The staple of radio programs, the playing of music, faced some difficulties in the transition to television — after all, queuing up music records was a fairly static event. But what if that music playing could be shown live, with a personable disc jockey spinning those records? That premise took hold among the teenagers of the 50s, and DJ shows made their ways from around margins of station programming into prime time. They were helped along the way the the relative low cost of production compared to scripted television, made even lower by a flood of music sold at rock bottom prices or given up free by artists hoping to use the new medium to promote themselves.

On this day, August 5, in 1957, one of the greatest of these live television music shows, American Bandstand premiered on the ABC Network. Its timeslot was 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday — coinciding with the time schools across the country let out.

American Bandstand was the progeny of a local Philadelphia television show called Bandstand, which combined a live disc-jockey with a crowd of teenagers dancing to the music. Its first host was Bob Horn, a popular local DJ, who four years after starting the show was arrested for drunken driving — in the middle of the network’s long-term campaign against drunken driving. Horn was swiftly replaced by a much more wholesome-looking Dick Clark.