For me, the music culture of the fifties began with the program, Your Hit Parade, on radio and TV. After switching from CBS to NBC, it was the first TV program to display the NBC peacock. After rock thundered onto the scene. Your Hit Parade quietly slipped away in 1959.
The fifties ended with the solid entrenchment of rock 'n roll during our Rogers years. Still, I fondly recall watching Snooky Lanson, Dorothy Collins, Russell Arms, and Gisele MacKenzie sing the current hits. Others appeared on the show, but those four performers were the backbone.
The material consisted of show tunes, big band, or so-called “standards” of the day. I have no idea how the seven songs were chosen each week. Supposedly "you" voted. I suspect the process was not on the up-and-up. This was the era of payola, right? On balance though, payola seems to associate with rock 'n roll, the genre that eventually derailed “Your Hit Parade.”
I recall watching the derailing process. In rock, the performance and the performer was (and still seems to be) more important than the song itself. I watched Snooky Lanson attempt to do Hound Dog several times in 1956. It didn't fly. It was embarrassing. By the time the show was canceled I wasn't even aware that it had died.
I have a memory of Your Hit Parade that connects to a later experience I had in New York City. I loved the Christmas carol, Oh Holy Night. One 1956-ish Saturday, during Christmas season, Dorothoy Collins ended the program with a moving solo of Oh Holy Night. She was at the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. I saw the big Christmas tree and that golden stature of the figure blowing a horn (somehow I knew it was golden, though our TV was monochrome). This Spokane boy had never been anywhere – not even Moses Lake! I resolved to someday see Rockerfeller Center.
Fast forward to November of 1998. I was on IBM's team in Manhattan for a PC Magazine technology dual with Microsoft. I was staying at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square. One morning I played hooky from the shoot-out to walk three blocks to Rockefeller Center. The Christmas tree was not yet there, but the rink was already frozen. The golden trumpet statue was where it belonged. My mind's eye and ear replayed the memory of Dorothy Collins singing Oh Holy Night. My reverie broke when I heard a noisy mob in front of the NBC building kitty-corner from where I stood. It was Al Roker of the Today Show working the crowd live. I was jerked back to my current time.
As I left New York, an old ear-worm began playing in my head: