Denville String Band on The Original Amateur Hour

In 2020, we discovered that DSB played on a segment of The Original Amateur Hour which was a TV show similar to American Idol and America's Got Talent.  The show debuted in 1948 and featured various acts, sometimes singers or other musicians, often vaudeville fare such as jugglers, tap dancers, baton twirlers, and the like, with the audience being asked to vote for their favorites by postcard or telephone.  The telephone number JUdson 6-7000 was on a banner at the bottom of the screen for viewers to call.

The "Denville Mummers String Band, Inc" appeared on the show that aired nationally on March 21, 1960.  They played: Alabama Jubilee and Four Leaf Clover." The contact was: Bert Wiswall, 18 Station Road, Denville, NJ.  His day phone was: TU-7-4000 and night was: OA-7-6177.

Tapes of the show are stored at the Library Congress and in Dec 2020, we obtained a video of the full 30-minute show.  Although the band's segment is probably only 3-4 minutes, it is interesting to see what the DSB looked like and sounded like in those days.

In short, they looked and sounded great!.  There were 26 of them, in costume, and they had a greater variety of instruments than the Band has today, including 6 banjos, 4 accordions, 7 saxophones, 4 clarinets, string bass, bell lyre, drum and a father and son as captains.  Every band member had a backpiece and the backpieces were larger than our current ones.  There were a total of 7 father-son pairs in the Band.

DSB was selected to open the show.  There was no introduction, they just kicked off the show with a high-energy Alabama Jubilee.  It is the only time ever that an act did a cold opening on The Original Amateur Hour! The maneuver they were doing is called a circle drill.  It was a signature marching formation of the Band.

Although we didn't know for sure when we first saw it, we felt doubtful that they won.  The small TV sound stage was difficult for such a large diverse band to show well and they had surprising competition from an amazing 14-year old trumpet player from Brooklyn and a near-professional opera singer from New York City.  We found out later that the opera singer won.

Here is the full The Original Amateur Hour video from 1960: