\Andy Griffith young would seem to be best represented by The Andy Griffith Show, perhaps the most beloved and popular sitcoms from the 1960s and the one that turned people like Andy, Don Knotts, Jim Nabors and Ron Howard into stars. But in truth, the actor was building up a very different career before the 1960 to 1968 show came along.
Andy Griffith early life
He was born June 1, 1926 in Mount Airy, North Carolina (the inspiration for the fictional Mayberry, North Carolina), his family so poor that he spent his infancy sleeping in a dresser drawer. Very shy growing up, he discovered a gift to make others laugh, and that allowed him to start to become more extroverted. He also gained a greater appreciation of swing music, which impacted him greatly.
At the University of North Carolina, he studied music and appeared in a number of student operettas, and upon graduation taught music and drama at Goldsboro High School in North Carolina. He gradually found himself a monologist – a form of stand-up, but more telling humorous stories than joke after joke – and achieved fame with the routine “What It Was, Was Football,” about a naive country preacher doing his best to understand the sport.
His acting debut
It became the subject of a hit single released in 1954, and the following year he found himself starring in an Ira Levin-written television show No Time for Sergeants, a comedy about a fellow from the country who finds himself in the Air Force. The script would be expanded and staged on Broadway in October of that year, with Griffith playing the role again. A movie version, co-starring Don Knotts, was released in 1958, solidifying the stardom of the young Andy Griffith.
A year earlier, in 1957, he made his film debut in A Face in the Crowd, a drama about a power-hungry drifter who becomes a television personality and whose ensuing popularity allows him to attain political power that he uses to manipulate large parts of the population.
Andy on the big and small screen
There would be another big screen comedy in the form of 1958’s Onionhead, but television was really where he was destined to be. His second appearance in the medium was in the “Danny Meets Andy Griffith” episode of Make Room for Daddy, the sitcom starring Danny Thomas. The episode introduced the character of Mayberry sheriff Andy Taylor – a far more sarcastic and “energized” version of the character that we’d come to know – and served as a means of introducing the television audience to Griffith and the concept of what would become The Andy Griffith Show. Also appearing in the episode was Ron Howard as Andy’s son, Opie; and Frances Bavier as a Mayberry resident before she was cast as Aunt Bee.
