Daytime Television’s Vital Organs
Future DAYS OF OUR LIVES creator Ted Corday directs the cast of THE GUIDING LIGHT.
Pictured second from left is Charita Bauer, who played matriarch Bert Bauer from 1950 until her death in 1985.
And pictured second from right is Rosa Rio, who alternated with Bernice Yanocek as the soap’s organist.
There was a time when the electric organ was as essential to the American soap opera as adultery or amnesia.
Of course those days are long gone now. On today’s daytime drama, you’re as likely to see a jackalope scamper across Victor Newman’s furrowed brow as hear a Hammond organ. Nowadays, soap operas are awash with generic synthesizer-dominated orchestral beds and montage-ready pop songs. The only live musical performances enjoyed by daytime fans since the 1980s have occured on those occasions when a soap actor’s musical abilities are written into the script (as in the case of actor Michael Damian, who followed his own character of Danny Romalotti on THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS to the top of the BILLBOARD charts in 1989 with his cover of David Essex’s glam hit, “Rock On”) or when established pop acts make guest appearances (like the B-52s did on GUIDING LIGHT in the early ’80s and the Rolling Stones did on DAYS OF OUR LIVES in 2005).
Today, soap writers and executives play to a post-MTV audience, as evidenced by the recent scene in which a character on ALL MY CHILDREN engaged in a long conversation about Faith No More’s Mike Patton with Pine Valley’s resident transsexual rocker, Zarf (himself a throbbing indicator of how much the soap opera has changed since it was invented in 1930 by radio writer Irna Phillips). No, the only organs on modern daytime television are those that are barely covered by flesh-colored g-strings and pasties during the fevered love scenes.
Which is a bit sad, because for decades the Hammond served as the preferred underscore and punctuation for radio serials like ONE MAN’S FAMILY, STELLA DALLAS and WHEN A GIRL MARRIES, and in the early 1950s, when sudsers like THE GUIDING LIGHT made the leap to television, the Hammond electric organ followed, sonorously ushering viewers from anguished admissions of infidelity to commercials for Dash Detergent and back again.
The Hammond was patented in 1934 by the man for whom it was named, Laurens Hammond, an inventor and entrepreneur who also gave the world an early — and ultimately unsuccessful — form of 3D cinema called Teleview. The first model of Hammond organ, the model A, went into production in 1935… and two years later, the opening chords of the first episode of THE GUIDING LIGHT were being pounded out live by radio organist Bernice Yanocek. Yanocek continued to underscore that soap in its television incarnation, which hit the air in 1952. Other talented radio keyboard players were soon ensconced on tv soaps — like George Wright (who, when he wasn’t cutting records for labels like King, Hi-Fi and Dot, was musically accenting the sordid affairs in Port Charles on GENERAL HOSPITAL) and Paul Taubman (who spent his evenings performing at his own New York cabaret and, paradoxically, played on THE EDGE OF NIGHT by day). Charles Paul, who had underscored radio’s ELLERY QUEEN, A BRIGHTER TOMORROW and THE SHADOW, exercised his keyboard chops on AS THE WORLD TURNS from its inception in 1956 until 1973, when the CBS soap changed over to pre-recorded orchestral tracks (although Paul’s daughters, Pamela Paul Dufallo and Carlina Paul Della Pietra, continued on the show as musical supervisors).
It was probably inevitable that the soap opera would outgrow the Hammond organ. By the time it disappeared from sudsville, the soap organ had become a cliche, mercilessly skewered in parodies like Carol Burnett’s “As the Stomach Turns.” But for all their modern musical trappings, the soap operas of today entertain just a tiny fraction of the audiences they once held rapt, when their only accompaniment was a simple Hammond organ.