Plot
A radio disc jockey is about to lose his program's sponsor because the sponsor believes that television viewing is cutting down the size of the listening audience for radio programs, and those featuring platter-spinning radio disc jockeys. He sets out to prove otherwise and calls on twenty-eight disc jockeys in major cities across the United States to help prove his contention.
Keywords: 1950s, actor-shares-first-and-last-name-with-character, actor-shares-first-name-with-character, actor-shares-last-name-with-character, actress-shares-first-and-last-name-with-character, actress-shares-first-name-with-character, actress-shares-last-name-with-character, archive-footage, atlanta-georgia, audience-competition
All-Star Jam Session
Ernest Loring "Red" Nichols (May 8, 1905 – June 28, 1965) was an American jazz cornettist, composer, and jazz bandleader.
Over his long career, Nichols recorded in a wide variety of musical styles, and critic Steve Leggett describes him as "an expert cornet player, a solid improviser, and apparently a workaholic, since he is rumored to have appeared on over 4,000 recordings during the 1920s alone."
Red Nichols is a name which comes to us from the jazz of the 1920s, a time when Nichols was a fecund recording artist. But that name got a second lease on life when Hollywood made a movie, The Five Pennies, (starring Danny Kaye) very loosely based on Nichols’ life, in 1959.
Ernest Loring (“Red”) Nichols was born on May 8, 1905 in Ogden, Utah. His father was a college music professor, and Nichols was a child prodigy, because by twelve he was already playing difficult set pieces for his father’s brass band. The young Nichols heard the early recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (which was not in fact “original,” but was the first “jazz” band to record), and later those of Bix Beiderbecke, and these had a strong influence on the young cornet player. His style became polished, clean and incisive.
Lawrence Welk (March 11, 1903 – May 17, 1992) was an American musician, accordionist, bandleader, and television impresario, who hosted The Lawrence Welk Show from 1955 to 1982. His style came to be known to his large number of radio, television, and live-performance fans (and critics) as "champagne music".
In 1996, Welk was ranked #43 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.
Welk was born in the German-speaking community of Strasburg, North Dakota. He was sixth of the eight children of Ludwig and Christiana (Schwahn) Welk, ethnic Germans who emigrated to America in 1892 from Selz, Kutschurgan District, in the German-speaking area north of Odessa (now Odessa, Ukraine, but then in southwestern Russia).
The family lived on a homestead that today is a tourist attraction. They spent the cold North Dakota winter of their first year under an upturned wagon covered in sod.[citation needed]
Welk decided on a career in music and persuaded his father to buy a mail-order accordion for $400 (equivalent to $4,641 as of 2012). He promised his father that he would work on the farm until he was 21, in repayment for the accordion. Any money he made elsewhere during that time, doing farmwork or performing, would go to his family.
Irving Milfred Mole, better known as Miff Mole (11 March 1898 – 29 April 1961) was a jazz trombonist and band leader. He is generally considered as one of the greatest jazz trombonists and credited with creating "the first distinctive and influential solo jazz trombone style." His major recordings included "Slippin' Around", "Red Hot Mama" in 1924 with Sophie Tucker on vocals, "Miff's Blues", "There'll Come a Time (Wait and See)", on the film soundtrack to the 2008 movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and "Toddlin' Blues" and "Davenport Blues", recorded in 1925 with Bix Beiderbecke and Tommy Dorsey as Bix Beiderbecke and His Rhythm Jugglers.
Miff Mole was born in Roosevelt, New York. As a child, he studied violin and piano and switched to trombone when he was 15. He played in Gus Sharp's orchestra for two years and in the 1920s went on to become a significant figure of the New York scene: he was a member of the Original Memphis Five (1922), played with Russ Gorman, Roger Wolfe Kahn, Sam Lanin, Ray Miller and many others. His other activities, like those of many jazz musicians at the time, included working for silent film and radio orchestras. In 1926–9 Mole and trumpeter Red Nichols led a band called "Miff Mole and his Little Molers". They recorded frequently until 1930.
Fud Livingston (April 10, 1906 - March 25, 1957) was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, arranger, and composer. He co-wrote the jazz and pop standard "I'm Through With Love".
Fud Livingston started out on accordion and piano before settling on saxophone. He played with Talmadge Henry in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1923, then worked with Ben Pollack, the California Ramblers, Jean Goldkette, Nat Shilkret, Don Voorhees, and Jan Garber; he also recorded freelance with musicians such as Joe Venuti, Red Nichols, and Miff Mole. He did some arrangement work for Frankie Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke, including the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty".
He worked with Fred Elizalde in London in 1929, then returned to New York City to play with Paul Whiteman. His stint with Whiteman, which lasted from 1930 to 1933, was mainly as an arranger, though he played occasionally. Later in the 1930s he worked with Benny Goodman (1934), Jimmy Dorsey (1935-37), Bob Zurke, and Pinky Tomlin (1940). He essentially stopped writing and arranging at this point, though he occasionally performed in small-time venues in New York in the 1950s. He never recorded as a leader.
Adrian Francis Rollini (June 28, 1903 - May 15, 1956) was a multi-instrumentalist best known for his jazz music. He played the bass saxophone, piano, xylophone, and many other instruments. Rollini is also known for introducing the goofus in jazz music. His major recordings included "You've Got Everything" (1933) on Banner, "A Thousand Good Nights" (1934) on Vocalion, "Davenport Blues" (1934) on Decca, "Nothing But Notes", "Tap Room Swing", "Jitters", "Riverboat Shuffle" (1934) on Decca, and "Small Fry" (1938) on CBS.
Rollini was born June 28, 1903 to Ferdinand Rollini and Adele Augenti Rollini. (Some sources will date 1904, but his brother Arthur, as well as social security records will attest to the earlier date.) He was born in New York and was the eldest of several children. Arthur played tenor saxophone with Benny Goodman from 1934 to 1939, and later with Will Bradley). Growing up in Larchmont, New York, he showed musical ability early on, and began to take piano lessons on a miniature piano, at the age of two. At the age of four, he played a fifteen minute recital at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Among the selections played were Chopin's Minute Waltz—he was hailed as a child prodigy and was billed as "Professor Adrian Rollini."