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Research dossier · Arts & Letters

If You Give a Dance, You Gotta Pay the Band

1972 film

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 13, 2026
Entity authorityQ85320856 ↗
Source-derived summary

If You Give a Dance You Gotta Pay the Band is a 1972 American TV movie. It was the first program shown under the umbrella ABC Theater.

The production (at the time referred to as a "dramatic special" or "teleplay" rather than a made-for-TV movie) was the first screen credit for Laurence Fishburne and led to him getting a role later on in the soap opera One Life to Live.

The teleplay first aired on ABC at 8:30pm ET on Tuesday, December 19, 1972 and was rerun on Wednesday, June 6, 1973 at 9:00pm ET. In TV listings of the era, the title was generally given as If You Give a Dance You Gotta Pay the Band without a comma.

Plot

The story of ghetto boy and girl trying to raise money for the girl to visit her father in prison. It was shot on videotape in November 1972.

Editorial summary

“If You Give a Dance, You Gotta Pay the Band” enters the record as 1972 film. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Give, Dance and Gotta can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive route into publication, performance and collection histories when the underlying object or edition remains clearly identified. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1972, 1973—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1972. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Give, Dance and Gotta.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“If You Give a Dance, You Gotta Pay the Band” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Give, Dance and Gotta provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85320856. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1972 and 1973.

Critical limits

Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “If You Give a Dance, You Gotta Pay the Band”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow If You Give a Dance, You Gotta Pay the Band primary sources, If You Give a Dance, You Gotta Pay the Band archive and Give research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “If You Give a Dance, You Gotta Pay the Band”?
  2. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
  3. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “If You Give a Dance, You Gotta Pay the Band” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.