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One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television

2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/screen/hjt028

1460-2474

Carolyn Birdsall,

Media Studies and Communication

Media events can provide evocative explanations for the shifts and breaks in the histories of media such as radio, film and television. In the case of US cultural history, one such ‘historic’ moment is found in Elvis Presley's televised music performances that started in January 1956. These television appearances have fuelled a popular myth about the ‘arrival’ of music on US television, and are frequently credited with facilitating the meteoric rise of rock'n'roll, Presley's stardom and postwar youth culture. In One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount, Murray Forman challenges this conventional periodization and posits that television music in 1956 be necessarily understood as a reflection of already-established efforts to achieve confluence between music and television. Rather than only celebrate the effects of this television debut, Forman asserts that Presley and his audiences were, in fact, already familiar with a broad range of television music programming and personalities.