Sam 'n' Henry

Chicago: Shrewesbury Publishing Co.. Very Good-. (c.1926). First Edition. Hardcover. (red cloth with black lettering; no dust jacket) [a bit of wear to extremities, very slight exposure of boards at lower corners, tiny white stain on rear cover, one-time owner's name in ink at top of front endpaper]. (pen & ink drawings) Racial (OK, let's just say racist) humor by the creators of "Amos 'n' Andy," this volume reproduces 25 short sketches, selected from among the earliest episodes of the "Sam 'n' Henry" radio series, which premiered on the Chicago Tribune-owned station WGN in January 1926. Created and written by two white men (who also performed as the title characters), it presented the misadventures of two natives of Birmingham, Alabama, who have migrated to Chicago. Although not identical, the characters and their milieu are models for A 'n' A in virtually all the ways that matter; the show was an immediate hit; other iterations, besides this book, included the regular publication of some of the show's scripts in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, a number of recordings made by Gosden and Correll, and at least a handful of stage performances in Chicago in early 1927. The radio series itself ran for two-and-a-half years, but by the time it ended its run on WGN in July 1928, its creators had decamped for a competing Chicago station, leaving the "Sam 'n' Henry" name and characters (owned by WGN) behind, and had reworked the basic idea into "Amos 'n' Andy," which thrived on radio (and then television) for another 25+ years. Cringe-worthy to modern sensibilities, this kind of material can only be appreciated within the context of its time, most especially in its employment of the then-common "blackface" entertainment mode, which involved not only white performers in makeup but also an extreme and theatrical form of "Negro dialect," of which I will spare you any examples. (About the only less-condemnatory thing that can be said about the latter is that it was perhaps marginally less offensive on the radio than when Gosden & Correll "blacked up" to play the characters in the only "Amos 'n' Andy" feature film ever made, CHECK AND DOUBLE CHECK, produced at RKO in 1930. It made money for the studio, but even Gosden himself, years later, called it ""just about the worst movie ever.") .