Thanks to those who’ve read and watched the past several weeks’ worth of episodes of my father, Dr. Simon Anderson, for 40+ years a professor of music at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, and the first of his two distance-learning TV shows, Man and His Music. I posted video links to all 10 shows in previous blog posts in honor of the 50th anniversary of their airing on Cincinati’s PBS affiliate, WCET, TV-48, in the winter trimester (February, March, and early April) of 1973. The material from those shows eventually turned into his first textbook, The Musical Imperative, still published by the boutique publishing company he started out of our garage, Clifton Hills Press, now run by sister and brother-in-law out of Valparaiso, Indiana.

Because Man and His Music was such a hit (I remember with pride school friends coming up to me and saying, with a bit of awe in their voices, “I saw your dad on TV last night!”), and because Dad taught a very popular pop-music survey class in addition to his bread-and-butter offering, Music Appreciation, the powers that were at the university and PBS decided to do a sequel the following year based on the content that evetually became his second book. Both that text and the TV show were titled Pop Music, U.S.A. Rather than wait until next year, to celebrate an actual 50-year anniversary, I plan to post all 10 of the sequel shows while I’m on a roll.

Those who watched the Man and His Music episodes will find some of the presentations familiar, but both Dad and his producers upped the ante just a bit the second time around. For starters, Pop Music, U.S.A. features intro and outro montages like a real TV show, which took the production a step or two beyond basic cable-access fare. (Recognize the skytline from a similar shot used for the opening of WKRP?) That’s our family car in the intro, one of several Ford Country Squires (with the faux wood paneling) Dad owned during my childhood and adolescence. He’s sporting his signature fedora here as well, a constant sartorial accoutrement. Even though everybody and their uncle back seemed to smoke cigarettes, I was always aghast at the picture in the outro with the cigarette dangling from his lower lip. I remember asking myself in my spirit, “What price authenticity?” or a 10-year-old equivalent anyway.

The production values have improved just a bit in a year’s time, although they’re certainly laughable by today’s standards. What hasn’t changed in the new show is Dad’s insightful sociological and anthropological takes on why certain music evolves the way it does. His dissection of the three basic forms of pop songs–sentimental songs (of all styles: “I Don’t Know Why” in the same vein as “Light My Fire”), narrative songs, and humorous songs–is Dad in his element. It’s this kind of profound-but-accessible instruction–along with his willingness to be a song-and-dance man to get through to the I-dare-you-to-try-to-make-me-care-about-this-stuff students in the auditorium that was his typical classroom–that made him such a popular fixture at CCM for so long . . . and the primary reason why, for about 30 years, we rarely enjoyed a family dinner in a local restaurant without someone coming up to the table and thanking Dad for being a great teacher, often folks in their fifties reminiscing about their college experiences 30 years prior.

Episode 1 sets the stage for the episodes to follow, which will look at the four primary forms of popular music at that time, as Dad saw them: country, jazz, mainstream (including Broadway), and rock. Thanks for considering coming along for the ride over the next two or three months. Here’s the title episode, “Pop Music, U.S.A.”