HARRY JAMES AND HIS 20 PIECE "MUSIC MAKERS" ON "SPOTLIGHT BANDS".
AND THE BANDS PLAYED ON...
Coca-Cola decided to pursue the youth market in 1941 citing tobacco companies that had used Network Radio and popular music to get their cigarette sales messages across to young people for over a decade. In the 1940-41 season American Tobacco's Lucky Strikes had scored big hits with Kay Kyser’s College of Musical Knowledge, (11th in the Annual Top 50), and Your Hit Parade, (26th).
Coke’s longtime agency, D’Arcy Advertising, reasoned that a nightly program of top dance bands, (like Kyser’s), and a competition of their record sales, (similar to Hit Parade’s weekly song surveys), would result in a winning format to be called Spotlight Bands. It was decided that the program would be 15 minutes in length Monday through Friday, with a different name band “in the spotlight” every night, capped with a 30 minute Saturday night show when the band with the week’s best record sales would be presented and given the week’s Silver Platter Award. (1)
D’Arcy, which also created Coca-Cola’s famous The Pause That Refreshes theme in 1929, ran into clearance problems for its projected prime time series. Obtaining a quarter hour weeknight strip combined with a half hour at the same start time on Saturday was impossible on Blue, CBS and NBC. But Mutual was a different story - almost,
The young and hungry network gave Coke and its agency a starting time of 10:15 ET every night but Friday, when it was committed to Gillette’s Friday Night Fights at 10:00. It was agreed that Spotlight Bands would be delayed until immediately after the fights, sometimes as late as 11:15 p.m.
With the familiar Coca-Cola theme song, Spotlight Bands debuted on November 3, 1941, with Kay Kyser’s orchestra over 166 Mutual stations. (2) A broadcast from this first group of shows, January 31, 1942, featuring Sammy Kaye’s orchestra and its Silver Platter winning hit, Remember Pearl Harbor, is also posted below. The first ratings were promising - Saturday reached a 5.7 in December - but Coca-Cola wanted a better timeslot - on the hour or half hour - and one that wasn’t dependent on knockouts for its Friday start time.
Mutual needed to please the soft drink that had become its largest advertiser so it cleared out its mostly sustaining programming at 9:30 p.m. ET Monday through Saturday to make room for the rescheduled Spotlight Bands.. A program from this series, February 28, 1942, with Alvino Rey’s band, the King Sisters and their Silver Platter song, Deep In The Heart of Texas, is posted below.
Spotlight Bands was consistent in its start times but its ratings tanked against the higher powered competition found at the earlier hour. The 9:30 show was scheduled opposite Lux Radio Theater on Mondays. (Number Eight for the season), Fibber McGee & Molly on Tuesdays, (Number One), Mr. District Attorney on Wednesday, (Eleven), Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall on Thursday,(13), First Nighter on Friday, (35), and Your Hit Parade on Saturday, (25). Against these shows Spotlight Bands’ weeknight average rating was 3.7 for 135th place and its Saturday rating was 4.0 for 133rd place. After 26 weeks with Mutual, Coca-Cola decided to rethink its format and pulled Spotlight Bands from the network’s schedule on May 2, 1942.
With the country at war, Coke and D’Arcy decided to scrap the Silver Platter awards and turn Spotlight Bands into a Monday through Saturday morale boosting half-hour that would send big bands to the country’s service camps, veterans’ hospitals and defense plants. This format presented a problem for Mutual which had accommodated the first flight of Spotlight Bands with the studios or remote facilities of its major market affiliates. But the new format would take the show into locations where nearby Mutual stations weren’t equipped to successfully produce the remote pickups.
Nobody had to ask the Blue network twice if it could clear the time and handle the technical details involved with producing the Coca-Cola pop concerts from different far-flung locations every night. RCA had divorced Blue from NBC six months earlier, systematically stripped the network of its major programs and put it up for sale, leaving Mark Woods and his Blue management team eager for Coke’s revenue to make their network more attractive to prospective buyers. The deal was struck and Spotlight Bands, now known as The Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands and 25 minutes long, kicked off on Blue with the Harry James band from the Marine Training Base at Parris Island, South Carolina, at 9:30 p.m. on September 21, 1942. (3)
The Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands remained on Blue six nights a week without a break for three years, until June 16, 1945. Most of the broadcasts posted below are from that period, hailed by most critics as its prime. The shows run were all well paced and executed - truly a big band buff’s delight :
November 5, 1943: Jack Teagarden
November 27, 1943: Duke Ellington
January 11, 1945: Tommy Tucker
January 18, 1945: Bobby Sherwood
January 19, 1945: Charlie Spivak
February 13, 1945: Jan Garber
March 14, 1945: Charlie Barnet
March 15, 1945: Benny Goodman
March 19, 1945: Tommy Dorsey
Victory Parade’s ratings, however, didn’t reflect its quality. Over its three seasons on Blue, the show’s average rating was a mediocre 3.2 which roughly translated to a million homes or one-tenth the audience of the season’s top shows. Nevertheless, Coca-Cola made millions of friends by subsidizing hundreds of visits by the country’s top bands to military, medical and industrial facilities during World War II - and those friends kept drinking Coke long after the war ended.
The sale of the Blue network and its conversion to ABC created obstacles to renewal of its Coca-Cola contract so The Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands moved back to Mutual on June 18, 1945 on a limited schedule of 25 minute shows every Monday and Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. (4) A Friday night broadcast was added on July 13th when Double Or Nothing was moved by its sponsor, Feenamint Laxative, to Mutual‘s Sunday night schedule.
When the war ended Spotlight Bands reverted back to its original show title on August 20, 1945. Two broadcasts from this Mutual series are posted - Artie Shaw’s band from October 10, 1945 and Eddy Howard from November 9, 1945. Both shows retained the enthusiasm and production values of the Blue/ABC broadcasts but they unfortunately also had the same sad ratings. (5)
Costs were cut on April 1, 1946, when Spotlight Bands became a showcase for three bands - Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians on Mondays, Xavier Cugat’s Latin rhythms on Wednesdays, and Harry James’ Music Makers on Fridays. The music remained top notch but the spark of the roaming remote broadcasts was gone and Spotlight Bands became just another big band broadcast filling 30 minutes on the Mutual schedule three nights a week. Coke wanted out.
On November 22, 1946, Coca Cola dropped its sponsorship of Spotlight Bands blaming the sugar shortage that curtailed its production of the soft drink. The show limped along under the “sponsorship” of the U.S. Army until December 2nd when Guy Lombardo’s Auld Lang Syne fittingly concluded the series after five seasons and over 1200 broadcasts.
We leave the story of Spotlight Bands with two undated standby broadcasts from its final season, transcribed for use whenever travel or technical difficulties prevented the originally scheduled remote broadcast. Disc scratches date the appearances by Gene Krupa’s band and Les Brown’s Band of Renown, just two of the dozens of orchestras both famous and forgotten that played for Network Radio‘s longest running prime time showcase of big bands.
(1) Week after week repeat winners pestered Spotlight Bands like they did Your Hit Parade. During the first year of Spotlight Bands, Harry James and vocalist Helen Forrest won the Silver Platter for seven consecutive weeks for I Don’t Want To Walk Without You while Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra took the award for five straight weeks with This Love of Mine.
(2) All shows sponsored by Coca-Cola were introduced by an instrumental melody known only as The Coca-Cola Company Theme, composed by conductor/arranger Leonard Joy. Kay Kyser’s orchestra was followed during Spotlight Bands’ first week by Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kaye, Tommy Dorsey and Eddy Duchin. The first week’s Silver Platter was awarded to Freddy Martin for Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto aka Tonight We Love.
(3) The Spotlight Bands run on Blue was 25 minutes. The final five minutes was originally given to blackface comedy sketches by Pick Malone and Pat Pagett as Molasses & January, replaced by British singing star Gracie Fields on October 12,1942. Fields was replaced by motivational speaker Dale Carnegie on January 11, 1943. Singer Grace Morgan took over the five minutes from Carnegie on April 19, 1943 and held it until December 17,1943, when it became the depository for variety of short, miscellaneous programs, most notably, Short, Short Story from February 25, 1944, until April 25, 1945.
(4) The loss of Spotlight Bands cost ABC a reported $2.5 Million in annual Coca-Cola gross billings.
(5) Spotlight Bands finished the 1945-46 season in 170th place with a 3.2 rating.
Copyright © 2015 Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
Coca-Cola decided to pursue the youth market in 1941 citing tobacco companies that had used Network Radio and popular music to get their cigarette sales messages across to young people for over a decade. In the 1940-41 season American Tobacco's Lucky Strikes had scored big hits with Kay Kyser’s College of Musical Knowledge, (11th in the Annual Top 50), and Your Hit Parade, (26th).
Coke’s longtime agency, D’Arcy Advertising, reasoned that a nightly program of top dance bands, (like Kyser’s), and a competition of their record sales, (similar to Hit Parade’s weekly song surveys), would result in a winning format to be called Spotlight Bands. It was decided that the program would be 15 minutes in length Monday through Friday, with a different name band “in the spotlight” every night, capped with a 30 minute Saturday night show when the band with the week’s best record sales would be presented and given the week’s Silver Platter Award. (1)
D’Arcy, which also created Coca-Cola’s famous The Pause That Refreshes theme in 1929, ran into clearance problems for its projected prime time series. Obtaining a quarter hour weeknight strip combined with a half hour at the same start time on Saturday was impossible on Blue, CBS and NBC. But Mutual was a different story - almost,
The young and hungry network gave Coke and its agency a starting time of 10:15 ET every night but Friday, when it was committed to Gillette’s Friday Night Fights at 10:00. It was agreed that Spotlight Bands would be delayed until immediately after the fights, sometimes as late as 11:15 p.m.
With the familiar Coca-Cola theme song, Spotlight Bands debuted on November 3, 1941, with Kay Kyser’s orchestra over 166 Mutual stations. (2) A broadcast from this first group of shows, January 31, 1942, featuring Sammy Kaye’s orchestra and its Silver Platter winning hit, Remember Pearl Harbor, is also posted below. The first ratings were promising - Saturday reached a 5.7 in December - but Coca-Cola wanted a better timeslot - on the hour or half hour - and one that wasn’t dependent on knockouts for its Friday start time.
Mutual needed to please the soft drink that had become its largest advertiser so it cleared out its mostly sustaining programming at 9:30 p.m. ET Monday through Saturday to make room for the rescheduled Spotlight Bands.. A program from this series, February 28, 1942, with Alvino Rey’s band, the King Sisters and their Silver Platter song, Deep In The Heart of Texas, is posted below.
Spotlight Bands was consistent in its start times but its ratings tanked against the higher powered competition found at the earlier hour. The 9:30 show was scheduled opposite Lux Radio Theater on Mondays. (Number Eight for the season), Fibber McGee & Molly on Tuesdays, (Number One), Mr. District Attorney on Wednesday, (Eleven), Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall on Thursday,(13), First Nighter on Friday, (35), and Your Hit Parade on Saturday, (25). Against these shows Spotlight Bands’ weeknight average rating was 3.7 for 135th place and its Saturday rating was 4.0 for 133rd place. After 26 weeks with Mutual, Coca-Cola decided to rethink its format and pulled Spotlight Bands from the network’s schedule on May 2, 1942.
With the country at war, Coke and D’Arcy decided to scrap the Silver Platter awards and turn Spotlight Bands into a Monday through Saturday morale boosting half-hour that would send big bands to the country’s service camps, veterans’ hospitals and defense plants. This format presented a problem for Mutual which had accommodated the first flight of Spotlight Bands with the studios or remote facilities of its major market affiliates. But the new format would take the show into locations where nearby Mutual stations weren’t equipped to successfully produce the remote pickups.
Nobody had to ask the Blue network twice if it could clear the time and handle the technical details involved with producing the Coca-Cola pop concerts from different far-flung locations every night. RCA had divorced Blue from NBC six months earlier, systematically stripped the network of its major programs and put it up for sale, leaving Mark Woods and his Blue management team eager for Coke’s revenue to make their network more attractive to prospective buyers. The deal was struck and Spotlight Bands, now known as The Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands and 25 minutes long, kicked off on Blue with the Harry James band from the Marine Training Base at Parris Island, South Carolina, at 9:30 p.m. on September 21, 1942. (3)
The Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands remained on Blue six nights a week without a break for three years, until June 16, 1945. Most of the broadcasts posted below are from that period, hailed by most critics as its prime. The shows run were all well paced and executed - truly a big band buff’s delight :
November 5, 1943: Jack Teagarden
November 27, 1943: Duke Ellington
January 11, 1945: Tommy Tucker
January 18, 1945: Bobby Sherwood
January 19, 1945: Charlie Spivak
February 13, 1945: Jan Garber
March 14, 1945: Charlie Barnet
March 15, 1945: Benny Goodman
March 19, 1945: Tommy Dorsey
Victory Parade’s ratings, however, didn’t reflect its quality. Over its three seasons on Blue, the show’s average rating was a mediocre 3.2 which roughly translated to a million homes or one-tenth the audience of the season’s top shows. Nevertheless, Coca-Cola made millions of friends by subsidizing hundreds of visits by the country’s top bands to military, medical and industrial facilities during World War II - and those friends kept drinking Coke long after the war ended.
The sale of the Blue network and its conversion to ABC created obstacles to renewal of its Coca-Cola contract so The Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands moved back to Mutual on June 18, 1945 on a limited schedule of 25 minute shows every Monday and Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. (4) A Friday night broadcast was added on July 13th when Double Or Nothing was moved by its sponsor, Feenamint Laxative, to Mutual‘s Sunday night schedule.
When the war ended Spotlight Bands reverted back to its original show title on August 20, 1945. Two broadcasts from this Mutual series are posted - Artie Shaw’s band from October 10, 1945 and Eddy Howard from November 9, 1945. Both shows retained the enthusiasm and production values of the Blue/ABC broadcasts but they unfortunately also had the same sad ratings. (5)
Costs were cut on April 1, 1946, when Spotlight Bands became a showcase for three bands - Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians on Mondays, Xavier Cugat’s Latin rhythms on Wednesdays, and Harry James’ Music Makers on Fridays. The music remained top notch but the spark of the roaming remote broadcasts was gone and Spotlight Bands became just another big band broadcast filling 30 minutes on the Mutual schedule three nights a week. Coke wanted out.
On November 22, 1946, Coca Cola dropped its sponsorship of Spotlight Bands blaming the sugar shortage that curtailed its production of the soft drink. The show limped along under the “sponsorship” of the U.S. Army until December 2nd when Guy Lombardo’s Auld Lang Syne fittingly concluded the series after five seasons and over 1200 broadcasts.
We leave the story of Spotlight Bands with two undated standby broadcasts from its final season, transcribed for use whenever travel or technical difficulties prevented the originally scheduled remote broadcast. Disc scratches date the appearances by Gene Krupa’s band and Les Brown’s Band of Renown, just two of the dozens of orchestras both famous and forgotten that played for Network Radio‘s longest running prime time showcase of big bands.
(1) Week after week repeat winners pestered Spotlight Bands like they did Your Hit Parade. During the first year of Spotlight Bands, Harry James and vocalist Helen Forrest won the Silver Platter for seven consecutive weeks for I Don’t Want To Walk Without You while Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra took the award for five straight weeks with This Love of Mine.
(2) All shows sponsored by Coca-Cola were introduced by an instrumental melody known only as The Coca-Cola Company Theme, composed by conductor/arranger Leonard Joy. Kay Kyser’s orchestra was followed during Spotlight Bands’ first week by Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kaye, Tommy Dorsey and Eddy Duchin. The first week’s Silver Platter was awarded to Freddy Martin for Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto aka Tonight We Love.
(3) The Spotlight Bands run on Blue was 25 minutes. The final five minutes was originally given to blackface comedy sketches by Pick Malone and Pat Pagett as Molasses & January, replaced by British singing star Gracie Fields on October 12,1942. Fields was replaced by motivational speaker Dale Carnegie on January 11, 1943. Singer Grace Morgan took over the five minutes from Carnegie on April 19, 1943 and held it until December 17,1943, when it became the depository for variety of short, miscellaneous programs, most notably, Short, Short Story from February 25, 1944, until April 25, 1945.
(4) The loss of Spotlight Bands cost ABC a reported $2.5 Million in annual Coca-Cola gross billings.
(5) Spotlight Bands finished the 1945-46 season in 170th place with a 3.2 rating.
Copyright © 2015 Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
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