This Day in Music – April 8, 1968 – Petulia and an Interracial Touch – Oh My!
On this date April 8th in 1968, (there’s that tumultuous year again only four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King) ) NBC aired Petula Clark’s TV Special, aptly named “Petula”. One of the guests on the show was the great Harry Belafonte. Belafonte and Clark were to perform a duet on an antiwar song that Clark had written titled “On the Path to Glory” While they were taping the performance Clark spontaneously put her arm around Belafonte’s arm. This caused the show’s sponsor Chrysler to freak out! Chrysler feared that the interracial touch would be too much for their southern viewers! Petula and her husband (the show’s executive producer) Claude Wolff’s response to Chrysler was great!! They had all the other takes destroyed, so that they had to air “the touch”, which actually became the first interracial contact broadcast on American Television!! The show met with high ratings and critical acclaim. Clark was the hostess of two more specials, another one for NBC and one for ABC. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the original telecast of Petula, Clark and Wolff appeared at the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan on 22 September 2008, to discuss the broadcast and its impact, following a broadcast of the program! Way to Go Petula and Claude!! Read More about Petula at Wikipedia Here is the performance,….
