Sam 'n' Henry - Characters and History

Characters and History

In late 1925, radio performers Gosden and Correll had been approached about doing a show based on Sidney Smith's popular comic strip The Gumps. Gosden and Corell instead proposed their own radio serial using characters they created themselves. Like The Gumps, each show would be amusing in itself but would also feature recurring characters in an ongoing storyline.

Since they had received a favorable response to African American characters they had previously done on radio, Gosden and Correll proposed that the principal characters be African Americans, Sam Smith and Henry Johnson, newly arrived in Chicago from rural Alabama.

After overcoming initial problems of not starving, finding a living space and making enough money to pay the rent for it, Sam and Henry set up their own moving company, with overbearing Henry as company president and meek, gullible Sam as the one who does all the work. Having been initiated into a colored fraternity called the Jewels of the Crown, they strike up a friendship with the Most Precious Diamond, the high officer of the lodge, who frequently tries to get his hands on the boys' money.

Sam 'n' Henry premiered on Chicago radio station WGN on January 12, 1926, and immediately found an audience of Midwestern listeners. Correll and Gosden wrote and produced 586 episodes. They provided the voices for all characters.

They left WGN after the station rejected their novel concept of recording Sam 'n' Henry on phonograph records and distributing those to other radio stations. The duo's last musical program for WGN was broadcast on January 29th, 1928. In March, they brought their characters, now called Amos and Andy, to competing Chicago station WMAQ. WGN retained the rights to the characters and continued Sam 'n' Henry without Correll and Gosden until February 12th. On March 31st, some two weeks after Amos 'n' Andy premiered on WMAQ, Sam 'n' Henry returned as a 15 to 30-minute program, in which the title characters mostly functioned as announcers for musical performances. The final episode of Sam 'n' Henry aired on July 14, 1928.