To a radio listener of the ’30s and ’40s, “crossover” would have been a baffling coinage. Firestone was only the longest-running of a passel of shows built around classical and semiclassical music, or classicalized arrangements of parlor music. Its most significant rival was undoubtedly The Bell Telephone Hour (1940-58), but many other shows had important pieces of the action, too. To perform their middlebrow mix, these programs stirred up a veritable vocal melting pot. Operatic artists consorted regularly with radio-film-concert singers, “legit pop” vocalists, folk balladeers, radio crooners and vaudeville novelty singers. The same performers turned up as frequent guests on the Sunday comedy and variety shows, and aspiring young ones on The Major Bowes/Ted Mack Amateur Hour. Several (for example, Eileen Farrell, Mario Lanza) had their own shows.

The effect of all this might be called musically integrative or assimilative. American society of the Depression and war years needed adhesives, and radio-television music was a kind of glue. The classical singers who succeeded in the format were those who cultivated comfortable popular personalities, while their lower-brow counterparts incorporated such classical precepts as attractive tone, a balanced range, and a legato line into their own techniques and styles. As in society at large, a hierarchy was quietly left in place, but its structure was smoothed and half-concealed with a democratic stucco. And that was seen to be benevolent and necessary. Firestone was the last survivor of that world, wandering dazedly into one that not only did not assume the benevolence or the necessity, but that insisted on its money up front. The telecast was a throwback in its own day, in trouble from the start. The radio version had been central to NBC’s Monday Night of Music, which held its own against such competition as Inner Sanctum and My Friend Irma. On television, however, music was up against Arthur Godfrey, whose vast audience tended to carry over into the latterly hallowed sitcom I Love Lucy. The Firestone Company was willing to accept the lower ratings, and remained supportive. But NBC was concerned for its entire Monday night. Sid Caesar, not the fat lady, was its idea of a prime-time star.

Throughout its existence, the Firestone telecast was something of a cause, not only with its doggedly loyal audience, but with responsibility-in-broadcasting advocates. “Pleasing the heart and not the chart,” ran the slogan. Public write-ins helped to save the program in 1954, and to revive it in 1962. Senators Mike Monroney and Thomas Dodd led Congressional expeditions on its behalf. Federal Communications Commission hearings actually raised what now seem quaint questions over the application of ratings to cultural programming. The object of these spirited delaying actions was, in truth, a terrible television show. There was no good reason to add a picture to the radio show’s format, and the producers’ efforts to find one were tacky and clumsy. The performers were caught between their wish to convey something of substance and the need to be liked, and only a few of them handled the terrors of live TV with any real assurance. The stagings ranged from the occasional bright idea through sketchy thoughtlessness to acts of outright sabotage: Jussi Bjoerling addressing Don Jose’s “Flower Song” to several painfully polite young women, in a kind of suburban serenade, or Robert Merrill voicing Hamlet’s nearly suicidal “Drinking Song” as a chantey in what appears to be a down-rent City Island watering hole.