A couple of generations after Andy Griffith recorded the comedy routine that made him a star, “What It Was, Was Football” keeps reaching new audiences.
It even helped an Asheboro cartoonist win an Emmy a couple of years back.
But Griffith almost failed in his attempts to get it recorded.
Fortunately for the late actor and his fans, he finally pulled it off at a corporate dinner on the outskirts of Greensboro. Without it, “The Andy Griffith Show,” “Matlock” and Griffith’s other work might never have come about. The careers of collaborators such as Don Knotts and Ron Howard, a child actor turned Oscar-winning director, might have taken very different paths.
“This was the last try,” Griffith told me in a 1993 interview.(tncms-asset)f0f6d7e4-876d-11e7-8af3-00163ec2aa770 —(/tncms-asset)
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In the early 1950s, he had been performing in Kiwanis and Rotary clubs when he wasn’t acting in “The Lost Colony.” The Mount Airy native graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a music degree in 1949 and taught in Goldsboro for a while before moving to Manteo.
The mountain folks he grew up around gave him plenty of fodder for observational jokes and stories, and Griffith had thought up a homespun version of “Hamlet” that was a hit with the civic club crowds. The play, he told them, “was pretty good, except they don’t speak as good o’ English as we do.” A similar take on “Romeo and Juliet” would end up as the B-side to “What It Was, Was Football.”
Griffith was in the middle of a two-night stand performing at a conference in Raleigh, and he needed additional material. On the drive over from Chapel Hill, he thought up a monologue where a naive country boy tries to explain his first football game: “What I seen was this whole raft o’ people a-sittin’ on these two banks and a-lookin’ at one another across this pretty little green cow pasture.” He goes on to describe “convicts” blowing whistles, “pretty girls wearing little bitty short dresses and dancin’ around” and groups of men fighting over a “funny little pumpkin.”
After he performed the football monologue during a luncheon at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, he was approached by Orville Campbell, owner of the Chapel Hill Newspaper and a former news director at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina — now UNC-Greensboro. Campbell had a small record label, Colonial Records, that had regional success in the late 1940s with “All the Way Choo-Choo,” a song with lyrics Campbell wrote about UNC football star Charlie “Choo-Choo” Justice.
Campbell smelled another hit.
“He said he would record it and we’d split the profits,” Griffith said. “I had never been before a microphone before.”
Campbell and Griffith tried to capture the monologue at a couple of civic gatherings, but Griffith kept freezing up in front of the mike. The last attempt was at a Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company dinner at the Jefferson Standard Country Club near Guilford College, a wooded retreat off New Garden Road.
“Orville Campbell had about given up on it,” Griffith said.
They were assisted in the recording by a Greensboro teenager, Milton Alderfer, who had a recording studio above Moore Music in downtown Greensboro, Alderfer told Jim Schlosser for a 2015 article in O. Henry magazine.(tncms-asset)85ce1e46-876d-11e7-838a-00163ec2aa771 —(/tncms-asset)
Seth Macon, a career Jefferson Standard employee who eventually became a senior vice president and member of the company’s board of directors, was in the audience when Griffith finally got “What It Was, Was Football” on tape.
“He did it in a professional way, and did it so amazingly funny you wouldn’t believe it,” Macon told me in 2013, three years before his death. “Everybody in that room just applauded and applauded and applauded.”
Griffith did another routine that bombed, Macon said.
“It was a story about a church meeting and very severe criticism of what took place in that church meeting,” he said. “He shocked the people in that room so much that they didn’t even applaud; they didn’t comment. The thing that impressed me over the years is that I’ve never heard him tell that story a second time.”
The recording of the football monologue lacked the audience reaction Griffith wanted, so he worked with Alderfer to punch it up with laughter from the “Romeo and Juliet” recording.
“I merely provided technical assistance,” Alderfer told Schlosser.
An item about the recording showed up in the Dec. 16, 1953, Greensboro Record: “The record was sound-tracked under promotion of Orville Campbell, Chapel Hill fella who used to direct the Woman’s College News Bureau here, and the original was cut in September at a party at our Jefferson Country Club where Andy was the entertainment.”
Campbell’s instincts were on target: “What It Was, Was Football” became a hit, selling nearly 50,000 copies for Colonial. (Griffith, who went to Carolina planning to be a Moravian minister, was chagrined when he saw that Campbell had credited him as “Deacon Andy Griffith.”) But that was only the beginning. The next chapter in the story came when Hal Cook, national sales manager for Capitol Records, made a business trip to Charlotte.
“He saw a line of people going into a record shop,” Griffith said. “He asked what they were there to buy, and it was my record.”
Griffith and Campbell each got a $5,000 advance from Capitol, which reissued the record and turned it into one of the most successful comedy records of all time, selling nearly 800,000 copies and reaching No. 9 on the charts in 1954. Soon Griffith was making national TV appearances and starring on Broadway.
“That one little monologue took me 45 minutes to make up, and it set my career,” Griffith said.
The monologue has taken on a life of its own in the years since. MAD magazine published a cartoon version in 1958 with Griffith’s monologue accompanied by illustrations from George Woodbridge. A short filmed adaptation was created in 1997 with an actor portraying Griffith’s character, using the original routine as its soundtrack. (Its director, Duncan Brantley, went on to co-write “Leatherheads,” the 2008 movie about the early days of professional football directed by George Clooney and partially filmed in the Triad.)
National Public Radio played the monologue in its entirety 50 years after its release to mark the opening of college football season in 2003.(tncms-asset)0f8f5bf6-878f-11e7-b86c-00163ec2aa772 —(/tncms-asset)
One of the latest incarnations of “What It Was, Was Football” came in 2014. A production crew from “Our State,” a WUNC-TV series affiliated with the magazine of the same name, traveled to Asheboro to film a segment in the studio of Rich Powell, a cartoonist and illustrator. He draws for MAD and Highlights for Children as well as the syndicated comic “Wide Open!”(tncms-asset)760123a0-876d-11e7-a466-00163ec2aa773 —(/tncms-asset)
“Initially I was just gonna do some illustrations for it,” Powell said. But Morgan Potts, the segment’s producer, decided to make Powell a significant part of the story, so the crew spent about a week filming at Powell’s home studio, including images of him drawing and laughing while listening to Griffith’s routine.
George Woodbridge, who created the 1958 illustrations for MAD, is one of Powell’s heroes. When Powell started the project, he was not aware that Woodbridge had also created a version of “What It Was, Was Football” decades before.
“It was a worst-case scenario,” Powell said. “He had like 20 or 30 panels he did it in. They are just beautiful; they’re so good. I love George Woodbridge’s stuff.”
There was also the pressure of caricaturing Griffith, a near-saintly figure in his home state. But Griffith’s distinctive appearance gave Powell plenty to work with.
“He’s a funny-looking guy to begin with,” Powell said. “He has those giant ears and stuff. He looked like an old man as a young man.”
Powell persevered, applying his own lively, screwball style to Griffith’s tale. The video aired statewide in 2014 after a Greensboro screening.
“They had a premiere at Red Cinemas,” Powell said. “It was really fun to see it for the first time.”
The segment won a Midsouth Regional Emmy Award, earning a Powell a plaque.
“Probably my first and last Emmy, I’d imagine,” he said. “I feel sort of like I cheated the system.”