Andy Griffith: The Dark Side

This is ostensibly our final tribute to the late Andy Griffith. Here we show a side of his career often overlooked, namely his early film experience. Griffith made his debut on the silver screen in 1957, with A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, he co-starred with Patricia Neal, in a story of another type of country boy, a drifter with delusions of grandeur.

In a 2005 interview, Griffith maintained that the film was far more popular and respected in more recent decades than it was when originally released.

Here's the trailer. You decide.
 

FAMW: Single Ladies (In Mayberry)

This is another tribute to the late Andy Griffith, courtesy of Slate.com (the last one is later tonight), which published a mashup of his show's theme song "The Fishin' Hole" with Beyoncé's "All the Single Ladies," the combination of which is the work of San Francisco DJ Party Ben. There's not much of an image here, but you get the idea, which admittedly gets old about halfway through. But it seemed like a good idea at the time, when we were planning for this week's Friday Afternoon Moment of Whimsy.

Y'all put your hands on it, now, ya hear?
 

Guitar Workshop: The Music of Mayberry

For this week's installment of our more or less usual midday Thursday feature, our tribute to the late Andy Griffith continues.

Besides a love for the stage, Griffith was also devoted to music, both as a singer and a guitar player. The former won him more acclaim than the latter. He recorded a series of albums of classic gospel hymns for Sparrow Records, as well as a 1996 release, I Love to Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns, which eventually went platinum. One of the aforementioned earned him a Grammy Award.

But while he was no virtuoso on guitar, his playing was quite capable, and his guitar was a periodic feature on the series during its eight year run. Griffith picked and sang in his early movies, as well as in numerous episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. This first clip, entitled “The Guitar Player” and originally broadcast on October 24, 1960 (Season 1, Episode 3), Andy helps local player Jim Lindsey (James Best) get a chance at stardom, by arresting a visiting music group. We see a few musical scenes here, some of them obviously overdubbed. Even "Mister Guitar" himself, Chet Atkins, couldn't play lead and rhythm parts at the same time to that degree.

Then there's the usual Southern banter:

You heard all these fellas that come through here, playin' in the shows. How 'bout that fella we see every now and then on television, shakin' and screamin'? Sounds like somebody's beatin' his dog.

Skip ahead about seven months, to May 15, 1961, as Mayberry's favorite son returns in “The Guitar Player Returns” (Season 1, Episode 31), having made his fortune as the star picker of "Bobby Fleet and His Band With A Beat." (Groovy.) Our sheriff learns the real story soon enough, that our rising star has fallen a bit lately, and is in some financial difficulty. Andy gets to the bottom of it, with the help of a now-less discourteous Bobby Fleet. Notice also how Andy has already lost some of the country-boy hokum near the end of the first season, paving the way for the addition of other oddball supporting characters as the series went on.

What authentic playing is actually featured in these two episodes, provides an adequate demonstration of the "rockabilly style" already sweeping the South, and making a few inroads up North, by the dawn of the 1960s. We will explore that style again in a future installment.
 

Andy Griffith (1926-2012)

The man who played a country lawyer on TV in the 80s and 90s, but who was best known as a small-town sheriff in the 60s, died early this morning at his home on Roanoake Island, North Carolina. He was 86.

It was on the show that bore his name that Griffith made his mark on American culture, as the sheriff (and justice of the peace, remember?) of Mayberry, North Carolina, a fictional town said to be based on his own boyhood home of Mount Airy, also in North Carolina. The characters who were the staple of American small town life, the folks who lived "up in them hills," and the unsentimental homespun wisdom he shared with his son, Opie (played by now-producer/director Ron Howard), were among the things that made it to the short list of viewable fare in the Alexander household back in the day.

There will be many tributes to Griffith in the days to come, and so many old clips from which to choose. It is a little known fact, that the instrumental theme song whistled at the beginning of every episode, composed by Earle Hagen (the whistler) and Herbert Spencer, actually had lyrics written by Everett Sloane. We leave you with Andy singing them here.

Hey, Andy ... rest in peace, ya hear?