BJ's Bootleg Comic Adventures

Amos ’n’ Andy: The Young Girl’s Mother (1951)

BOOTLEG COMICS • A little movie history with BJ

**Amos ’n’ Andy — main cast**
Top: Tim Moore — Kingfish. Lower left: Spencer Williams — Andy. Lower right: Alvin Childress — Amos.

Old School BJ here. After watching Amos and Andy chase my refrigerator, you might think moving furniture was their biggest problem. But in “The Young Girl’s Mother,” Andy discovers that romance can be just as dangerous as a runaway appliance—especially when old history catches up with him.

This early episode of The Amos ’n’ Andy Show aired on CBS on July 12, 1951, just two weeks after the television series premiered. It is generally listed as Season 1, Episode 3. Andy wants to marry a woman much younger than himself, despite his friends’ warnings. The situation becomes complicated when her mother turns out to have a connection to Andy’s own romantic past.

Spencer Williams plays the hopeful Andy Brown, Alvin Childress is the steadier Amos Jones, and veteran comedian Tim Moore supplies the scheming energy of George “Kingfish” Stevens. Lillian Randolph’s Madame Queen is another important personality in the show’s world. Director Charles Barton, whose credits also include Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, brought considerable experience with screen comedy to the series.

The television version followed a hugely successful radio property created by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. Unlike the radio leads, who were white performers, the television characters were played by Black actors. Their timing, expressions, and reactions gave the familiar situations a distinctly visual life.

1. Andy was played by a pioneering filmmaker.

Spencer Williams was much more than a television comedian. A decade before this episode, he wrote, directed, and starred in The Blood of Jesus (1941), a religious drama made for Black audiences. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 1991. That means the actor playing the easily misled Andy also helped create an enduring work of African American cinema. His accomplishments behind the camera deserve attention alongside his familiar television character.

2. Amos originally wanted to be Kingfish.

Alvin Childress initially auditioned for Kingfish, according to his later account of the casting process. Gosden and Correll instead chose him for Amos. Childress also became involved in the search for the actor who would play Kingfish; the part ultimately went to Tim Moore, whose entertainment career stretched back to vaudeville. Imagine those personalities switched around! Casting Childress as the calmer presence and Moore as the energetic schemer helped establish the combination viewers remember.

3. The biggest problems extended beyond the set.

The show offered substantial roles to Black performers when television provided relatively few such opportunities. At the same time, the NAACP protested its racial stereotypes and argued that viewers could mistake its comic characters for a fair picture of Black life. Some cast members defended the program and the opportunities it created. Its CBS network run ended in 1953; reruns continued afterward, before CBS withdrew the series from syndication in 1966. Those were separate events, not one immediate disappearance.

For me, revisiting this episode means appreciating the performers while recognizing that complicated history. Watch the reactions and the pauses between the jokes. These actors knew that sometimes the funniest moment arrives just before somebody realizes he should have listened to his friends.

History sources: Episode date, cast and synopsis; Series credits; Library of Congress: The Blood of Jesus; Alvin Childress and casting; St. James Encyclopedia: broadcast history and controversy.
Photos: Rotten Tomatoes (Barton); supplied cast photo (Moore at top, Williams at lower left, Childress at lower right). Photos are from different productions and years.

Old School Movie Theater

Amos ’n’ Andy — Cartoon & Comedy

Read Old School's introduction

Program sources

First: The Rasslin’ Match cartoon (about 11 minutes). Then: The Young Girl’s Mother (about 25 minutes). Picture streams from Internet Archive. Each selection has its own volume boost with compression and peak limiting. Availability depends on Internet Archive.