This sounded like a satire when I started reading it.
But I do wonder if Arthur Godfrey's "Too Fat Polka" could get played today without protests. I doubt it.
@goatprairie I'd be one of the first to protest, but then I'm not a huge fan of either a) polkas, or b) Arthur Godfrey. I wouldn't protest to get it banned from air play, I'd protest on grounds that it's further evidence of horrible taste, even if it'd be an exercise in futility considering how horrible taste never quite goes out of style, on the airwaves or in politics, for that matter.
Godfrey was a bully and a tyrant on set, and the way he dumped Julius LaRosa on the air---ex-Navy man though he was, LaRosa was still enough of a naive kid that he had no idea a "swan song" referenced the final utterance of a dying swan, and someone had to tell him he'd just been fired live in front of a large national morning radio audience---was one of the sleaziest things in the history of broadcastings. It didn't help, either, that LaRosa at the time committed two cardinal sins so far as Godfrey was concerned. Cardinal Sin One: LaRosa and McGuire Sister Dottie were romancing each other at a time McGuire's marriage collapsed to separation and looked headed for divorce. Cardinal Sin Two: LaRosa's fan mail began eclipsing Godfrey's; so far as Godfrey was concerned there was only one star in his solar system and it smiled to him from the mirror every day.
Godfrey had a policy against his so-called "Little Godfreys" socialising off set, especially in the romance department (LaRosa wasn't the first Little Godfrey to get on the boss's sh@t list for romancing a co-star), but he also tried to bind them to exclusivity even though nothing was ever set in writing legally in that regard. Days after LaRosa was canned on the air, Godfrey's musical director Archie Bleyer got his---for the cardinal sin of Bleyer's Cadence Records issuing an album of Don McNeil's
The Breakfast Club radio highlights. Sleeping with the enemy! . . . even though McNeil's show, which had a very long life in its own right, still wasn't anything close to a ratings threat for Godfrey's morning shows. Radio historians surmise credibly enough that the real reason Godfrey liquidated Bleyer was his romance with another Little Godfrey---Chordettes singer Janet Ertel. Bleyer and Ertel married, a marriage that endured until Bleyer's death of Parkinson's in 1989. Before he sold the label in 1964, Bleyer's Cadence Records had successes with LaRosa and the Chordettes but his biggest successes would later come when the label discovered both the Everly Brothers (Bleyer was Phil Everly's stepfather-in-law, in fact) and Andy Williams.
Bleyer wasn't crazy about rock and roll generally but he did also originally release one of rock and roll's groundbreaking records---Link Wray's instrumental "Rumble."
