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Andy griffith football story from 195312/26/2023 And I know, friends, that they couldn’t eat it because they kicked it the whole evenin’ and it never busted. He gradually infers that “Both bunches-full of them men wanted this funny-lookin’ little pumpkin to play with. The referee is “a convict” when players get in a huddle, “They voted.” (For full comic effect, play the YouTube recording, or channel the Andy voice in your head.) To Andy, it’s just a giant “cow pasture” with stripes on it and “great big outhouses” (tunnels) on either side. He tells the audience that, “last October, I believe it was,” he and his fellow Christians had come to some college town for a tent service, and he wandered into what his listeners instantly realize is a football stadium. And Griffith created the piece - the only time in his career he took writer’s credit. Listening to “What Is Was, Was Football” on YouTube, the Andy fan hears the rolling cadences and sly innocence of the Taylor and Matlock voices. But Standley’s monologue climaxed in a sing-along tune (“Grandma’s Lye Soap”), whereas “Football” was just Andy talking, for five minutes and 40 seconds - possibly a record length in that era of three-minute singles. Johnny Standley, a Wisconsin musician in Horace Heidt’s band, had translated the fire-and-brimstone preacher mode to the tale of Little Bo Peep for his 1952 comedy record, “It’s in the Book.” The two-sided single hit No. Occasionally, a monologue could become a vinyl and radio smash. As Rogers was to Oklahoma, and later Herb Shriner to Indiana, so Griffith was to rural North Carolina: the country boy speaking truth to the city slickers. Ruth Draper fashioned it into high art on Broadway, but the monologue was also a staple of vaudeville in the 1920s it had helped build Will Rogers‘ legendary reputation. Unlike traditional standup, with its barrage of one-liners, the monologue has a through-line narrative it’s a short story or essay delivered aloud. That brought him to New York, where the rural naïveté of the Andy character played like sweet, foreign bluegrass music to the sophisticates in Manhattan night clubs. Raised a Baptist, and entering the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the intention of becoming a Moravian minister, Andy Sam Griffith soon spun the spellbinding oratorical skills of a backwoods preacher into comedy monologues. (READ: James Poniewozik’s tribute to Andy Grffith’s TV career) For a decade, Griffith scaled the mountain of achievement, then coasted - most agreeably and reassuringly - as the folksy-foxy sheriff or lawyer on TV. And having constructed this friendly Tarheel image, he then boldly deconstructed it, tore it to shreds, as folk singer and TV talk-titan Lonesome Rhodes in the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd. He extended that character by starring in the TV, Broadway and movie versions of the military comedy No Time for Sergeants, a solid hit in each medium. He didn’t strike out he was a triple-crown winner.īeginning as a standup comic, Griffith perfected the “Andy” persona - the good ol’ boy observing modern life with enthusiastic bafflement - in monologues like “What Is Was, Was Football,” which went to No. 1, 1960, when he was 34, Griffith had already conquered the other extant media: records, Broadway shows and movies. But his admirers from a half-century’s runs and reruns of The Andy Griffith Show and Matlock should know that there was life before Mayberry. By the time he launched his own TV show on Oct. That comment, like so many things Griffith said as Sheriff Andy Taylor and Ben Matlock, was a sly joke, an aw-shucks feint of self-depreciation to disarm the sharpies who underestimated him. Follow struck out on Broadway, and I’d struck out in the movies, so I kinda had to go to television,” Andy Griffith stated in 2008.
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