen dance television show, similar to Philadelphia's American Bandstand, that was created by Zvi Shoubin and aired on WJZ-TV in Baltimore, Maryland from 1957 until 1964.The show was taken off the air because home station WJZ-TV was unable to integrate black and white dancers. In 1948, Deane married Helen Stevenson, his childhood sweetheart, whom he first met when he was just four years old. But black kids in . Several local art contests were also held on the show, with viewers submitting their own art work. As well, a show was broadcast from a local farm in Westminster, Maryland. From 1957 to 1963, only white teens were allowed to attend the weekday broadcasts of the Buddy Deane Show, with the exception of one Monday each month when black teenagers filled the studio (the . Waters would rush home . The show featured only white kids dancing, so Scruggs wrote him a letter in the fall of 1958 to . He was one of the first disc jockeys in the area to regularly feature rock and roll. Mary Lou laughs at the memory of doing a pimple medicine spot on camera. 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. At just 10 years old, he and a friend set up their own radio station in a chicken coop that belonged to Deane's mother. In 1942, Deane enrolled at Cornell University in New York. I was a square. The Buddy Deane Show was a teen dance television show, created by Zvi Shoubin, hosted by Winston "Buddy" Deane (1924-2003), and aired on WJZ-TV (Channel 13), the ABC affiliate station in Baltimore from 1957 until 1964. Buddy Deane used to boast that every major rock 'n' roll star of the era appeared on the show, except Elvis Presley and Rick Nelson. Deane even played a small role in the movie, which premiered to moderate success but went on to become a cult classic. He left behind his wife, Helen Stevenson Deane; his three daughters, JoEllen, Dawn, and Debbie and their families. Based loosely on the 1988 film by John Waters, Hairspray centres on Baltimore teen Tracy Turnblad (Carmel Rodrigues), who in 1962 wants nothing more than a chance to dance on the local pop music TV. In my on-going search for African American footage I stumbled across this article in Google. No matter how progressive we become, there will always be those who will still hang on to the tradition of hate. . Hopefully, some footage of you and the other Black dancers will be found and published online.Best wishes to you and yes, GOD HELP US! Even racists like it, Waters said in his opening remarks. and later on, growing up, it was a definite blow: reality. I still have a whole box of fan mail, says Evanne. C. Fields in drag.), This movie is the only radical movie I ever made because it snuck in mid-America. Hundreds of thousands of teens learned the latest dances by watching Committee members on the show, copying their personal style, and following their life stories and interactions. BLACK MUSIC MOMENT #96: Short-Lived Integration Of The Buddy Deane Show. The show featured only white kids dancing, so Scruggs wrote him a letter in the fall of 1958 to . After a surprise interracial broadcast, WJZ-TV received bomb and arson threats, hate mail, and complaints from white parents. Being a teenage star in Baltimore had its drawbacks. Checking back with the studio, no one had information concerning footage of African American dancers. three, two, one. Waters based the main storyline and "The Corny Collins Show" on the real-life "The Buddy Deane Show" and racial events surrounding it. And Divine said, What drag queen would allow themselves to look like this?'. Ladies and gentlemen, the nicest kids in town!. You could throw her down on the ground, and her hair would crack, recalls Gene. 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