Let’s go waaaay back in the Wayback Machine

Dang, a searcher has to really search just to get to Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman. Put “wayback machine” in the search box and you get all kinds of references to stuff stored somewhere forever and ever. I had to look for Mr. Peabody in order to get what I wanted. You might think that if something happened more than five or 10 years ago, it really never happened. Unless someone was trying to prove the evil that lives to the right of the political center line.

While fixing breakfast this morning, my mind for some reason suddenly jumped to Your Hit Parade, which was  on television from 1950-59. Funny, the 1959 date, because that is the year Mr. Peabody and Sherman made their first appearance on The Huckleberry Hound Show. I remember the TV Hit Parade for about three years. My mother and father bought a television around 1956.

Two things were in my mind about Hit Parade – Gisele MacKenzie singing I’m All Shook Up while dressed as an Egyptian Pharaohesse or Pharaohnette and lying on an apparent embalming table; and the name Snooky Lanson, who was a singer on Hit Parade. I don’t remember anything about Lanson, except “Snooky” was not a name likely to be found in Bowie or Morris counties, Texas.

Rock and roll did in Hit Parade. Until the popularity of rock, pop music was a singer backed by a big band. Rock, by contrast, was a singer backed by three guitars (lead, rhythm and bass), drums and sometimes a piano. Rock put a lot of singers out of work.

Hard to imagine a woman in diaphanous gown, lying ready for embalming and singing an Elvis Presley song. These days activists and such would find all kinds of things wrong with a supine woman in flimsy white silk, shook up or not.