Hey Snooky, You're No Elvis!

Here's Snooky Lanson, perforning "Heartbreak Hotel" in this clip from a 1956 NBC telecast of Your Hit Parade.  

 The show was beginning to have problems by then.  Before the emergence of rock 'n' roll, it was the song that was the thing, regardless of who sang or played it.  After the mid-1950s, it became the performance that was the thing.  The youngsters weren't interested in anyone other than Elvis Presley singing "Heartbreak Hotel." Rock n' roll fans did not want their favorite songs performed by the likes of Snooky, Dorothy Collins, or Gisele MacKenzie.  They wanted Elvis, Fats Domino, and The Platters.  YHP, which started on radio in 1935 and on TV in 1950, switched networks from NBC to CBS in 1958, and went off the air in April, 1959.