The antecedents for music's applications in television may be found in film and radio. Most television music (like film music) is non-diegetic: It is heard by viewers and listeners, but not on-screen performers. This "background" music is added after filming has been completed, and is used to create moods, fill spaces, provide rhythm and link the production to other cultural texts. Television music also draws on the tradition of radio, which foregrounded music through variety shows and featured performances. Variety shows were based in vaudeville and dominated the first two decades of television due to their broad appeal and low production costs. Yet music frequently was considered an afterthought during television's early years. In 1948, only 17 stations were on the air. Programming largely was produced on a local basis, and talent and material often were in short supply.

Labor unions played a significant role in determining how music was used on television in the late 1940s. Under the leadership of James Petrillo, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) instigated freezes on all music recording in 1942 and 1948, and the AFM banned "live" music on television until the spring of 1948. The union also ordered that all programs with featured or background music must be broadcast "live" before they were syndicated via kinescopes, and these kinescopes were banned from airing on any station not affilliated with the originating station. This arrangement that favored networks over independent stations and allowed the powerful AFM to strenghten its control of the music industry. The union also prohibited its members from recording for television films until 1950, when the AFM negotiated a system of royalty payments from television producers to musicians (although no such royalty system existed in the film industry). Television music also was hampered by disagreements between program producers and music publishers. Producers sought a broadened general license fee for music use, rather than a special license, while the major music publishing concern (ASCAP) demanded three times the rate it received for film music.

The networks were concerned with "cultural uplift" during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they viewed "high culture" as a way to add cultural legitimacy to the new medium. NBC had telecast a Metropolitan Opera presentation of "Pagliacci" on 10 March 1940, and all three networks featured classical music and opera on a semi-regular basis. NBC aired three telecasts of the NBC Orchestra in 1948, and ABC telecast an adaption of "Othello" on 29 November of that year. The NBC Opera Theater began regular telecasts in 1950 with four programs and continued to air opera specials through 1950s and early 1960s. The network also aired an experimental color broadcast of "Carmen" on 31 October 1953.

Yet producers faced a number of problems with adapting opera to television. The NBC presentations were sung in English and frequently condensed into one-hour programs, which aroused the ire of some critics. Early televised operas also were criticized for incessant camera panning and closeups. A reviewer for Musical America described a December 1952 closed-circuit telecast of "Carmen" by New York's Metropolitan Opera to 27 cities: "The relentlessness of the camera in exposing corpulence and other less attractive physical features of some of the performers aroused hilarity among the more unsophisticated viewers, of whom there were, perforce, very many."

The networks also showcased classical music in specials and limited-run series throughout the early 1950s. In 1951, ABC's Chicago affilliate (WENR-TV) became the first station to regularly televise an orchestra, and NBC aired Meet the Masters, a classical music series, that spring. The network continued to air occasional telecasts of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and CBS countered with specials featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra. The classical music series "Voice of Firestone" had originated in 1928 on radio; in June 1954 it jumped to television on ABC. Other network programs presented a grab bag of "high culture." CBS's Omnibus debuted in 1952 with support from the Ford Foundation. Although it won numerous awards, the program moved to ABC and NBC because of poor ratings. Omnibus was cancelled in 1959, and the Ford Foundation's experience with the program led them to provide the seed money for American public television. Classical music and opera also made occasional appearances on variety shows, particularly CBS's Toast of the Town, and performers were prominently featured on variety shows like Toast of the Town and The Milton Berle Show. NBC musical specials in 1951 showcased the works of Richard Rogers and Irving Berlin, and NBC continued to air lavish musical presentations throughout the decade.

Music was an integral part of amateur talent shows, which ran on all three networks throughout the 1950s. The most successful of these, Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour, was adapted from radio's Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour. Dumont began telecasting the series in 1948, and it aired on various networks until 1970. Music also was featured in the context of game shows. Celebrities rated records on KNXT's Juke Box Jury, which was carried by ABC in 1953 and later syndicated. Other musical game shows included ABC's So You Want to Lead a Band and NBC's Musical Chairs, which aired in 1954 and 1955 respectively, as well as Name That Tune, which ran on NBC and later CBS from 1953 to 1959 and was briefly revived in syndication in the mid-1970s.

Singers often hosted summer replacement shows in the early 1950s. In 1950, Kate Smith and Sammy Kaye hosted replacement shows on NBC while CBS countered with several summer series hosted by Perry Como, Vaughn Monroe and Frank Sinatra. ABC configured much of its prime time schedule around music, particularly after Lawrence Welk joined the network in July 1955. Welk, who began telecasting his performances in June 1949, remains perhaps the most popular musical performer in television history. By featuring performers like Welk, Guy Lombardo, Paul Whiteman, Fred Waring and Perry Como, networks targeted older audiences (at the time, "teenagers" as a demographic group were of little use to network advertisers).

Television producers in the late 1940s and early 1950s relied on older popular songs, or "standards," and avoided songs without proven audience appeal. In addition, ASCAP's outright hostility to television led producers to use BMI-licensed songs, many of which were older and in the public domain. Exposing new music largely was relegated to independent stations. This pattern parallelled post-war developments in the recording industry, in which new genres like rhythm and blues and country music were distributed by small, independent labels. Independent television stations were particularly strong on the West Coast due to weak network links, and remote band broadcasts provided inexpensive filler for broadcast schedules. KTLA-TV in Los Angeles featured five orchestra shows each week in the early 1950s, including Spade Cooley's hugely popular western program, while KLAC-TV countered with the Hometown Jamboree hillbilly program. KLAC also challenged the color barrier by presenting a black singer, Hadda Brooks, regularly in 1949.

"Video deejay" programming provided another economical means of filling airtime. Al Jarvis had created the radio deejay program at Los Angeles' KWAB-AM in the early 1930s, and in the winter of 1950 Jarvis began daily broadcasts of records, interviews, horse racing results and "daily religious periods" at KLAC. NBC began airing Wayne Howell's deejay show nationally on Saturday afternoons, and by the end of 1950 video deejays were firmly established in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles as well as secondary markets like San Francisco, Miami, Louisville, Philadelphia, Detroit and Cleveland (where pioneering rock and roll deejay Alan Freed held forth late at night on WXEZ-TV). Video deejay programs combined lip-synch performances, dancers, games, sketches, stunts and film shorts. Between 1941 and 1947, more than 2000 promotional jazz and ballad films, or "soundies," were produced by the Mills Novelty Company for coin-operated machines, and many of these shorts resurfaced on video deejay shows. "Soundies" also were frequently screened between programs to fill airtime, as were the 754 "visual records" Louis Snader produced in his Hollywood studios between 1950 and 1952. Similar films were produced by Screen Gems and United Artists, with a unique twist: silent films were paired with phonograph records, which allowed the clips to be recycled with different songs.

By 1956, local video deejay programs were telecast regularly in nearly 50 markets. These programs were the only significant television programming produced for teenagers and, along with "Top-40" radio, were instrumental in the rising success of rock 'n' roll. The most notable video deejay program debuted on Philadelphia's WFIL-TV as Bandstand in September 1952. Dick Clark replaced Bob Horn as host in July 1956, and the following year American Bandstand was picked up for national distribution by ABC. The program aired from 3:00 to 4:30 P.M. Monday through Friday afternoons, and Dick Clark had begun to parlay American Bandstand's success into a television empire. More than 100 local imitators of Bandstand were on the air by March 1958, and TV had become second only to radio as a means of promoting music. In 1950, standards outnumbered popular tunes on television by four to one, and popular songs on television were already well-established on records and radio. Four years later, the ratio of hits to standards was 50/50. "Let Me Go, Lover" was recorded by several artists after its initial success on CBS's Studio One, and the "Ballad of Davey Crockett" from Walt Disney's ABC-TV series established TV's importance in making hits.

NBC was the most adventurous network in music programming throughout the 1950s, particularly through Steve Allen's efforts to present pop, jazz and classical artists on the Tonight Show. Allen also hosted an NBC special, All Star Jazz, in December 1957. Like Allen, Ed Sullivan featured a number of black acts on his Talk of the Town variety show in the 1950s. Although most acts were comics and dancers, musical performers included W. C. Handy, Billy Eckstine, Lena Horne and T-Bone Walker. On 1 April 1949, ABC affiliate WENR in Chicago began airing Happy Pappy, a jazz-oriented revue that featured an all-black cast, and three years later an ABC special with Billy Daniels was the first network television program to feature a black entertainer as star. Nat "King" Cole became the first black to host a regular network series (on NBC from 1956 to 1957), yet the program failed to attract a national sponsor and was boycotted by several stations in the North and South. As a result, blacks largely were relegated to guest shots on variety shows. No black performer would host a network variety series until Sammy Davis, Jr. in 1966.

Rhythm and blues and rock and roll originally were objects of ridicule on TV, as exemplified by Sid Caesar's "Three Haircuts" parody skit on Your Show of Shows, but programmers began paying closer attention to the burgeoning teenage market in 1956. Ed Sullivan presented a rhythm and blues special in November 1955 that featured LaVern Baker, Bo Diddley, and the Five Keys and was hosted by radio deejay "Dr. Jive," yet attempts at providing a regular network showcase for rhythm and blues failed due to resistance from Southern affiliates as well as pressure from ASCAP, who refused to license rhythm and blues titles for blatantly racist reasons.

Country music was more readily embraced by programmers. "Hillbilly," as it was more commonly known, gained its initial video exposure with shows hosted by regional performers in the Midwest, including Earnie Lee at WLW in Cincinnatti (1947), Pee Wee King at WAVE in Louisville (1948) and Lulu Belle at Chicago's WNBQ (1949). By 1956, almost 100 live local country and western shows aired on more than 80 stations in 30 states. Eddy Arnold, aka the "Tennessee Plowboy," was tapped as a summer replacement for Perry Como in 1952, and his program was syndicated throughout the 1950s. Other network efforts included Red Foley's Ozark Jubilee (ABC, 1955-61), the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show (NBC, ABC, 1955-65), and CBS ran a country music program hosted by Jimmy Dean against Today. Nevertheless, these programs were largely pop-oriented in terms of song selection and guest stars.
 
 

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