Cover of Kelly Brown’s book on Florence Lawrence, Hollywood’s first movie star. 2007 paperback edition.
The movie industry of the early 1900s, during the silent film era, was not the star-centered commercial enterprise it is today. Most actors, in fact, labored in obscurity. And film makers liked it that way. The film studios then were out to produce a cheap, standardized product and part of the strategy was to keep actors anonymous and low paid. Indeed, most actors of that day focused on the Vaudeville stage, and many, in fact, thought it down right horrid to work in the “flickers.”
But during the early1900s, the seeds of change were being sown, as a few actors tried some self-promotion in the trade press, and film exchange owners were also beginning to see that audience familiarity with actors was good for business. Still, one of the most popular actresses of that day was Florence Lawrence of the Biograph Studios. But Lawrence was not known to movie fans by her real name. A Canadian in her twenties, Lawrence had already made 38 films for the Vitagraph Co. before coming to Biograph. But even at Biograph, though her face was well known, she was simply known to the public as “The Biograph Girl.” Then came a film producer named Carl Laemmle.
Laemmle, born into a Jewish family in 1860s Germany, had come to the U.S. when he was 17. He opened a Chicago nickelodeon some years later, and moved into film distribution in the Midwest. By 1909, after fighting with inventor and film-maker businessman Thomas Edison over film distribution rights, he established his own film production company, the Independent Motion Picture Company of America, also known as IMP. “Biograph Girl” Florence Lawrence, meanwhile, had a falling out with her employer, and Laemmle hired her to his company. Laemmle then went about creating some first-of-a kind publicity to introduce her.
Biograph Girl Dead !
Copy of ad on the 'Florence Lawrence incident,' which mentions IMP's new film.
Although there are some variations on the story, plus a degree of myth-making added over the years, the gist of what happened appears to be roughly along the lines that follow. In February 1910, Laemmle planted a fictitious news story that the actress had been killed in a street-car accident. Newspapers and magazines were the only real “media” then, and key to spreading a story of the kind Laemmle had created. After Laemmle gained press attention for his false story, he then placed ads in newspapers and the movie trade press that the story about Lawrence’s death was, in fact, a lie. In the March 12, 1910 edition of Moving Picture World, a full-page announcement appeared explaining that Biograph — angry over losing its “Biograph girl,” Lawrence, to Laemmle — had created the false story. This announcement also included a small photo of Lawrence and explained, by the way, that she was making a new movie for Laemmle’s IMP called, The Broken Oath, and that “very shortly, some of the best work of her career” would be released (in the ad, the film’s title was misspelled as “The Broken Bath”).
The new 'star.'
Laemmle then arranged for — and publicized — a personal appearance for his soon-to-be-star, along with her leading man, King Babbott, and the film’s director, in St. Louis, Missouri. They made two appearances at St. Louis theaters — the Gem and the Grand Opera House. According to Karen Ward Mahar writing in Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood: “The St. Louis Times announced their arrival by train, planned a welcome party, and offered a clip-out coupon to female fans who would receive a photograph of Lawrence upon presenting it to the actress.” Lawrence “was mobbed by a huge crowd of fans, who tore the buttons off her coat.” It was the first staged media appearance by a film star. At the event Lawrence “was mobbed by a huge crowd of fans, who tore the buttons off her coat,” according to historian Robin Cross. Lawrence that day in St. Louis drew more people to her coming out event than had the President of the United States, William Howard Taft, who had visited the city a week earlier. Thus, with this event and its generated press, “a star was born,”created by the studio head Carl Laemmle, who would later help found Universal Studios. Before long, Florence Lawrence became a well-known film personality and a household name. Laemmle — with the help of a growing print media at the time — had created the early outlines of the Hollywood “star system,” though it wasn’t called that at first. No longer would movie actors and actresses labor in obscurity, or go unnoticed or unnamed. Again, Karen Ward Mahar writing in Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood, notes:
Carl Laemmle, founder of the IMP film company, staged the Florence Lawrence event, making her America's first 'film star'.
…A mere two months after Lawrence’s live appearance in St. Louis, Moving Picture World’s “Man About Town” [magazine column] professed astonishment at “the interest the public has taken in the personality of many of the picture players.” Letters allegedly poured into the offices of film manufacturers and exchanges, from both men and woman, asking for autographed photos of their favorite leading actors. One actress [Florence Turner] claimed to have received three thousand offers of marriage just three months after the Lawrence incident. By the end of 1910, Moving Picture World’s “Picture Personalities” column profiled Florence Turner of Vitagraph, Mary Pickford of Biograph, and Pearl White of the Powers film manufacturing company. Even if it did not invent the film star, the Lawrence incident signaled to the industry that the star had arrived.
“Famous Players”
Mary Pickford, who followed Florence Lawrence as the ‘Biograph Girl,’ soon became a giant star with Adolph Zukor.
Other fledgling Hollywood studios by this time were also moving toward promoting the names of actors to make them popular. In 1912, Jewish emigree Adolph Zukor established a film distribution business using the moniker “Famous Players in Famous Plays.” He soon found himself running a business that sought to bring noted stage and Vaudeville actors to the screen, one of whom was a child actress named Mary Pickford. Pickford, in fact, had initially followed Florence Lawrence as the Biograph Girl. However, by 1913 the Famous Players Film Company was established, producing The Prisoner of Zenda. That year, Zukor told Mary Pickford’s mother, “if feature pictures succeed, we expect to pay according to the drawing power of the box office.”
By 1915 Pickford was on a salary of $10,000 a week – a huge amount at the time – and her drawing power became the foundation of the evolving Zukor empire which, after a series of business deals, became Paramount Pictures with Zukor as president. At Paramount, Zukor revolutionized the film industry by organizing production, distribution, and exhibition within a single company. But it was the movie stars like Pickford and others that became the collateral on which the film companies could borrow huge sums of money.
Theda Bara, starring in 1917's 'Cleopatra.'
Another film maker who helped push the early star system forward in the 1910s was William Fox. A German-Jewish immigrant like Carl Laemmle, Fox had made a fortune in the film exchange business. By 1915, he went into film production as head of the Fox Film Corporation. But Fox needed a star, and his solution was simply to create one. Fox transformed a somewhat “plain Jane” stage actress named Theodosia de Coppet (Goodman), into the screen’s first ‘vamp’ and million-dollar star, Theda Bara. His early movies with Bara, such as A Fool There Was (1915), produced the funds to help found the Fox Film Corporation, while others with Bara like Cleopatra (1917) helped make Fox a successful studio.
Clara Bow, 1921, among the early film stars signed by Paramount’s Adolph Zukor, an early booster of Hollywood’s ‘star system’.
Carl Laemmle was on the rise by then too, becoming a partner in 1912 in the Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Known later as simply Universal or Univeral Studios, Laemmle would eventually become its sole owner. In March 1915, Laemmle, amid much publicity, opened his new Universal City studios on the north side of the Hollywood Hills. Built on some 230 acres of farmland, it was world’s largest motion picture production facility. Hollywood was now the place where more and more films were being made, shifting from its former New York and New Jersey base. In 1915 alone, over 250 pictures poured out of the Laemmle’s Universal City studios, most of them two-reelers and serials.
Adolph Zukor at Paramount, meanwhile, developed many of the leading early film stars. In addition to Mary Pickford, Zukor would also sign Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, and Wallace Reid. With so many “famous players,” Zukor’s Paramount was able to introduce block booking, which meant that an exhibitor who wanted a particular star’s films had to buy a year’s worth of other Paramount productions. It was this system that gave Paramount a leading position in the 1920s and 1930s. It also later led the government to pursue the company on anti-trust grounds. In any case, it was the early star system that helped build the Hollywood studios into the business giants they would become.
Celebrity & Fan Culture
“The Famous Players were now more important than the Famous Plays,” film historian Robin Cross would later say of the changing film industry in the 1910s. Celebrity culture was on its way, now given a much larger reach in those early days of film promotion. Celebrity culture — born in the early movie star system of the 1910s and fueled by the urban masses — would go well beyond film & Hollywood.But celebrity culture would go well beyond film, becoming a powerful force in its own right and a key part of entertainment and marketing economics in the years to come. For celebrity culture would not only rise in Hollywood and film, but also in radio, sports, and later television, spawning a host of new specialties and cottage industries, from talent agencies to a vast new advertising industry.
There is, of course, a lot more detail on the history and rise of the Hollywood star system. But it does appear that “mass appeal stardom” first took hold in the film industry of the 1910s in part through the actions of business-wise film makers and promoters like Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, and others. This “movie star” phenomenon was soon spread to the urban masses by the eager newspaper and magazine industries, forming a “celebrity press” that stoked the rise of celebrity and fan culture that followed.
Stay tuned to this site for additional history on the rise of celebrity, in Hollywood and elsewhere, and especially its impact on business, politics, and popular culture.
Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (History of the American Cinema, 2), Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, May 1994, 337 pp.
Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood, John Hopkins University Press, 2006, 332 pp.
Kelly R. Brown, Florence Lawrence, The Biograph Girl: America’s First Movie Star, North Carolina, McFarland & Co., 2007, 230 pp.
Poster for the 1983 film, with subhead above that reads: 'The story of eight old friends searching for something they lost, and finding that all they needed was each other.' For many Baby Boomers who saw this film, the soundtrack was especially memorable, a fact not lost on Madison Avenue.
In September 1983, a movie named TheBig Chill was released — a story about eight former 1960s’ college friends who gather for an unscheduled reunion after a friend’s untimely suicide. The Columbia film was nominated for, but did not win, three academy awards, including Best Picture. The Big Chill did reasonably well at the box office and in its DVD afterlife and still has fans online today. But for many who first saw it in 1983, it was the film’s soundtrack – an evocative collec- tion of original 1960s rock ‘n roll tunes – that was especially memorable and enduring. In fact, the movie’s music became something of a key landmark in the history of advertising, as it would help to spur the use of original rock music in a myriad of advertising applications in the years that followed. Prior to The Big Chill, for the most part, popular rock musicians sang company jingles, or advertisers used copied versions of their songs, performed by imitators and studio groups. But after The Big Chill, there was a decided turn by Madison Avenue to use original rock ‘n roll songs, or portions of them, in all kinds of advertising. “…[T]he movie probably gave far too many ad agencies the notion to buy up the rights to 60s’ songs for use in pushing the nostalgia buttons of key-demographic consumers,” later wrote Ken Tucker in The New York Times. Indeed, by the mid-1980s oldies rock ‘n roll had reached vintage nostalgic value among middling Baby Boomers, who were then arriving by the millions in their full, prime-time spending years. And while it wasn’t the only factor, The Big Chill certainly helped persuade Madison Avenue to begin using original-track rock ‘n roll more prominently in their advertising. In fact, a few industry wags would call the practice “Big Chill advertising.”
Big Chill Music 1983 Soundtrack
“I Heard it Through the Grapevine” Marvin Gaye (1968, #1) “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” The Rolling Stones (1973, #42) “A Whiter Shade of Pale” Procol Harum (1967, #5) “Tracks of My Tears”(1965, #16)
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles “Wouldn’t it Be Nice”(1966, #8)
The Beach Boys “Tell Him” (1963, #4)
The Exciters “The Weight”(1968, #63)
The Band “Good Lovin’”(1966, #1)
The Rascals “Strangers in the Night” Instrumental “Gimme Some Lovin’”(1967, #7)
Spencer Davis Group “Bad Moon Rising” (1969, #2)
Creedence Clearwater Revival “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”(1966, #13)
The Temptations “When a Man Loves a Woman”(‘66,#1)
Percy Sledge “A Natural Woman”(1967, #8)
Aretha Franklin “In the Midnight Hour” The Rascals “I Second That Emotion”(1967, #4)
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles “Joy to the World”(1971, #1)
Three Dog Night “Quicksilver Girl”(1968)
The Steve Miller Band “My Girl”(1965, #1)
The Temptations ___________________ Songs listed by approximate appearance in the film.
What follows below is some history on Madison Avenue’s use of rock music in advertising; but first, a few words on The Big Chill’s storyline and its musical packaging.
The Film
The Big Chill is an introspective film featuring a weekend of soul searching by the group of college friends who have lost one of their former inner circle to suicide (Kevin Costner played the corpse). The film’s star-studded cast included Glenn Close, William Hurt, Tom Berenger, and Jeff Goldblum, among others. “The big chill,” of course, is the death of their friend and a “ten-years-later”reality check on what they each have become since their college days. Among them is a medical doctor, an owner of athletic shoe company, a public-defender-turned-corporate-lawyer, an aimless, somewhat psychologically-harmed Vietnam veteran, a TV actor, a bored-to-tears housewife, a People maga- zine writer, and a pretty, much younger woman who was living with their departed friend at the time of his suicide. This mix of characters retires from the funeral to the South Carolina home of one of the group, where they each work through their various feelings, concerns and hopes during the weekend. They eat, drink, cavort, reminisce, dance, smoke dope, and bare their souls. They fondly recall their college days and their causes, but also confront their disappointments and the waning of their idealism. In the end, some find new direction, some not. Others pick up where they left off. The film’s viewers, meanwhile, are fully engaged, with the music becoming a big part of the film’s take away value.
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“Tell Him” - The Exciters Big Chill sampler [music player]
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The Music
The Big Chill soundtrack, in fact, is top shelf; some of the best music of the 1960s, placed nicely in the film’s storyline, hitting its intended viewers in their deepest memory banks and remaining in their heads for days after seeing the film. During the church scene at the funeral of the departed Alex, for example, one of the group begins to play a few riffs of one of his favorite songs on the church organ – the Rolling Stone’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” — as the camera pans the knowing smiles of his friends’ faces. The organ riff segues into the original tune which plays throughout the funeral scene.
In another scene in the kitchen where the group is cleaning up after a pasta and wine fest, The Temptations’ “Ain’t to Proud to Beg” is played, leading to impromptu dancing among friends. “The scene encapsulates the spirit of the film,” one reviewer would later write, “friendship forged in the footloose optimism of the 60’s; camaraderie instantly regained through the nostalgic power of good pop music.” (see film promo clip).
Other tunes in the film – such as “A Natural Woman” by Aretha Franklin; “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” by the Beach Boys; “The Weight” by The Band; “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival; “Tracks of My Tears” by Smokey Robinson; “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye; and “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum – all fit nicely into their scenes, serving as a kind of “comfort food” for Boomers. The Big Chill soundtrack, in fact, quickly became a popular best-seller for Motown, climbing to #17 on the Billboard albums chart in 1983, selling 1 million copies by late March 1984. All of this, of course, was not lost on Madison Avenue.
The Big Chill wasn’t the first movie to use original rock ‘n roll music in a soundtrack. Other films dating to the 1950s had already done so – such as 1955’s Blackboard Jungle, which used Bill Haley’s “Rock Around The Clock” over the opening and closing credits. The Beatles were among the first to integrate film and original rock music in their mid-1964 A Hard Day’s Night, which used about a dozen of their songs. Easy Rider of 1969 used rock music effectively in its score, and so did American Graffiti in 1973, the latter in a purposeful nostalgic vein. Madison Avenue, meanwhile, had a long history of using all kinds of music in advertising. However, rock ‘n roll music in advertising – especially original-version rock ‘n roll – was still new territory for advertisers in the early 1980s.
Pre Big Chill: 1960s-1985
In fact, prior to the mid-1980s, original rock ‘n roll music had pretty limited and spotty use in advertising. Rock and popular recording artists were commissioned to sing company jingles or musical spots for various products using company-provided lyrics or compositions. In 1963, the folk music group The Limeliters helped inaugurate a series of radio ads for the Coca-Cola company. They also did a few early TV ads. The Shirelles, one of the popular “girl groups” of the early 1960s, were among the first pop acts chosen by Coke to record radio commercials, doing a series of those ads for the company over several years. Among others who did Coke ads in 1965, and whose names appeared on vinyl promo recordings produced by Coke’s ad agency McCann-Erickson, were: the Four Seasons, Roy Orbison, Jay & the Americans, Jan & Dean, and others. In the 1965-69 period, for example, one Coca-Cola historian found 63 Coke radio spots by popular artists, including one by Freddie and the Dreamers singing one Coke lyric to their tune “I’m Telling You Now.”
Sample label from 1965 advertising recording of Coca-Cola jingles produced by ad agency McCann-Erickson featuring artists Roy Orbison and Jan & Dean
Among other Coke artists doing radio and/or TV spots during this era and later years were: the Bee Gees, Neil Diamond, the Moody Blues, the Tremeloes, the Troggs, Los Bravos, the Everly Brothers, Otis Redding, the Box Tops, Leslie Gore, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and Ray Charles. Pepsi, 7-Up, and a number of other companies were then recording jingles with pop groups as well. In the U.K., the young Rolling Stones recorded a rock jingle in the 1960s for Rice Krispies cereal that appeared on a European TV spot. Still, most of this music was commissioned specifically for the product, and did not use original, pre-existing rock songs. The nostalgic and “associative” value of these original rock songs, aimed at specific target groups, had yet to be linked to advertising pitches.
By the late 1970s, rock music was surfacing in a few other TV formats, as the 1976 Orleans hit, “Still the One” started to be used as the ABC-TV network theme song and also by the Nine Network in Australia for the same purpose. In 1981, there were musicians hooking up with beer and liquor companies in a variety of relationships, some of which involved TV and radio spots, doing company jingles, appearing in print ads, or becoming involved in sponsorship arrangements. These included Dave Mason of Traffic and later Fleetwood Mac, and Charlie Daniels of the Charlie Daniels Band doing beer commercials – Mason for Miller and Daniels for Busch. The Commodores became involved with Schlitz beer; Kool & The Gang with Schlitz Malt Liquor, Journey joined Budweiser, and The Marshall Tucker Band with Ronrico Rum. In the 1960s and 1970s, the nostalgic and “associa- tive” value of original rock `n roll music had yet to be linked to specific advertis- ing pitches. Ad agencies in the early and mid-1980s were also using some popular song melodies, but inserted their own product-specific lyrics usually performed by cover groups. As writer Carrie McLaren noted in research she’d done on this history: the Platters’ “Only You” became “Only Wendy’s”; the Diamonds’ “Little Darlin’” became KFC’s “Chicken Little”; Buddy Holly’s “Oh Boy” became “Oh Buick!”; Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” became Burger King’s “Whole Lotta Breakfast Goin’ On”; Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop” becomes “Let’s Go Take a [Granola] Dip”; and Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife” became “It’s Mac Tonight.” In mid-1982, a version of the Beach Boys’ ”Good Vibrations” was being used in a Sunkist ad. By this time too, MTV, “music television,” was becoming a force. Launched in August 1981, the whole point of MTV was to use music videos to sell music. But it also had a major impact on advertising. By early 1984, for example, super pop sensation and MTV star Michael Jackson, then of “Thriller” and “moon walk” fame, had made two TV spots for Pepsi – ads that used Pepsi lyrics to the beat and sound of Jackson’s popular “Billie Jean” song in Pepsi’s “new generation” campaign.
Boomer Connection
Meanwhile, on another level, The Big Chill of 1983-84 helped show advertisers the way to a new kind of advertising to Baby Boomers through the rich connection to original rock songs. “It became prevalent in the mid-’80s after The Big Chill came out,” according to Ray Serafin, an automotive writer for Advertising Age. Many of the spots that followed The Big Chill, he explained, were trying “to evoke an emotional connection.” By the time of The Big Chill , the evocative con- nection between the ’60s music and its Boomer audience had become especially ripe. By the time of The Big Chill in 1983-84, the evocative connection between the music and its Boomer audience had become especially ripe. More years had elapsed between the music’s initial popularity and Boomers’ middling years. The music had, for this group, reached its “prime-time nostalgic vintage,” and so, had a more powerful appeal and connection.
In both film and advertising psychology, the music-emotion tie is a well-studied phenomenon, and has become a valued strategy. Movie producers know that the right music in a movie scene can make the scene more powerful, more memorable. Hollywood producers would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the legal rights to use the right song in the right spot. Advertisers by the mid-1980s were willing to do the same.
Ford’s Yuppie Ads
In 1985, Ford Motor Company’s advertising agency, Young & Rubicam (Y&R), became an early developer of this approach, producing a series of 19 television commercials using 1960s and 1970s music. These ads were used to pitch Ford’s Lincoln-Mercury cars. Ford and Y&R called their advertising “The Yuppie Campaign” – meaning “Young Urban Professional” or “Young Upwardly Mobile Professionals,” describing a desirable Boomer market segment. The aim of the Ford/Y&R campaign was to make an emotional connection with Yuppies, bringing back memories of when they were in college. Different popular songs were used on each commercial, some in the original, some by imitators.
Bette Midler Case 1986-1988
Back in 1985, when the Ford Motor and its ad agency, Young & Rubicam, Inc., launched their 19 television ads with rock ’n roll music in their “The Yuppie Campaign,” one of the songs they used was a 1973 Bette Midler tune, “Do You Want to Dance.” In some of the songs that Young & Rubicam used in that campaign, they tried to obtain the original song versions for their ads. However, in ten cases the agency employed “sound-alikes” and not the original artists or original versions. One of the “sound-alikes” imitated Bette Midler in her song “Do You Want to Dance.” Midler by then was a nationally known actress and singer who had won a 1973 Grammy as Best New Artist, and also had recordings that had gone Gold and Platinum. She was also nominated in 1979 for an Academy award for Best Female Actress in The Rose, in which she portrayed a pop singer Janis Joplin. Midler had a long history of avoiding commercial endorsements, and in fact had refused Ford’s offer to do the ad herself. When the backup singer produced a very Midler-like version of the song for Ford – a version that even fooled Midler’s friends – Midler took legal action.
In 1986-87, Midler sued Lincoln-Mercury and Young & Rubicam, alleging that the use of a sound-alike in their ad constituted “an unlawful misappropriation of her persona.” She lost her first attempt at the trial court level when her case was dismissed. But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal came to her aide in a 1988 decision, noting that, “… when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California.” She was also awarded $400,000 by the jury. Midler’s success – which came to be known as the “Midler tort” in California – put a damper on the use of sound-alikes. But soon, outright licensing of original songs became the preferred way to go for commercial interests, although many artists would not go down that path.
In early March 1985, for example, Lincoln-Mercury used the music from the Beatles song “Help”in one of their ads – though the tune in this case was sung by other artists, not the Beatles. Still, it was the first time that a Beatles song was used in an American TV spot, and Lincoln-Mercury paid $100,000 at the time to use it. After that, The Beatles refused to allow their music to be used in commercials, though that would change after a later battle with Nike. Other artists whose music was used in the Lincoln-Mercury ads – either in the original or by imitators – included Bette Midler, the Coasters, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Tina Turner, and Martha & the Vandellas.
Among artists and fans, meanwhile, there was resistance to using rock ‘n roll songs in advertising and other commercial applications. Some artists refused to allow their songs to be used for advertising. Among artists in the mid-1980s then resisting the practice were, for example, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde, Billy Idol, and John Mellencamp. Some music fans would object to the practice in more fundamental way.
Carrie McLaren, writing some years later about music and advertising, described how she associated a car commercial with the song “Everyday People” by Sly and Family Stone after casually hearing the song on a radio at a bagel shop. She caught herself in the thought, angered by the car-ad association, rather than remembering the artist per se, “the everybody-can-get-along” message of the song, or her college days when she first heard the music. “When I reacted to “Everyday People,’” she explained, ” it wasn’t about [the artist] selling out or some ’60s multicultural love-in; it was as if the song in my head had been swiped.” And that for many fans – the appropriation and/or distortion of musical memory – would continue to be an issue as more and more original music was used in advertising. Still, the genie was out of the bottle by this time. Advertisers had discovered the power in original rock music and there would be little turning back. By 1986 Rolling Stone magazine had launched a separate newsletter, Marketing Through Music, aimed at promoting the use of rock music to sell consumer goods, especially to the young adult audience.
The “Big Chill advertising” that began in the mid- and late-1980s was just the beginning. Some important legal fights were yet to come, including the Beatles’ fight with Nike in the late 1980s over the use of one of their songs. But increasingly, through the 1990s (see “Selling Janis Joplin”, for example ), the use of original rock music in advertising would escalate and become more common.
15th anniversary DVD edition, 1998.
As for The Big Chill, the movie and music continued to have a good run for years after its initial opening. In the year after the movie’s opening, a second album of music was released: The Big Chill: More Songs from the Original Soundtrack. The original soundtrack meanwhile sold 2 million copies by late September 1985. It would eventually sell more than six million copies, becoming one of Motown’s best-selling albums. In 1998, the film’s 15 anniversary year, there was a theatrical reissue of the film in November, and a DVD version by Sony the following January. The DVD includes a retrospective documentary, deleted scenes, the movie’s trailer, and a six-page insert. “The Big Chill reasserts itself effortlessly… as an irresistibly satisfying cultural artifact,” wrote Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum at the film’s 1998 reissue. In 1998 as well, both the original and supplemental Big Chill music albums were remastered and released anew. In 2004, a deluxe edition of the soundtrack was released containing all but two of the eighteen songs from the film, plus three additional instrumentals from the film. A second “music-of-a-generation” disc of nineteen additional tracks was also included in the deluxe edition, some of which had appeared on the original albums. In 2008, some twenty-five years after its release, The Big Chill still had an online following.
Stay tuned to this website for other stories on the history and use of music in advertising and related issues.
Stephen Holden, “The Pop Life,” New York Times, November 30, 1988.
More 'Big Chill' music, 1998 edition.
Ken Tucker, The New Season/Film; “Ain’t Too Proud to Obsess, All Over Again,” New York Times, September 13, 1998 [Ken Tucker is the critic-at-large for Entertainment Weekly.].
Don Aucoin, “Fifteen Years Later, `Big Chill’ Is Cooler than Ever,” Boston Globe, November 6, 1998.
Alex funeral scene from The Big Chill on You Tube (6:37 min).
The Big Chill cast in front of the home in South Carolina where the film was shot, from left: Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, Meg Tilly, William Hurt, Tom Berenger, Mary Kay Place, Jeff Goldblum, and JoBeth Williams.
July 2, 1963: Bob Dylan at civil rights gathering in Greenwood, Mississippi singing ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game,’ a song about the murder of activist Medgar Evers.
In the summer of 1963, the civil rights movement in the United States was coming to a head. There had already been eight years of activism in the south, beginning with the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, where a young preacher named Martin Luther King began to emerge as a leader. In 1957, the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas had begun. By the early 1960s, college students had conducted “sit ins” at lunch counters to protest segregated restaurants. A few black students by then had, for the first time, gained admission to the universities of Alabama and Georgia. Blacks across the south and elsewhere were finding they could act to change their world. Medgar Evers was one of those who became committed to action.
Medgar Evers, 1963.
Evers would become one of the rising young leaders in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. In the 1940s, he had dropped out of high school at the age of 17, joined the army and fought in Europe during WWII, completing his service honorably in 1945. But when Evers returned home, he was prevented from voting in elections, and was also intimidated by a mob of white men. He vowed then to work for change. By 1952, he graduated from Alcorn State University and married a classmate Myrlie Beasley.
“Only a Pawn
in Their Game” 1963
A bullet from the back of a bush
took Medgar Evers’ blood.
A finger fired the trigger to his name.
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man’s brain
But he can’t be blamed
He’s only a pawn in their game.
A South politician preaches
to the poor white man,
“You got more than the blacks,
don’t complain.
You’re better than them, you been born
with white skin,” they explain.
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the
governors get paid,
And the marshals and cops get the same,
But the poor white man’s used in the
hands of them all like a tool.
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
‘Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.
From the poverty shacks, he looks
from the cracks to the tracks,
And the hoof beats pound in his brain.
And he’s taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide ‘neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain’t got no name
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.
Today, Medgar Evers was buried from
the bullet he caught.
They lowered him down as a king.
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He’ll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game.
In early 1954, Medgar Evers applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi to study law. When his application was rejected, Evers became the focus of an NAACP campaign to desegregate the school that would later culminate in the 1961-62 case of another student, James Meredith. By this time, Evers and his family were living in Jackson, Mississippi and he became the first field secretary of the NAACP in that state. He traveled throughout Mississippi recruiting new members, organizing voter-registration, protesting unequal social conditions, and boycotting companies that practiced discrimination. Evers soon had a high profile as an activist, and that made him a threat to the power structure in Mississippi, and also a target.
Shot in the Back
On June 12, 1963, just past midnight, Evers drove up to his Jackson home, parking under the car port, the kitchen door to his house a short distance away. Evers that night had attended a group meeting at New Jerusalem Baptist Church, while his wife Myrlie and his children watched President Kennedy’s televised speech – a speech that focused on the racial tensions in Birmigham, Alabama, where violent clashes between protestors and police had been going on for the past two months. As Evers got out of his car, he grabbed a bundle of T-shirts that were to be handed out the next morning to civil rights demonstrators. He only took a few steps away from his car toward the kitchen door when he was shot in back. The bullet tore though his body and went into the house where his wife Myrlie and their three children were. “Medgar was lying there on the doorstep in a pool of blood,” said Myrlie. “I tried to get the children away. But they saw it all – the blood and the bullet hole that went right through him.” Medgar Evers was 37.
On June 19, 1963 in Washington D.C., Evers was buried at the Arlington National Cemetery, receiving full military honors. More than three thousand people attended. It was the largest funeral at Arlington since the interment of John Foster Dulles, former U.S. Secretary of State in 1959. On June 23, 1964, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for Evers’ murder, but it would take decades before justice was finally served in the case.
“Oxford Town”
Meanwhile, in New York’s Greenwhich village, a new, young singer named Bob Dylan had been playing coffee houses and recording some new folk music along with old blues. In 1962, Bob Dylan had released his first album, Bob Dylan, and also had written songs such as “Blowin in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” which were labeled “protest music” by some since they touched on issues of the day, including civil rights. Some of Dylan’s music keyed specifically on civil rights subjects of that time. In 1962, for example, he wrote “Oxford Town” – a song about the riots that ensued in Oxford, Mississippi when black student James Meredith became the first to be admitted to University of Mississippi.
“Oxford Town”
1962
Oxford Town, Oxford Town
Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down
The sun don’t shine above the ground
Ain’t a-goin’ down to Oxford Town
He went down to Oxford Town
Guns and clubs followed him down
All because his face was brown
Better get away from Oxford Town
Oxford Town around the bend
He come in to the door, he couldn’t get in
All because of the color of his skin
What do you think about that, my frien’?
Me and my gal, my gal’s son
We got met with a tear gas bomb
I don’t even know why we come
Goin’ back where we come from
Oxford Town in the afternoon
Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune
Two men died ‘neath the Mississippi moon
Somebody better investigate soon
Oxford Town, Oxford Town
Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down
The sun don’t shine above the ground
Ain’t a-goin’ down to Oxford Town
The small town of Oxford was the university’s main campus and on September 20, 1962, it became something of battleground, as U.S. Marshalls had been sent there under direct order from President John F. Kennedy to ensure James Meredith’s enrollment and protection. Rioting ensued; two were killed and numerous students were injured. Dylan’s “Oxford Town” focused the events surrounding the campus riots and Meredith’s enrollment there, and also the larger civil rights movement then unfolding. “Oxford Town” was written by Dylan in October or November 1962 and first recorded on December 6, 1962. He is said to have performed the song at appearances in the fall and winter of 1962 and 1963, including a Carnegie Hall concert in October 1963. The song also appears on Dylan’s second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
Music Player “Oxford Town”-1962
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Back in New York, Dylan continued to perform in Greenwich Village, as well other cities during 1963, and also a few television shows. On May 12, 1963, Dylan sparked controversy when he walked out of a rehearsal for a scheduled appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Dylan wanted to perform “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” but was informed by CBS Television’s “head of program practices” that the song was potentially libelous to the John Birch Society. Rather than comply with the censorship, Dylan refused to appear on the program. He did perform several days later with Joan Baez on May 18, 1963 at the Monterey folk festival in California. His second album, Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released at the end of May 1963.
Pete Seeger performing in Greenwood, Mississippi.
Following the murder of Medgar Evers on June 12th, 1963, Dylan was moved to write a song about the incident, which he titled “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” In Mississippi that summer, there were voter registration drives underway in various communities, one of which was Greenwood, Mississippi. It was here that Dylan visited on July 2, 1963 after an overnight flight. He performed there before a small gathering of civil rights workers and did the song “Only A Pawn in Their Game” and others. Pete Seeger, who had been there for a few days already, also performed at the Greenwood gathering.
Joan Baez & Dylan in August 1963 at the historic ‘March on Washington’.
Elsewhere that summer, Dylan would also perform his songs, including those with the civil rights themes, at numerous performances. At the July 26, 1963 Newport Music Festival, he performed “Only A Pawn in Their Game” and did duets with Joan Baez, some in small group sessions. On the main stage near the end of the festival, the songs “We Shall Overcome” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” were performed with a larger group that included Dylan, Baez, Pete Seger, the Freedom Singers, and Peter, Paul and Mary. In late August 1963, at the historic “March on Washington,” Dylan sang “Only A Pawn in Their Game”, among others, at the Lincoln Memorial – where Dr. Martin Luther King made his famous “I Have A Dream” speech. Nor would Dylan end his songwriting of civil rights-related music with his 1963 Medgar Evers tune.
Hattie Carroll’s Death
Dylan also wrote and recorded a song in late October 1963 entitled, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” The song first appeared on Dylan’s 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin.’ However, he performed the song live very soon after he had first written it. The song provides what is believed to be a generally factual account of the death of 51 year-old African American barmaid named Hattie Carroll. She was struck by a wealthy young tobacco farmer from Charles County, Maryland named William Devereux “Billy” Zantzinger – named “William Zanzinger” in Dylan’s song. For his crime, Zantzinger served a sentence of six months in a county jail. In 1963, Charles County, Maryland was still strictly segregated by race in public facilities such as restaurants, churches, theaters, doctor’s offices, buses, and the county fair. The schools of Charles County, for example, would not be integrated until 1967, four years after Hattie Carroll was killed.
“The Lonesome Death
Of Hattie Carroll”
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’.
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain’t the time for your tears.
William Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years
Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the politics of Maryland,
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling,
In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain’t the time for your tears.
Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen.
She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn’t even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level,
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room,
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle.
And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain’t the time for your tears.
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught ‘em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom,
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’.
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished,
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now’s the time for your tears.
Reportedly, the main incident occurred at a white-tie Spinsters’ Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland in early February 1963. A drunken Zant- zinger arrived at the hotel carrying a toy cane — a cane later described by Time magazine as “a wooden carnival cane that he had picked up somewhere.” At the Emerson Hotel, Zantzinger assaulted at least three of the hotel workers: a bellboy, a waitress, and, at about 1:30 in the morning of February 9th, barmaid Hattie Carroll. She was 51 years old, the mother of ten children. Zantzinger – then 24 years old and about 6′-2″ – struck her after she did not bring his bourbon quickly enough.
When Zantzinger and his party arrived at the hotel that night, he was already drunk and had earlier assaulted employees at a Baltimore restaurant, also using his toy cane. At the hotel Ball, however, he continued to be abusive, calling a 30-year-old waitress a “nigger” and hitting her with his cane. Shortly thereafter he started in on Hattie Carroll when she didn’t bring his bourbon immediately, cursing her – calling her a “nigger” and a ” black son of a bitch” – and hitting her on the shoulder with the cane. He also attacked his own wife, knocking her to the ground and hitting her with his shoe. Hattie Carroll meanwhile, told co-workers she felt ill after being hit and verbally abused, and then collapsed. She was hospital- ized shortly thereafter and died eight hours later. Her autopsy showed hardened arteries, an enlarged heart, and high blood pressure. A brain hemorrhage was the reported cause of death.
Zantzinger was initially charged with murder. His defense was that he had been extremely drunk and said he had no memory of the attack. His charge was reduced to manslaughter and assault, based on the likelihood that it was her stress reaction to his verbal and physical abuse that led to the intracranial bleeding, rather than blunt-force trauma from the blow that left no lasting mark. On August 28, 1963 Zantzinger was convicted of both charges and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.
Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963.
Time magazine, covering the sentencing, noted:
“In June, after Zantzinger’s phalanx of five topflight attorneys won a change of venue to a court in Hagerstown [50 miles or so west of Baltimore], a three-judge panel reduced the murder charge to manslaughter. Following a three-day trial, Zant- zinger was found guilty. For the assault on the hotel employees: a fine of $125. For the death of Hattie Carroll: six months in jail and a fine of $500. The judges considerately deferred the start of the jail sentence until September 15, to give Zantzinger time to harvest his tobacco crop.”
Bob Dylan, meanwhile, had been following the case in the news, and reportedly wrote the song in Manhattan, sitting in an all-night cafe. He recorded it on October 23, 1963, when the trial was still relatively fresh news, and incorporated it into his live performances. Dylan also performed the song on Steve Allen’s network television program soon after its release. A studio version of the song was later released on January 13, 1964 and it also appears on Dylan’s 1964 album, The Times They are A-Changin’. But by then Dylan had begun moving away from protest and folk music.
Reluctant Icon
Dylan, with guitar, in the early 1960s somewhere in the south -- quite possibly Greenwood, MS, July 1963. Photo, www.bobdylan.com
Dylan, by virtue of his early 1960s protest music, had become something of a civil rights icon and protest leader – at least in the eyes of many civil rights workers at the time. But he soon moved to take himself out of that role, feeling restricted and pigeon- holed by the designation. In December 1963, three weeks after the assassination of John Kennedy and four months after the March on Washington, Dylan was the invited guest of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee at their annual Bill of Rights dinner. There, Dylan was to receive the Tom Paine Award for services to the cause. But in accepting the award that evening, and after some heavy drinking, Dylan signaled his frustration with the protest role, finding it a burden and a limit on his creativity. For some, this was Dylan marking the end of that involvement; expressing his rejection of his role in protest politics and of folk musician in that genre. It would be something of a pattern for Dylan whenever the outside world tried to define him. In mid-1964 he reportedly said to writer Nat Hentoff: “Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore – you know, be a spokesman. From now on, I want to write from inside me …I’m not part of no movement… I just can’t make it with any organization…” Then came Dylan’s embrace of electric music at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, which left many of his fans and colleagues in shocked disbelief. Yet the change in style, like his speech at the civil rights award dinner, would be Dylan being Dylan, following his muse, and rejecting outside labels, especially when others would try to impose some definition on who he was or what his music meant.
In any case, while Dylan the musician continued to move on to new musical forms and genres – as he does to this day – his contributions to protest music are fact, remain significant, and have become legend. Dylan’s protest songs of the early 1960s did make an important contribution for many in the civil rights arena and beyond. Dylan’s contributions to protest music are fact, remain significant, and have become legend. “He was a folk-singer writing during a time when popular song focused on ‘Moon-June’ sentimentality and vacuous ditties,” wrote Robert Chapman in the late 1990s on why Dylan was important to civil rights in the early 1960s. “At the time it was unheard of for a young white songwriter to compose the kind of songs that he did, and he knocked down some serious barriers as to what was thought possible within the parameters of popular music.” In addition to “A Pawn in the Game,” “Oxford Town,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol” mentioned here, other protest and civil rights-related songs he wrote include: “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, and “The Death Of Emmett Till” (a song about the a young Chicago boy beaten to death on a visit to Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman). And of course, there is also “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Another, somewhat fuzzy photo of Dylan & Pete Seeger at the 1963 Greenwood, MS gathering.
Although “Blowin’ in the Wind” is regarded generally as a protest song about peace, war, and freedom, it became something of an anthem for the civil rights movement. Upon first hearing the song in the 1960s, other musicians involved with civil rights, such as Marvin Gaye and Mavis Staples of the Staples Sisters, were quite impressed. Staples, in fact, said she was amazed at how a young white man at that time could write something that captured the frustration and aspirations of black people.
“Blowin’ in the Wind,” however, was not made famous Dylan, but by folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, also represented by Dylan’s manager. Their version of the song, released as a single in 1963, sold 300,000 copies in the first week. By mid-July 1963, it was No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart and had sales exceeding one million copies. But it was Dylan’s songwriting that shone through on this and other songs of that era.
Article Citation: Jack Doyle, “Only A Pawn in Their Game,” PopHistoryDig.com, October 13, 2008.
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Sources, Links & Additional Information
This 1964 Dylan album contains both ‘Only A Pawn...’ and ‘Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.’
“Northern Folk Singers Help Out at Negro Festival in Mississippi, New York Times, July 7, 1963.
Robert Shelton, No Direction Home, Da Capo Press, 2003 reprint of 1986 original, 576 pp.
Pete Seeger, “Report from Greenwood, Mississippi: A Singing Movement,” originally published in Broadside Magazine, No. 30, August 1963; also in, Pete Seeger, The Incompleat Folksinger, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972, p. 247.
Gerry Cordon, Liverpool Community College, Book Review: Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art, by Mike Marqusee New Press, 2003, Review posted, January 18, 2005.
Audio recording, The Story of Greenwood Mississippi, Recorded and Produced by Guy Carawan for the Student No-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Featuring Bob Moses and SNCC workers, Fanny Lou Hammer and Greenwood citizens, Mass meetings, hymns, prayers, Freedom songs, Medgar Evers and Dick Gregory, 2004 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings / 1965 Folkways Records #5593.
Murray Lerner, producer, The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965 (DVD), Sony, 2007.
One of GE’s ‘model miners’ featured in its 2005 TV ad touting the company’s ‘clean coal’ technology.
In 2005, General Electric, the giant American conglomerate that owns, among other things, the NBC Television Network, began an advertising campaign to tout its new-found concern for the environment and global warming. The advertising series and its affiliated campaign, were part of a company- wide, GE initiative then titled “Ecomagi- nation” — GE’s word for environmental inno- vation. The company had allocated some $90 million to launch the campaign, of which the TV ads were part. One of the first ads to be featured used a coal mining theme and was titled “Model Miners.” The music backing the ad was from the 1950s hit song “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford. GE used the spot to push “clean coal,” a phrase which given coal’s carbon content, is regarded as something of an oxymoron by those concerned with global warming. Still, GE’s “Model Miners” TV ad was part of the company’s message that the nation could use its coal reserves in an environmentally friendly way to help solve its energy problem.
Scene from GE's coal mining ad.
Cue ‘Model Miners’
The ad opens at a coal mining site, with processing buildings in the background, as a group of male and female “model miners” descend a slight grade on their way into a coal mine. The camera then pans to various work scenes in the mine — the gals clad in tank tops and a few of the guys shirtless. All of the “model miners,” of course, have very good looking bodies and are sweating appropriately, yet not too much. At the ad’s opening and throughout its first scenes, Tennessee Ernie Ford sings his legendary “Sixteen Tons” tune in the background:
Well, I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine.
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mines.
I loaded sixteen tons of Number Nine coal,
And the straw-boss said, “Well, bless my soul.”
Scene from GE's coal mine ad.
You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go,
I owe my soul to the company store.
As the song fades off lightly into the background, the narrator delivers GE’s intended message:
“Imagine if a 250-year supply of energy were right here at home… Now, thanks to emissions-reducing technology from GE Energy, harnessing the power of coal is looking more beautiful every day…..Another product of pure Eco-imagination. GE, imagination at work.”
As the narrator is making the pitch, the scene cuts to frame after frame of attractive workers flashing their muscles, the ladies in particular, wielding shovels and at least one with a jackhammer, most smiling and a few in near-flirting poses. The final screen shot, as the announcer finishes, shows the GE logo with “GE Imagination” printed below it, remaining on screen until close.
“The commercial we see,” offered Josh Ozersky in a July 2005 review of the ad in The New York Times, is visually indistinguishable from a Victoria’s Secret ad, right down to the blue filters and hubba-hubba slow motion.” Others thought the ad resembled a Madonna MTV video. In fact, at the unveiling of the “ecomagination” campaign in Washington D.C. where the TV ads were played and introduced at a VIP reception, CEO Jeffrey Immelt described the “Model Miners” ad as “a play on how to make coal sexy again.” Applauding heartily for the ad when it was played, according to one attendee, was James Connaughton, President Bush’s senior environmental advisor.
Scene from GE's coal mine ad.
No OSHA Regs
GE’s coal mine, of course, is a highly stylized, Hollywood coal mine. There are no OSHA regs here; no breathing masks required. And there’s plenty of room to stand up and strut one’s stuff. No low ceilings or cramped quarters. In fact, GE’s ad agency, BBDO, did not actually use a real coal mine to make the ad. Rather, they built a replica of the coal mining scenes on a soundstage to make the ad – at no small cost, to be sure. BBDO and GE would later win praise for their efforts. Some of the avant garde on Madison Avenue gave the piece high marks for its artistry, and BBDO won an award or two for the production. Yet others saw the piece as all wrong. “It strikes me as disingenuous to call for a massive resurgence in coal mining and then portray the job as a stylish sex party,” wrote Seth Stevenson of Slate magazine. Real miners, he said, still get black lung and still die in cave-ins.
'Model miners' at work in GE ad.
GE’s use of the song “Sixteen Tons” also brought objection, especially among those who cited the heritage of the song and what it was really saying about the brutish world of coal mining and company-ruled mining towns. True, the song was written about the struggles in the 1930s and 1940s, and things have improved since then. Still, as many who work in the mines today will point out, things are still far from peachy-keen in the coalfields.
BBDO’s Executive Creative Director Don Schneider told Slate’s Seth Stevenson that “Sixteen Tons” was used in the ad because it “instantly feels like a coal-mining song.” He also told Stevenson, “you can picture coal miners singing it without any negative feelings.” Really? Coal miners happily singing “another day older and deeper in debt”? Perhaps Mr. Schneider might have looked a bit deeper into the song’s history before he made that assertion. “Sixteen Tons” is certainly not “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It’s Off To Work We Go.” Merle Travis, the song’s author, had another world in mind when he penned the tune in the 1940s. (See “Sixteen Tons” for that background). “No one expects G.E. to preach a Marxist sermon,” wrote Josh Ozersky the New York Times, referring the deeper message in the song, “but the use of “Sixteen Tons” as a jokey soundtrack is an odd public relations move.”
More GE 'model miners'.
Jonathan Klein, a GE spokesman had explained the ad’s purpose to the New York Times. “In ‘Model Miners,’” he said, “the goal is to communicate that G.E.’s emission-reducing technology can make coal a more appealing energy source.” More appealing, that is, to GE’s coal and electric utility clients, perhaps. Building coal gasification facilities, coal-fired power plants, and sequestering carbon are all potentially huge capital goods businesses for GE. That may account for the company’s keen interest in projecting coal as a clean and happy “MTV generation” enterprise. BBDO and GE are not pitching coal miners or coal communities here, or even the general public necessarily. They’re message is really aimed at bigger corporate and government clients, saying in effect, “we can reduce your costs and increase your profits by reducing your future environmental liabilities, your pollution.” That’s not a bad thing, certainly, but running roughshod over coal mining’s labor heritage and short changing its dangers with misplaced imagery is.
Another GE 'model miner' from its TV ad.
It appears, however, that GE did get the message that its “Model Miners” ad was not striking the right chord with many of its viewers. TreeHugger.com, a Discovery Company website, reported that “GE was eventually pressured into dropping the ad campaign after it received numerous complaints from coal mining families.” Also, on January 2, 2006, the dangers of coal mining in the U.S. had become quite apparent once again, as the Sago Mine explosion in Sago, West Virginia became the dominant national news story, with days of continuous CNN and other coverage. Twelve miners died in the Sago mine tragedy. Not a good time, in any case, for “Model Miners” type advertising.
Group shot, 'model miners'.
Today, GE continues its Ecomagination campaign in various forms and venues, using television and print advertising, among other outlets. A sampling of some of these ads and other GE information on the project can be found at the company’s website.
General Electric, Press Release, “GE Launches Ecomagination to Develop Environmental Technologies; Company-Wide Focus on Addressing Pressing Challenges”, May 9, 2005.
Greg Schneider, “GE Determined to Show More ‘Ecomagination’ - Program Sets Pollution Reduction Targets,” Washington Post, Tuesday, May 10, 2005, p. E-2.
Record sleeve cover for January 1956 Capitol album that included ‘Sixteen Tons’ by Tennessee Ernie Ford.
The top song in America during late 1955 and early 1956 was a tune about coal mining – a song about the hard life and poverty of being a coal miner. Its title was “Sixteen Tons” and it was made popular by a singer named Tennessee Ernie Ford. The song had actually been written in the 1940s, its verse grown piecemeal from oft-heard phrases and the lives of miners dating to the 1930s. And although the song had been previously recorded in the 1940s, it wasn’t until the 1950s that it became a big hit.
By Merle Travis
In the mid-1940s, Merle Travis was a guitar-playing, country musician from Kentucky who had worked in radio, studio recording, and live stage shows. He also had bit parts in Hollywood films singing in B Westerns. In 1946, he signed a recording contract with Hollywood-based Capitol Records and had some early hits. Capitol also asked him to record an “album”of folk songs – four 78 rpm disks – three of which were songs that Travis wrote about coal mining. They were about life in the mines of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, where his father had worked. One of the songs was “Dark As A Dungeon” and another, “Sixteen Tons.” For the latter song, Travis had pieced together fragments of phrases he had heard while growing up and in later life. A letter his brother sent during WWII made a comparison to working in the coal mines, saying: “You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.” Travis had also heard an expression his father used with neighbors, which Travis adopted for “Sixteen Tons,” as he later recounted: “…The chorus is from a saying my Dad often used. He never saw real money. He was constantly in debt to the coal company. When shopping was needed, Dad would go to a [coal company] window and draw little brass tokens against his account. They could only be spent at the company store. His humorous expression was, ‘I can’t afford to die. I owe my soul to the company store.’ “
A later compilation of Merle Travis music.
Travis’ version of “Sixteen Tons” was released by Capitol records in 1947 on Folk Songs of The Hills. But the song did not receive much notice. In fact, during the Cold War hysteria of the late 1940s, songs dealing with workers’ woes by “folk music activists,” as they were called, became suspect. Ken Nelson, a Capitol record producer who had also worked at WJJD radio in Chicago in the 1940s, later explained in 1992 that FBI agents advised the radio station not to play Travis’ records because they considered him a “communist sympathizer,” which Travis was not. Although his version of “Sixteen Tons” – produced with a single guitar – did not become a hit, Merle Travis continued his music career, becoming one of the most highly regarded country guitarists in history. His “Sixteen Tons” would be made famous by Tennessee Ernie Ford.
“Tennessee” Ernie’s Big Hit
Ernie Ford in Capitol recording session.
Ernest Jennings Ford was from Bristol, Tennessee, where in high school his baritone voice had first been noticed. After a stint in the military during WWII, he adopted the stage name “Tennessee Ernie.” He began his career as a singer of country music on radio stations in San Bernardino and Pasadena, California. By 1949, he signed a contract with Capitol records, had a few hit records and also became a local TV star on the popular Southern California show, Hometown Jamboree.
In 1954 Tennessee Ernie Ford became nationally known through his several appearances on the I Love Lucy TV show as a visiting “country cousin.” Ford knew the “Sixteen Tons” song from working with Merle Travis who had appeared on Hometown Jamboree. Ford’s grandfather and uncle had also worked in the mines. In early 1955, Ford did a version of “Sixteen Tons” on television. Within five days, NBC received over 1,200 letters from viewers asking about the song. In July 1955, Ford performed the song again at the Indiana State Fair before a crowd of 30,000 and the response was “deafening,” according to one report.
Label on 78 rpm version of ‘Sixteen Tons’.
Capitol Records, meanwhile, informed Ford in September 1955 that he needed to produce a new record to meet the terms of his contract. Shortly thereafter, a two-sided single was produced. “You Don’t Have To Be A Baby To Cry” appeared on the “A” side and “Sixteen Tons” on the B side. Capitol believed that the A-side song was destined to be Ford’s biggest hit yet. On October 17th, 1955, Capitol shipped the new record to radio DJs who began playing the B side, “Sixteen Tons.” In about ten days’ time, the record promptly sold 400,000 copies. Demand for “Sixteen Tons” became so great that Capitol geared all its pressing plants nationwide to produce the record. In less than month after its release, over one million recordings of “Sixteen Tons” were sold. It became the fastest-selling single in Capitol’s history.
Sample record sleeve, 'Sixteen Tons'.
No. 1 Hit
“Sixteen Tons” hit Billboard’s Country Music charts in November 1955, and held the No. 1 position for ten weeks. By December 15, 1955, more than 2 million copies were sold, then making it the most successful single to date. It then crossed over to the pop charts, and held the No. 1 position there for eight weeks into early 1956. Ford later gave some background on the song’s recording in an interview he did with the Saturday Evening Post: (…continues, at right…)
Sixteen Tons
Now, some people say a man’s made out of mud,
But a poor man’s made out of muscle and blood,
Muscle and blood, skin and bones,
A mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong.
You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go,
I owe my soul to the company store
Well, I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine.
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mines.
I loaded sixteen tons of Number Nine coal,
And the straw-boss said, “Well, bless my soul.”
You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go,
I owe my soul to the company store
Well, I was born one mornin’, it was drizzlin’ rain.
Fightin’ and trouble is my middle name.
I was raised in the bottoms by a mama hound.
I’m mean as a dog, but I’m as gentle as a lamb.
You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go,
I owe my soul to the company store
WeIl, if you see me a-comin’ you better step aside.
A lotta men didn’t and a lotta men died.
I got a fist of iron, and a fist of steel.
If the right one don’t get you, then the left one will.
You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go,
I owe my soul to the company store
Ford interview:
“…Sometimes it’s a new twist that boosts one of those songs up into the million sales class. ’Sixteen Tons’ was written eight years before I recorded it, too. I’d sung ‘Sixteen Tons’ years before [on radio], but it hadn’t been any blockbuster, and Merle Travis, who’d written it, had put it in an album of his songs called Folk Songs of the Hills. Nothing happened then either. Then we decided to do some of Merle’s things with modern instrumentation [on television]. When Merle did them, he’d used a straight guitar music background. When we did them we used a flute, a bass clarinet, a trumpet, a clarinet, drums, a guitar, vibes and a piano. They gave it a real wonderful sound.”
“I snapped my fingers all through it. Sometimes I set my own tempo during rehearsal by doing that…. After I was through rehearsing that song, Lee Gillette, who was in charge of the recording session for Capitol Records, screamed through the telephone from the control room, ‘Tell Ernie to leave that finger snapping in when you do the final waxing.’”
“They liked ‘Sixteen Tons,’ all right, at Capitol, …but nobody threw a fit over it. Nobody said, ‘We’re glad you brought this along because it’s sure to sell a million copies in twenty-one days.’ They didn’t say that because anybody in his right mind knew that wouldn’t happen. Yet that’s exactly what did happen.” [end Ford interview]
“[N]o American song in many a generation has got as much [play] in such a short time…as ‘Sixteen Tons’,” wrote a Time magazine reporter in December 1955. “It is currently the No. 1 hit on almost every list. It has been called deeply American by some and dangerously radical by others.”
Coal mining town of Dehue, West Virginia showing a 1934 labor march.
Danger & Debt
The song’s lyrics hinted at the dangers of working in mines and the hard times of living in mining communities. And indeed, from the early 1900s through the 1940s, life in the coal mining communities all across the country was pretty grim. Mineworkers were frequently killed in mine accidents and most who worked in the mines developed “black lung” disease from years of breathing coal dust. Although mine conditions improved following the unionization of mine workers in the 1930s and subsequent mine safety laws, even in the mid-1950s when “Sixteen Tons” was at the top of the charts, mine accidents and deplorable conditions in mining communities were still found throughout the coal fields.
And as “Sixteen Tons” made plain in its lyrics, indebtedness to the company was also a problem in some coal communities, especially before labor reforms were adopted. Coal miners often became indebted to the “company store,” also known as the general store in some locations. With no competition, the company could keep prices high for everyday items, and employees – especially those with families – often needed to pay in credit with tokens or scrip. A never-ending cycle of debt often resulted, meaning essentially that the workers were perpetually bound to the company.
Coal Mine Dangers 1950s-2010
Miner working in a confined, cramped position inside a narrow coal seam on a piece of equipment called a ‘lizard.’ (photo, Earl Dotter).
Although mine safety has generally improved over the years – and “Sixteen Tons” spoke largely to an earlier era – coal mining accidents were still occurring through the 1950s and 1960s, as they have to the present day. In December 1951, for example, the Orient No. 2 mine in West Frankfort, IL exploded killing 119 miners. In Farmington, WV, the Jamison No. 9 mine exploded in November 1954 killing 16. And in McDowell County, WV, the Bishop No. 34 mine had two fatal explo- sions in the 1950s – one on February 1957 that took 37 lives, and another in October 1958 that killed 22. The 1960s saw more of the same. A March 1960 mine fire killed 18 in the No. 22 mine at Pine Creek, WV. Suffocation took the lives of 6 workers in a Dora, PA mine in June 1966. And in 1972, a collapsed coal wastewater impoundment at Buffalo Creek, WV killed 126, injured more than 1,000, and displaced thousands more after flooding several downstream communities. In recent years, mine accidents have continued to occur, as in the May 2006 Darby Mine explosion in Harlan County, KY that took five lives; the August 2007 Crandall Canyon Mine cave-in of Emery County, Utah that killed six miners and later three rescuers; and the Montcoal, WV mine explosion of April 2010 at a Massey Energy mine that killed 29 miners.
"Sixteen Tons" record sleeve photo.
Song Resonates
“Sixteen Tons” caught on all across the country in 1955 and 1956, as it offered a distinctly different sound; somber and fatalistic, in sharp contrast to the up-beat pop ballads of that day. Rock ‘n roll was just starting its rise to prominence then. Still, the chorus of “Sixteen Tons” offered memorable lines and helped bring the plight of miners more into general pubic awareness at that time. Some listeners were also thought to identify with the tune in their own lives, as they too were living on credit or stuck in never-ending jobs, seeing themselves as “owing their souls” to a kind of “company store.” In any case, Capitol Records was certainly happy, as “Sixteen Tons,” along with other songs, helped improve 1955 sales to a record $21.3 million, up 25 percent over 1954, with profits up by 33 percent.
Cover of 'TV Guide' in March 1957, one of four he would appear on.
Ford’s Career Soars
Tennessee Ernie Ford, meanwhile, went on to a successful TV career hosting prime-time network music and variety shows from 1956 to 1965. Ford proved a versatile performer, cutting across comedy, film, and various music genres, including country, pop, gospel and religious music. Ernie Ford also appeared in Hollywood films, sang the title song for the Marilyn Monroe/Robert Mitchum 1954 film, River of No Return, a song which became a pop hit. He also did the “Ballad of Davy Crockett,” another 1955 hit record. His music career continued through the 1970s, as he completed a 1975 album with Glen Campbell, as this and other music from his past enjoyed a second life with new listeners and CD sales in the 1990s. At age 71 in 1990, Ford was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He passed away the following year due to liver cancer.
In 2005, some fifty years after “Sixteen Tons” had made its run at the top of the music charts, the General Electric Co., the giant industrial corporation, used the song in a TV advertising campaign designed in part to promote the use of “clean coal.” For more on that story see “G.E.’s Hot Coal Ad.”
“The Wild Birds Do Whistle,” Time, Monday, December 19, 1955.
“High-Priced Pea Picker,” Time, Monday, May. 27, 1957.
Pete Martin, “Tennessee Ernie Ford Interview.” Saturday Evening Post, September 28, 1957, p. 124.
Archie Green, Only a Miner, Urbana, Illinois 1972, pp. 301-302.
George Korson, Coal Dust on the Fiddle, Hatboro, Pennsylvania, 1965, pp. 72-73.
George Vecsey, “Strike Frees Miners From ‘Dungeon’ Peril”(Dante, VA), New York Times, Saturday October 2, 1971, p. 16.
Herbert C. Bardes, “A Chronicle of Coal Company Scrip,” New York Times, Sunday, April 1, 1973, p. 183.
Leonard Sloane, “The Company Store Comes Out of the Coal Mines; The Company Store, Revised for 1975,” New York Times, Business & Finance, Sunday, June 22, 1975, p. 147.
Coal mining folk music.
“Kentucky Coal Area Recalls Days of Token Money”(Dunmor, KY), New York Times, Sunday, May 4, 1980, p. 59.
Ace Collins, The Stories Behind Country Music’s All-Time Greatest 100 Songs, New York: Berkeley Publishing Group, 1996, pp. 91-93.
The Billboard Book of Number One Hits (fifth edition).
Rhonda Janney Coleman, “Coal Miners and Their Communities in Southern Appalachia, 1925-1941″ West Virginia Historical Society Quarterly, Volume 15, Nos. 2 & 3.
“Coal Mining Disasters,” (incidents with 5 or more fatalities), NIOSH Mining Safety and Health Research, National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health.
