After 15 years and more than 4,000 episodes, the serial gave way to a weekly situation comedy and the characterizations grew more exaggerated. Today, the original Amos 'n' Andy is almost completely forgotten-its substance overshadowed by the unacceptability of white actors portraying African-American characters and lost to the memory of the broadly played sitcom that replaced it. Nevertheless, Amos 'n' Andy remains a landmark in U.S. broadcasting history.

Origins

  Amos 'n' Andy grew out of Sam 'n' Henry, created by Free­ man F. Gosden and Charles J. Correll, two former producers of home-talent revues who had begun their careers as a comic harmony team on Chicago radio in 192 5. They had been asked by the management of station WGN to adapt the popular comic strip "The Gumps" for broadcasting, but were intimidated by its middle-class setting. Instead, they suggested a "radio comic strip" about two black men from the South moving to the North, characterizations that would draw on Gosden's familiarity since childhood with African-American dialect, and that would enable the performers to remain anonymous-an important consideration if the program should fail.

     Sam 'n' Henry premiered on 12 January 1926 as the first nightly serial program on American radio, combining black dialect with certain character traits and storytelling themes from "The Gumps." The early episodes were often crude, but Gosden and Correll gradually learned how to tell involving stories and to create complex human characterizations.

     By the spring of 1926 the performers had begun recording Sam 'n' Henry sketches for Victor, and the success of these records suggested to the performers that live broadcasting need not be their only course. Accordingly, the partners suggested to WGN that their programs be recorded and the recordings leased to other stations. WGN rejected the proposal, citing its ownership of the series and its characters. Gosden and Correll left WGN in December 1927, moving to station WMAQ, owned by the Chicago Daily News, and negotiated an agreement that included syndication rights. Arrangements were made for advance recordings of each episode on 12" 78 rpm discs that would be distributed to subscribing stations for airing in synchronization with the live broadcast from WMAQ. Correll and Gosden called this a "chainless chain" and, realizing the value of the concept, attempted to secure a patent, but were unable to do so; however, by the early 1930s their idea had formed the basis for the broadcast syndication industry.

Transition

     The WMAQ series introduced Amos Jones and Andy Brown as hired hands on a farm outside Atlanta, looking ahead to their planned move to Chicago. Amos was plagued by self-doubts and worried about finding work in the North, whereas the swaggering Andy was quick to insist that he had the answers to everything.

     Amos and Andy struggled until they met Sylvester, a soft­ spoken, intelligent teenager patterned after the black youth who had been Gosden's closest childhood friend. Sylvester helped Amos and Andy start their own business, the Fresh Air Taxicab Company, and introduced them to a cultured, successful, middle-class businessman named William Taylor and his bright, attractive daughter Ruby, who soon became Amos' fiancee. They also met the potentate of a local fraternity, George "Kingfish" Stevens, a smooth-talking hustler who insinuated himself and his constant money making schemes into their lives.

Chainless Chain to Network

      Within a few months Amos 'n' Andy had attracted a national following and the attention of the Pepsodent Company, which negotiated to bring the serial to the coast-to-coast NBC Blue network in the summer of 1929. Amos, Andy, and the Kingfish relocated from Chicago to Harlem at the start of the network run, but otherwise the storyline continued unchanged.

     At first, the program was heard at 11 P.M. Eastern time, but Pepsodent sought an earlier time slot for Eastern listeners and NBC was able to clear time at 7 P.M. As soon as the ​​career, had he applied himself, but who preferred the freedom of living by his wits.

     Other characters displayed a broad range of human foibles: the rigid, hard-working Brother Crawford, the social climber Henry Van Porter, the arrogant Frederick Montgomery Gwin­dell, the slow-moving but honest Lightning, the flamboyant Madam Queen. Still other characters stood as bold repudiations of stereotypes: the graceful, college-educated Ruby Taylor; her quietly dignified father, the self-made millionaire Roland Weber; and the capable and effective lawyers, doctors, and bankers who advised Amos and Andy in times of crisis. Beneath the dialect and racial imagery, the series celebrated the virtues of friendship, persistence, hard work, and common sense and, as the years passed and the characterizations were refined, Amos 'n' Andy achieved an emotional depth rivaled by few other radio programs of the 1930s.

     Above all, Correll and Gosden were gifted dramatists. Their plots flowed gradually from one into the next, with minor sub-plots building in importance until they took over the narrative and then receding to give way to the next major sequence; seeds for future storylines were often planted months in advance. It was this complex method of story construction that kept the program fresh and enabled Correll and Gosden to keep their audience in a constant state of suspense. The technique they developed for radio from that of the narrative comic strip endures to the present day as the standard method of storytelling in serial drama.

     Storylines in Amos 'n' Andy usually revolved around themes of money and romance-Amos' progress toward the goal of marrying his beloved Ruby Taylor stood in contrast to Andy's romantic fumblings-with the daily challenge of making ends meet forming a constant backdrop. The taxicab company remained the foundation of Amos and Andy's enterprises, but the partners constantly explored other ventures, including a lunchroom, a hotel, a grocery, a filling station, and a 500- acre housing development. Andy invariably claimed the executive titles, while Amos shouldered the majority of the work, until Amos' temper finally blazed and Andy was forced to carry his share of the load.

     The moneymaking adventures of the Kingfish moved in and out of these plotlines, and through the Depression era Amos 'n' Andy offered a pointed allegory for what had happened to America itself in the 1920s: Amos represented traditional economic values, believing that wealth had to be earned, whereas the Kingfish embodied the Wall Street lure of easy money, and Andy stood in the middle, the investor torn between prudence and greed.

     Although Amos 'n' Andy's ratings gradually declined from the peak years of the early 1930s, it remained the most popular program in its time slot until 1941. Correll and Gosden and their characters had become a seemingly permanent part of the American scene.

     The early 1930s saw criticism of the dialect and lower-class characterizations in the series by some African Americans, but Amos 'n' Andy also had black supporters who saw the series as a humanizing influence on the portrayal of blacks in the popular media. A campaign against the program by the Pittsburgh Courier in mid-1931 represented the most visible black opposition the radio series would receive-and, although the paper claimed to have gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures against the series, the campaign was abruptly abandoned after six months of publicity failed to generate a clear consensus. Throughout Amos 'n' Andy's run, African-American opinion remained divided on the interpretation of the complex, often contradictory racial images portrayed in the program.

A New Direction

     On 19 February 1943 Correll and Gosden broadcast the final episode of the original Amos 'n' Andy. In a busy wartime world, the era of the early-evening comedy-drama serial was drawing to an end.

     Correll and Gosden returned to the air that fall in a radically different format. The gentle, contemplative mood of the serial was replaced by a brassy Hollywoodized production, complete with studio audience, a full cast of supporting actors (most of them African-American) and a team of writers hired to translate Amos, Andy, the Kingfish, and their friends into full-fledged comedy stars. The new Amos 'n' Andy Show endured for the next 12 years as one of the most popular weekly programs on the air.

     The sitcom initially stuck close to the flavor of the original series; with Amos having settled down to family life, the storylines in the last years of the serial had focused on Andy's romantic entanglements and on his business dealings with the Kingfish. At first the half-hour series continued in this pattern, emphasizing plots that could be wrapped up with an O. Henry-like surprise twist at the end. By 1946, however, the Kingfish had moved to the forefront, driving the plots through his eternal quest for fast money and his endless battles with his no-nonsense wife Sapphire. The subtle blend of self-importance, guilelessness, and vulnerability that had characterized Andy was gradually replaced by simple gullibility, and for the Kingfish's increasingly outlandish schemes to work, Andy had to become not just gullible but more than a little stupid. Amos receded further into the background, his presence reduced to that of a brief walk-on, in which he would tip Andy off that the Kingfish had again played him for a fool. The relaxed intimacy of the original series had been replaced by an increasing emphasis on verbal slapstick. The subtlety of the original characterizations was lost in a barrage of one-liners. At the same time, however, the new series offered African-American performers a doorway into mainstream radio, in both comedic and non dialect, non stereotyped supporting roles.

     In 1948 Correll and Gosden sold the program to the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), initiating a chain of events that led directly to William Paley's "Talent Raid," and the network immediately began plans to bring the series to television with an all African-American cast. The TV version of The Amos 'n' Andy Show was dogged by controversy as CBS took the characters even further down the path of broad comedy, culminating in a formal protest of the TV series by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1951. The TV series was cancelled in 1953, but remained in rerun syndication until 1966.

     The radio version of The Amos 'n' Andy Show was not mentioned in the NAACP protest. Radio was a dying medium, however, and when the weekly show ended in May 1955 the performers had already begun their next series, The Amos 'n' Andy Music Hall, a nightly feature of recorded music sandwiched between pre-recorded bits of dialogue. Coasting on the familiarity of the characters, this final series ran for more than six years.

     On 25 November 1960 CBS aired the final broadcast of The Amos 'n' Andy Music Hall. After a brief comeback-in which they provided voices for the 1961-62 American Broadcast Company-TV animated series Calvin and the Colonel, which reworked Amos 'n' Andy Show plots into funny-animal stories-Correll and Gosden slipped quietly into retirement.

     Although audio recordings of most of the situation comedy episodes exist, most of the serial survives only as archival scripts, stored at the University of Southern California and the Library of Congress. Modern discussions of Amos 'n' Andy commonly focus more on deconstruction of its racial subtext than on examination of the original program-often obscuring the seminal role Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll played in the development of American broadcasting.