The First Family is a comedy album

Album

An album is a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution. The word derives from the Latin word for list .Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album...

 recorded on October 22, 1962, as a good-natured parody of President

President

A president is a leader of an organization, company, trade union, university, or country.Etymologically, a president is one who presides, who sits in leadership...

 John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy

John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....

, both as Commander-in-Chief

Commander-in-Chief

A commander-in-chief is the commander of a nation's military forces or significant element of those forces. In the latter case, the force element may be defined as those forces within a particular region or those forces which are associated by function. As a practical term it refers to the military...

 and as a member of a large, well-known

Celebrity

A celebrity, also referred to as a celeb in popular culture, is a person who has a prominent profile and commands a great degree of public fascination and influence in day-to-day media...

 political

Politics

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...

 family

Family

In human context, a family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children...

. Issued by Cadence Records

Cadence Records

Cadence Records was an American record company based in New York City. It was founded by Archie Bleyer, who had been the musical director and orchestra leader for Arthur Godfrey in 1952...

, it was honored as the "largest and fastest selling record in the history of the record industry" selling at more than a million copies per week for the first six and one-half weeks in distribution, by January it had sold more than 7 million copies. By time of the release of The First Family - Volume Two, the sequel, it had sold 7.5 million copies — unprecedented for any album at the time, let alone a comedy album.

Cast

The First Family starred stand-up comedian

Stand-up comedy

Stand-up comedy is a comedic art form. Usually, a comedian performs in front of a live audience, speaking directly to them. Their performances are sometimes filmed for later release via DVD, the internet, and television...

 and impersonator Vaughn Meader

Vaughn Meader

Abbott Vaughn Meader was an American comedian and impersonator whose achievement of fame with The First Family album spoofing President John F...

 as Kennedy and Naomi Brossart as the First Lady

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier "Jackie" Kennedy Onassis was the wife of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and served as First Lady of the United States during his presidency from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. Five years later she married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle...

. Meader's skill at impersonating Kennedy was honed on the stand-up circuit—with his New England accent

Regional accents of English speakers

The regional accents of English speakers show great variation across the areas where English is spoken as a first language. This article provides an overview of the many identifiable variations in pronunciation, usually deriving from the phoneme inventory of the local dialect, of the local variety...

 naturally close to Kennedy's familiar (and often parodied) Harvard

Harvard, Massachusetts

Harvard is a town in Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. A farming community settled in 1658 and incorporated in 1732, it has been home to several non-traditional communities, such as Harvard Shaker Village and the utopian Transcendentalist center Fruitlands...

 accent, he needed to adjust his voice only slightly to sound almost exactly like the President. Brossart was a theatre

Theatre

Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...

 actress and model

Model (person)

A model , sometimes called a mannequin, is a person who is employed to display, advertise and promote commercial products or to serve as a subject of works of art....

 making her recording début.

The album also featured the writing

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

 and voice talent

Voice acting

Voice acting is the art of providing voices for animated characters and radio and audio dramas and comedy, as well as doing voice-overs in radio and television commercials, audio dramas, dubbed foreign language films, video games, puppet shows, and amusement rides.Performers are called...

 of Earle Doud, Bob Booker, Jim Lehner, Bradley Bolke

Bradley Bolke

Bradley Bolke is an American voice actor. He was born on October 1, 1925 in New York City. He currently resides in Dobbs Ferry, New York-Television Roles:*New Casper Cartoon Show as Various Voices...

, Chuck McCann

Chuck McCann

Chuck McCann is a film actor, television actor, stage actor, and a voice actor from Brooklyn, New York.-Early career:...

, Bob McFadden

Bob McFadden

Robert "Bob" McFadden was a singer and voiceover actor best known for his many contributions to animated cartoons. His best known characters were Milton the Monster, Cool McCool, and the ThunderCats' Snarf...

, and Norma MacMillan

Norma MacMillan

Norma MacMillan was a Canadian voice actor.Norma MacMillan was a native of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It was there that she met, worked with and married her producer/manager husband Thor Arngrim. Arngrim had started the now-legendary, but short-lived Totem Theatre company in 1951...

. It was recorded in front of a live studio

Recording studio

A recording studio is a facility for sound recording and mixing. Ideally both the recording and monitoring spaces are specially designed by an acoustician to achieve optimum acoustic properties...

 audience

Audience

An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature , theatre, music or academics in any medium...

.

Meader later revealed, "A lot of people don't know this, but we recorded The First Family on the night of October 22, 1962, the same night as John F. Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis

Cuban Missile Crisis

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation among the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States in October 1962, during the Cold War...

 Speech. The audience was in the studio and had no idea of the drama that was taking place. But the cast had heard the speech and our throats almost dropped to our toes, because if the audience had heard the Cuban Missile Speech, we would not have received the reaction we did."

Effect on popular culture

Within weeks, many Americans could recite favorite lines from the record (including "the rubber schwan [swan] is mine," and "move ahead ... with great vigah [vigor]," the latter lampooning the President's own words). The album poked fun at Kennedy's PT-109

Motor Torpedo Boat PT-109

PT-109 was a PT boat last commanded by Lieutenant, junior grade John F. Kennedy in the Pacific Theater during World War II...

 history; the rocking chair

Rocking chair

A rocking chair or rocker is a type of chair with two curved bands of wood attached to the bottom of the legs . The chair contacts with the floor at only two points, giving the occupant the ability to rock back and forth by shifting his/her weight or pushing lightly with his/her feet...

s he used for his painful back

Back pain

Back pain is pain felt in the back that usually originates from the muscles, nerves, bones, joints or other structures in the spine.The pain can often be divided into neck pain, upper back pain, lower back pain or tailbone pain...

; the Kennedy clan's well-known athleticism

Sport

A Sport is all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim to use, maintain or improve physical fitness and provide entertainment to participants. Sport may be competitive, where a winner or winners can be identified by objective means, and may require a degree...

, football

American football

American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

 games and family togetherness; child

Child

Biologically, a child is generally a human between the stages of birth and puberty. Some vernacular definitions of a child include the fetus, as being an unborn child. The legal definition of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority...

ren in the White House

White House

The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...

; and Jackie Kennedy's soft-spoken nature and her redecoration of the White House; and many other bits of knowledge that the public was eager to consume

Consumer

Consumer is a broad label for any individuals or households that use goods generated within the economy. The concept of a consumer occurs in different contexts, so that the usage and significance of the term may vary.-Economics and marketing:...

. Kennedy himself was said to have given copies of the albums as Christmas

Christmas

Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...

 gifts, and once greeted a Democratic National Committee

Democratic National Committee

The Democratic National Committee is the principal organization governing the United States Democratic Party on a day to day basis. While it is responsible for overseeing the process of writing a platform every four years, the DNC's central focus is on campaign and political activity in support...

 group by saying, "Vaughn Meader was busy tonight, so I came myself." At one press conference, Kennedy was asked if the album had produced "annoyment (sic) or enjoyment." He jokingly responded, "I listened to Mr. Meader's record and, frankly, I thought it sounded more like Teddy

Ted Kennedy

Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy was a United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party. Serving almost 47 years, he was the second most senior member of the Senate when he died and is the fourth-longest-serving senator in United States history...

 than it did me. So, now he's annoyed."

The First Family album won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year

Grammy Award for Album of the Year

The Grammy Award for Album of the Year is the most prestigious award category at the Grammys. It has been awarded since 1959 and though it was originally presented to the artist alone, the award is now presented to the artist, the producer, the engineer and/or mixer and the mastering engineer...

 in 1963. That March, most of the same cast recorded a follow-up album, The First Family Volume Two, a combination of spoken-word comedy and songs. The sequel was released in the spring of 1963.

Immediately upon hearing of Kennedy's assassination, producers Booker and Doud (along with Cadence president Archie Bleyer) pulled both albums from sales, and had all unsold copies destroyed so as not to seemingly "cash in" on the President's death. Both albums remained out of print for many years, until they were finally issued on CD together in 1999. The CD is currently available from S'more Entertainment http://www.smoreent.com/product_musiccd.html#.

In 1981, a new album titled The First Family Rides Again was issued, co-produced by Earle Doud, and starring impressionist Rich Little

Rich Little

Richard Caruthers "Rich" Little is a Canadian-American impressionist and voice actor. He has long been known throughout the world as a top impersonator of famous people, resulting in his nickname, "The Man of a Thousand Voices"....

 as then-President Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....

 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0012HPGYK [].

Act I

• "The Experiment"
• "After Dinner Conversations"
• "The Malayan Ambassador"
• "Relatively Speaking"
• "Astronauts"
• "Motorcade"
• "The Party"
• "The Tour"

Act II

• "But Vote!!"
• "Economy Lunch"
• "The Decision"
• "White House Visitor"
• "Press Conference"
• "The Dress"
• "Saturday Night, Sunday Morning"
• "Auld Lang Syne"
• "Bedtime Story"

Act I

• "The Announcement"
• "An Evening With JFK"
• "1958"
• "The Trial"
• "The Law"
• "The Crisis"
• "The Concert"
• "The First Daughter"
• "Biography"

Act II

• "The First Family March"
• "Taxes"
• "The Movie"
• "Caroline's First Date"
• "Stop The World"
• "The Brothers Three"
• "1996"
• "Equal Time"

Chart positions

Year	Chart	Position
1962	Billboard Pop Albums (Billboard 200) (mono)	1
1963

External links

• Amazon.com album listing with audio excerpts