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Amos 'n' Andy was an American radio sitcom about black characters, initially set in Chicago then later in the Harlem section of New York City. While the show had a brief life on 1950s television with black actors, the 1928 to 1960 radio show was created, written and voiced by two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who played Amos Jones (Gosden) and Andrew Hogg Brown (Correll), as well as incidental characters. On television, 1951–1953, black actors took over the majority of the roles; white characters were infrequent. Amos 'n' Andy began as one of the first radio comedy series and originated from station WMAQ in Chicago. After the first broadcast in 1928, the show became a hugely popular series, first on NBC Radio and later on CBS Radio and Television. Later episodes were broadcast from the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, California.: 168–71  The show ran as a nightly radio serial (1928–43), as a weekly situation comedy (1943–55) and as a nightly disc-jockey program (1954–60). A television adaptation ran on CBS (1951–53) and continued in syndicated reruns (1954–66). It was not shown to a nationwide audience again until 2012. Origins Gosden and Correll were white actors familiar with minstrel traditions. They met in Durham, North Carolina in 1920. Both men had some scattered experience in radio, but it was not until 1925 that the two appeared on Chicago's WQJ. Their appearances soon led to a regular schedule on another Chicago radio station, WEBH, where their only compensation was a free meal. The pair hoped that the radio exposure would lead to stage work; they were able to sell some of their scripts to local bandleader Paul Ash, which led to jobs at the Chicago Tribune's station WGN in 1925. This lucrative offer enabled them to become full-time broadcasters. The Victor Talking Machine Company also offered them a recording contract.Since the Tribune syndicated Sidney Smith's popular comic strip The Gumps, which had successfully introduced the concept of daily continuity, WGN executive Ben McCanna thought a serialized version would work on radio. He suggested that Gosden and Correll adapt The Gumps for radio. The idea seemed to involve more risk than either Gosden or Correll was willing to take; neither was adept at imitating female voices, which would have been necessary for The Gumps. They were also conscious of having made names for themselves with their previous act. By playing the roles of characters using minstrel dialect, they would be able to conceal their identities enough to be able to return to their old pattern of entertaining if the radio show proved to be a failure.Instead, they proposed a series about "a couple of colored characters" that borrowed certain elements from The Gumps. Their new show, Sam 'n' Henry, began on January 12, 1926 and fascinated radio listeners throughout the Midwestern United States. It became so popular that in 1927 Gosden and Correll requested that it be distributed to other stations on phonograph records in a "chainless chain" concept that would have been the first radio syndication. When WGN rejected the proposal, Gosden and Correll quit the show and the station; their last musical program for WGN was announced in the Chicago Daily Tribune on January 29, 1928. Episodes of Sam 'n' Henry continued to air until July 14, 1928. Correll's and Gosden's characters contractually belonged to WGN, so the pair was unable to use the characters' names when performing in personal appearances after leaving the station.WMAQ, the Chicago Daily News station, hired Gosden and Correll and their former WGN announcer Bill Hay to create a series similar to Sam 'n' Henry. It offered higher salaries than WGN as well as the right to pursue the syndication idea. The creators later said that they named the characters Amos and Andy after hearing two elderly African-Americans greet each other by those names in a Chicago elevator. Amos 'n' Andy began on March 19, 1928 on WMAQ, and prior to airing each program, Gosden and Correll recorded their show on 78-rpm discs at Marsh Laboratories, operated by electrical recording pioneer Orlando R. Marsh. Early 1930s broadcasts of the show originated from the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, California.For the program's entire run as a nightly series in its first decade, Gosden and Correll provided over 170 male voice characterizations. With the episodic drama and suspense heightened by cliffhanger endings, Amos 'n' Andy reached an ever-expanding radio audience. It was the first radio program to be distributed by syndication in the United States, and by the end of the syndicated run in August 1929, at least 70 other stations carried recorded episodes. Early storylines and characters Amos Jones and Andy Brown worked on a farm near Atlanta, Georgia, and during the first week's episodes, they made plans to find a better life in Chicago, despite warnings from a friend. With four ham-and-cheese sandwiches and $24, they bought train tickets and headed for Chicago, where they lived in a rooming house on State Street and experienced some rough times before launching their own business, the Fresh Air Taxi Company. (The first car they acquired had no windshield; the pair turned it into a selling point.) By 1930, the noted toy maker Louis Marx and Company was offering a tin wind-up version of the auto, with Amos and Andy inside. The toy company produced a special autographed version of the toy as gifts for American leaders, including Herbert Hoover. There was also a book, All About Amos 'n' Andy and Their Creators, in 1929 by Correll and Gosden (reprinted in 2007 and 2008), and a comic strip in the Chicago Daily News.Naïve but honest Amos was hardworking, and, after his marriage to Ruby Taylor in 1935, also a dedicated family man. Andy was a gullible dreamer with overinflated self-confidence who tended to let Amos do most of the work. Their Mystic Knights of the Sea lodge leader, George "Kingfish" Stevens, would often lure them into get-rich-quick schemes or trick them into some kind of trouble. Other characters included John Augustus "Brother" Crawford, an industrious but long-suffering family man; Henry Van Porter, a social-climbing real estate and insurance salesman; Frederick Montgomery Gwindell, a hard-charging newspaperman; Algonquin J. Calhoun, a somewhat crooked lawyer added to the series in 1949, six years after its conversion to a half-hour situation comedy; William Lewis Taylor, Ruby's well-spoken, college-educated father; and Willie "Lightning" Jefferson, a slow-moving Stepin Fetchit–type character. Kingfish's catchphrase, "Holy mackerel!", entered the American lexicon. There were three central characters: Correll voiced Andy Brown while Gosden voiced both Amos and the Kingfish. The majority of the scenes were dialogues between either Andy and Amos or Andy and Kingfish. Amos and Kingfish rarely appeared together. Since Correll and Gosden voiced virtually all of the parts, the female characters, such.... Discover the N R Hairston popular books. Find the top 100 most popular N R Hairston books.