What It Is, Is Talk

For the jukebox and disk-jockey trade, record companies are reviving an old idea: "talk" records. These are comedy sketches or monologues of the type that helped kill vaudeville and weakened radio to the point where television became inevitable. Last week one of them, What It Was, Was Football, was striking for the bestselling list.

Football, the creation of a 27-year-old North Carolina singer and former teacher named Andy Griffith, is a straight monologue purporting to be a wandering hillbilly's wide-eyed reactions to his first sight of a crowded college stadium, and is notable chiefly for Griffith's relentless rural drawl. Sample:

"What Ah seen was this whole raft o' people a-settin' on these two banks and a-lookin' at one another across this pretty little green cow pasture. Well, they was. And somebody had tuk and drawed white lines all over it and drove posts in it and Ah don't know what-all, and Ah looked down thar and Ah seen five or six convicts a-runnin' up & down and a-blowin' whistles. They was . . . And friends, Ah seen that evenin' the awfullest fight that Ah have ever seen in mah life. Ah did. They would run at one another and kick one another and th'ow one another down and stomp on one another and grind their feet in one another and Ah don't know what-all--and jest as fast as one o' them'd get hurt, they'd tote him off and run another on."

Andy Griffith has moved to Manhattan, is planning to investigate subways, automats, tipping, etc. Backing him up is Capitol Records Inc., which has signed Griffith to an unusual contract: Capitol will pay him a straight weekly salary ("over $100") instead of the usual percentage of sales, will also manage his career. Probably nothing can be done about it.

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