Amos 'n' Andy is an American radio show set in Harlem, Manhattan's historic black community. The original radio show, which was popular from 1928 until 1960, was created, written, and voiced by two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who played a number of different characters, including the titular Amos Jones (Gosden) and Andrew Hogg Brown (Correll).

Amos 'n' Andy began as one of the first radio comedy series and originated from station WMAQ in Chicago. After the first broadcast in 1928, the show became a hugely popular radio series. Early episodes were broadcast from the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, California. The show ran as a nightly radio serial (1928–43), as a weekly situation comedy (1943–55), and as a nightly disc-jockey program (1954–60).

Early storylines and characters

Amos Jones and Andy Brown worked on a farm near Atlanta, Georgia, and, during the first week's episodes, they made plans to find a better life in Chicago, despite warnings from a friend. (The first car they acquired had no roof; the pair turned it into a selling point.)

Naïve but honest Amos was hard-working, and, after his marriage to Ruby Taylor in 1935, a dedicated family man. Blustering Andy was a dreamer with overinflated self-confidence and tended to let Amos do most of the work. Their Mystic Knights of the Sea lodge leader, George "the Kingfish" Stevens, was always either trying to lure the two into get-rich-quick schemes, especially the gullible Andy, or else tricking Andy into some kind of trouble. Other characters included John Augustus "Brother" Crawford, an industrious but long-suffering family man; Henry Van Porter, a social-climbing real estate and insurance salesman; Frederick Montgomery Gwindell, a hard-charging newspaperman; Algonquin J. Calhoun, a somewhat crooked lawyer added to the series in 1949, six years after its conversion to a half-hour situation comedy; William Lewis Taylor, the well-spoken, college-educated father of Amos's fiancée; and Willie "Lightning" Jefferson, a slow-moving Stepin Fetchit–type character. The Kingfish's catchphrase "Holy mackerel!" soon entered the American lexicon.