EXCLUSIVE: Pat Boone has no regrets leaving behind his popular variety show.
During the late ‘50s, the singer was starring in “The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom” on ABC-TV where he performed alongside many celebrity guests including Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, Fats Domino and Johnny Mathis, among others. But it was 1960 when the series suddenly came to an end.
“I was the youngest guy ever to have his own musical variety show at that age,” the 86-year-old told Fox News. “I was wallowing in the ecstasy of singing with all these artists… Towards the end of my third season, the greatest performer in the world at that time, Harry Belafonte, called me and said, ‘I like the way you treat your guests.’ That was the way he put it.”
At the time, Boone was inviting numerous African American performers to share the screen with him, which was making advertisers nervous. When Belafonte offered to make an appearance, an ecstatic Boone said yes.
Singer Harry Belafonte (Photo by NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)
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“I talked to Chevrolet and the ABC production people,” Boone recalled. “I said, ‘You’re not going to believe this: Harry Belafonte wants to come on the show. And they looked at me with these stony looks. ‘No, no, we can’t do that.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ Well, Chevrolet, they started telling me that they were having trouble with their dealers in the South because of the number of Black performers that were coming on.”
“So we have to thank him but no thanks,” he continued. “And I said, ‘You mean I’ve got to tell Harry Belafonte no thanks? Look guys, it says it’s ‘The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom,' but if I have to say no to Harry Belafonte, it’s not the Pat Boone show. So I’ll have to ask you to get somebody else to take the show from here. And I left the show. I was at the end of the third season. I just didn’t renew. “
Belafonte, 93, has enjoyed a decades-long career as both a singer and actor. But in addition to his accomplishments in Hollywood, the star, who was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr.’s, has been a tireless civil rights activist, encouraging artists to this day to speak out.
“I’d like to say that we had that meeting, Harry and I because he would have come on and I would have been thrilled to have him,” said Boone. “But that was it.”
Pat Boone runs through a routine with the dance group of ABC-TV's 'The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom.' (Getty)
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Boone shared that despite being a teen pop idol, he also enjoyed recording R&B tracks despite facing resistance.
“I got a lot of heat from both sides,” he explained. “As a white kid from Nashville, I got a lot of heat from teachers, ministers, families… they’d been infected with the age-old prejudice and wondered why I was singing all these songs and singing them sometimes with these Black artists, which was new to them.”
In a 1990 interview with Rolling Stone, Little Richard pointed out that Boone covered his 1957 track “Tutti Frutti,” which “made it broader ‘cause they played him more on the White stations.”
“I believe it was a blessing,” said the singer at the time. “I believe it opened the highway that would have taken a little longer for acceptance. So I love Pat for that.”
Pat Boone reflected on his decades-long career. (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
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“As hugely popular as it is now, it’s hard to realize that [R&B] was a separate genre,” said Boone. “They had their own stations, their own charts, their own artists… And the way Little Richard sang ‘Tutti Frutti,’ it’s kind of wild. That was his style. And parents, teachers and preachers had come to the opinion that rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues music was devilish and full of erotic symbolism. [They even believed] the drum beats sounded like the drum beats from Africa, from witch doctors. It was that crazy. And so, for a White guy like me to be singing rhythm and blues was very unusual.”
These days Boone has been keeping busy pursuing his love for music. Most recently, he released a song titled “Can’t We Get Along,” which was inspired by Rodney King, when in 1992, he asked, “Can’t we all get along?” The track is sung by Nashville-based recording artist Wendy Moten, who made her Grand Ole Opry debut last year.
King, whose 1991 beating by the Los Angeles police was famously videotaped, passed away in 2012 at age 47. During the 1992 riots, King pleaded for calm. According to the New York Times, more than 55 people were killed and 600 buildings destroyed in the violence.
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“I cried when I heard Rodney King say those words,” said Boone. “It was so moving. And I kept waiting for [somebody] to write a song with that title, but nobody did. So I did. I wrote the song [but] I had no way to market it… We need what Rodney King was calling for. It’s going viral across the country because it’s what we need. How can we really communicate and make a change unless we can see each other clearly and accept each other? And that’s what people are trying to do, but not violently, not with Molotov cocktails, not with bricks through windows and destroying stores and robbing. That’s not the way to accomplish anything Good.”
“I’m just grateful that Rodney King’s words, which inspired my song, are now being heard and listened to [again],” he added.
When Boone reflected on why he wasn’t in the Rock & Hall Hall of Fame, he joked that he “committed the cardinal sin of recording things other than Rock & Roll.”
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Singer Pat Boone arrives at the 26th Annual Movieguide Awards - Faith And Family Gala at the Universal Hilton Hotel on February 2, 2018, in Universal City, California. (Photo by Amanda Edwards/Getty Images)
“They just put in people that they like,” he said. “… They don’t want me in there. And that’s OK… I’m doing just great. I do what I think it’s right. And I love it.”
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