GEORGIE WOODS’S Rock ’N’ ROLL SHOW
While Bob Horn’s televised Bandstand still played white pop music and copies of black rhythm and blues songs performed by white artists, deejays like Georgie Woods and Mitch Thomas started playing rhythm and blues music and calling it “rock ’n’ roll.”5 Woods and Thomas held rock and roll concerts in large arenas and hosted record hops at skating rinks and recreation centers in addition to their daily radio shows. Vocal harmony groups in the city’s black neighborhoods, moreover, performed at these neighborhood shows and developed singing styles that influenced and were influenced by what they heard on the radio. Beyond the walls of American Bandstand’s studio, then, black broadcasters and teenagers made Philadelphia a vibrant rock and roll scene.
While radio was the most important medium for the development of rock and roll in Philadelphia, Georgie “the Guy with the Goods” Woods became the city’s most prominent black broadcaster. Woods was born in rural Barnett, Georgia, in 1927, the ninth of eleven children. Like many black families in the area, Woods’s family faced consistent threats from the Ku Klux Klan, culminating when the Klan burned a cross in his family’s yard. While his father continued his work as a preacher in Georgia, Woods’s mother moved the family to Harlem in 1936 to escape this racial violence and to find better employment and educational opportunities. After his mother died, Woods dropped out of high school at fourteen to work, and later spent two years in the army before returning to New York City. Woods got his start in radio with WWRL, a black-oriented station in New York, and came to Philadelphia’s WHAT in 1953 after one of its deejays quit.6
Although Woods was less experienced than WHAT’s other popular black deejays, Doug “Jocko” Henderson and Kae Williams, he distinguished himself by pitching his show to teenagers. Influenced by the popularity of Alan Freed’s radio program in New York, Woods started describing his program as “rock ’n’ roll,” a black slang term that Freed brought into the mainstream. Freed’s large interracial rock and roll audiences impressed Woods. In January 1955, for example, Woods described these interracial audiences in his weekly column in the Philadelphia Tribune, “Rock and Roll with Georgie Woods”:
There is a change taking place in the music industry of America, especially in the so-called rhythm and blues field. Today, as never before, white teenagers are buying rhythm and blues tunes. Reason—the younger generation is away from the old idea that rhythm and blues music is strictly for Negroes. In this writer’s opinion, Rock and Roll music is the rhythm of America and there are many who will agree. Here’s an example of how the change in taking place. In New York City a disc jockey by the name of Allan [sic] Freed … plays only rock and roll music and yet he has more white listeners than Negro listeners. … [H]e gave an affair at the St. Nick’s arena and … it went like this: The affair was a complete sellout—30,000 strong for both shows at $2.00 per, and each nite there were more whites in attendance than Negroes. … A change for the better is taking place and I for one can’t see any wrong in that change.7
FIGURE 16. Georgie Woods with his teenage fans at a record hop at Imperial Roller Skating Rink in West Philadelphia. Woods staked his claim as Philadelphia’s “King of Rock ’n’ Roll” through his radio show and his stage shows. October 12, 1954. Used with permission of the Philadelphia Tribune.
For Woods, rock and roll did not refer to a new type of music, but rather to a larger consumer market for rhythm and blues music. Already a popular radio personality, Woods started billing himself as the “King of Rock ’n’ Roll” and organized his first rock and roll stage show at the Met in North Philadelphia in April 1955. This first concert was followed by shows in Center City at the Academy of Music and the Mastbaum Theater.8 Each of these shows featured a mix of rhythm and blues singers like LaVern Baker, big bands like the Buddy Johnson Orchestra, and vocal harmony groups such as the Roamers. More important for Woods, each concert sold out. The Academy of Music show, the Philadelphia Tribune reported, “was packed and jammed with over 5,000 yelling, screaming high school students.”9 Woods used his radio show to promote these concerts, and this cross promotion prompted a dispute with station management that led him to leave WHAT and sign with the rival black-oriented station WDAS.10 He maintained his popularity after switching stations, and with each of the concerts Woods established himself as the leading rock and roll personality in Philadelphia.11
As he promoted these large stage shows, Woods also hosted smaller dances and concerts in the city’s majority black neighborhoods. Although teens paid only twenty-five or fifty cents to attend the record hops and one or two dollars for the larger concerts, these events helped to supplement Woods’s radio salary of twenty-five dollars a week.12 Beyond this financial motivation, the concerts and record hops also established a closer relationship between Woods and his teenage audience. Woods recalled that “anyplace where a number of people could gather, we [held a dance]. It wasn’t just one special place … we used playgrounds, gyms or auditoriums to do the dances.”13 Combining recorded music, live performances, and dancing, these neighborhood events were “community theaters,” which music scholar Guthrie Ramsey describes as central to the cultural experience and memory of black music.14 As rock and roll was starting to take off nationally, these local concerts and record hops established black community spaces as the local sites through which this music could be experienced. These events often featured vocal harmony groups made up of teenagers from the neighborhood.15 A North Philadelphia group called the Re-Vels, for example, performed frequently at the Richard Allen Community Centre in its neighborhood.16 Weldon McDougal, who lived in West Philadelphia and sang with the Philadelphia Larks, remembered that these talent shows provided a rare opportunity to venture into other neighborhoods:
You didn’t go to too many different neighborhoods to go to any dance. Because again, they didn’t want you to mess with their girls. You had to have a good reason [to go]. Like the Larks, we’d sing in community centers and also we would sing in talent shows in other parts of the city, like in North Philly at the Richard Allen projects, which I lived in [when I was younger]. So when they said they had a talent show over there, I said “oh man, let’s go over there” … now here I am from West Philly going to the Richard Allen projects, and we didn’t have cars so we caught the trolley. And we’d get off and walk on over there. And lo and behold here comes a gang. And they said, “What are y’all doing around here?” And we said, “We’re in the talent show.” And they said, “Y’all can’t sing. The best group in the world is the Re-Vels.” They lived in the Richard Allen projects. And they said, “We gonna kick your ass if y’all can’t out sing the Re-Vels.” They said, “sing something.” So then I broke out, and they said “man, y’all sound pretty good.” And they said “listen, we’re gonna come to the talent show, but I don’t think y’all can sing as good as the Re-Vels.” And what it really was, these guys, they liked us, so we weren’t in danger of getting beat up. But they still didn’t like us enough to beat the Re-Vels, so they would come to the talent show and they’d be hollering and screaming. It was exciting you know?17
Like the Re-Vels and the Larks, several other singing groups formed among teenagers in the city’s black neighborhoods. These vocal harmony groups were part of “the forgotten third of rock ’n’ roll.”18 Stuart Goosman, Robert Pruter, and Philip Groia have shown that vocal harmony took off in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York as it did in Philadelphia. These singing groups, usually comprising blue-collar young men from urban neighborhoods, drew from pop, blues, and novelty songs to create a smooth form of R&B that reached national popularity with groups like the Orioles, Clovers, Cadillacs, Cardinals, Flamingoes, and Moonglows. At the local level, vocal harmony groups practiced on street corners, in school hallways, in recreation centers, and in any available neighborhood space. Many groups became famous in their communities without ever recording an album.19 The Philadelphia Tribune ran pictures and stories about local groups such
as the Guy Tones, the Dreamers, the Opals, Ronald Jones and the Classmates, and the Satellites.20 At a time when discrimination limited educational and employment opportunities for black youth, and stories on juvenile delinquency appeared frequently in the mainstream press, these “local teens make good” articles highlighted music as a productive activity that could lead to a career and financial success. Indeed, several recreation centers and church groups also put on talent shows for teenagers as a way to curb juvenile delinquency and gang violence.21 While most vocal groups only performed at neighborhood showcases, several groups signed recording contracts and released singles, while other individuals, like Weldon McDougal, used their music experience to go into music promotion or production.22 Regardless of their level of commercial success, each of these groups contributed to the development of rock and roll in Philadelphia.
MITCH THOMAS, TELEVISION PIONEER
If Georgie Woods became the most prominent rock and roll personality in Philadelphia and teenage singing groups and their fans provided the energy that fueled the music’s growth in the city’s neighborhoods, Mitch Thomas brought black rock and roll performers and teenage fans to television. Born in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1922, Thomas’s family moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey, in the 1930s. Thomas graduated from Delaware State College and served in the army before becoming the first black disc jockey in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1949. In 1952, Thomas moved to a larger station (WILM) that played music by black R&B artists. By early 1955, Thomas also had a radio show on Philadelphia’s WDAS, where he worked with Woods and Jocko Henderson. When a television opportunity opened up in Thomas’s home market of Wilmington, Thomas got the call over these better-known Philadelphia-based radio hosts.23
FIGURE 17. The Re-Vels was one of the most popular teenage vocal harmony groups in Philadelphia, with twelve fan clubs including over a thousand members. May 19, 1956. Used with permission of Philadelphia Tribune.
The Mitch Thomas Show debuted on August 13, 1955, on WPFH, an unaffiliated television station that broadcast to Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley from Wilmington.24 The show, which broadcast every Saturday, featured musical guests and teens dancing to records. In its basic production the show resembled Bandstand (which at the time was still a local program hosted by Bob Horn) and other locally broadcast teenage dance programs in other cities. The Mitch Thomas Show stood out from these other shows, however, because it was hosted by a black deejay and featured a studio audience of black teenagers. Otis Givens, who lived in South Philadelphia and attended Ben Franklin High School, remembered that he watched the show every weekend for a year before he finally made the trip to Wilmington and danced on the show. “When I got back to Philly, and everyone had seen me on TV, I was big time,” Givens recalled. “We weren’t able to get into Bandstand, [but] The Mitch Thomas Show gave me a little fame. I was sort of a celebrity at local dances.”25 Similarly, South Philadelphia teen Donna Brown recalled in a 1995 interview: “I remember at the same time that Bandstand used to come on, there used to be a black dance thing that came on, and it was The Mitch Thomas Show. … And that was something for the black kids to really identify with. Because you would look at Bandstand and we thought it was a joke.”26 The Mitch Thomas Show also became a frequent topic for the black teenagers who wrote the Philadelphia Tribune’s “Teen-Talk” columns. Much in the same way that national teen magazines followed American Bandstand, the Tribune’s teen writers kept tabs on the performers featured on Thomas’s show, and described the teenagers who formed fan clubs to support their favorite musical artists and deejays.27 The fan gossip shared in these columns documented the growth of a youth culture among the black teenagers whom Bandstand excluded. It was one of these fan clubs, moreover, that in 1957 made the most forceful challenge to Bandstand’s discriminatory admissions policies.28 Although many of these teens watched both Bandstand and Thomas’s program, as Bandstand grew in popularity and expanded into a national program, The Mitch Thomas Show was the only television program that represented Philadelphia’s black rock and roll fans.
WPFH’s decision to provide airtime for this groundbreaking show was influenced more by economics than by a concern for racial equality. Eager to compete with Bandstand and the afternoon offerings on the other network-affiliated stations, WPFH hoped that Thomas’s show would appeal to both black and white youth in the same way as black-oriented radio.29 The station’s bet on Thomas was part of a larger strategy that included hiring white disc jockeys Joe Grady and Ed Hurst to host a daily afternoon dance program that started at 5 P.M., after Bandstand concluded its daily broadcast.30 While The Grady and Hurst Show broadcast five times a week, it was the weekly Mitch Thomas Show that proved to be the more influential program.
Drawing on Thomas’s contacts as a radio host and the talents of the teenagers who appeared on his show, the program helped shape the music tastes and dance styles of young people in Philadelphia. In a 1998 interview for the documentary Black Philadelphia Memories, Thomas recalled that “the show was so strong that I could play a record one time and break it wide open.”31 Indeed, Thomas’s show hosted some of the biggest names in rock and roll, including Ray Charles, Little Richard, and the Moonglows. Thomas’s show also featured several vocal harmony groups from the Philadelphia area.32 Like Woods, Thomas promoted large stage shows in the Philadelphia area as well as small record hops at skating rinks.33 In a 1986 interview with the Wilmington News Journal, Thomas remembered that these events were often racially integrated: “The whites that came, they just said, ‘Well I’m gonna see the artist and that’s it.’ I brought Ray Charles in there on a Sunday night, and it was just beautiful to look out there and see everything just nice.”34 The music and dance styles on his show also appealed to the white teenagers who danced on American Bandstand.35 Because the show influenced American Bandstand during its first year as a national program, teenagers across the country learned dances popularized by The Mitch Thomas Show.
FIGURE 18. Mitch Thomas debuts on WPFH in Wilmington, Delaware. From 1955 to 1958, The Mitch Thomas Show broadcast the creative talents of black teenagers and influenced the dance styles on Bandstand. August 6, 1955. Used with permission of Philadelphia Tribune.
Despite its popularity among black and white teenagers, Thomas’s show remained on television for only three years, from 1955 to 1958. The failure of the station that broadcast The Mitch Thomas Show underscores the tenuous nature of unaffiliated local programs like Thomas’s. Storer Broadcasting Company purchased WPFH in 1956.36 Storer frequently bought and sold stations, and, at the time of the WPFH acquisition, Storer also owned stations in Toledo, Cleveland, Atlanta, Miami, and Portland, Oregon. Storer changed WPFH’s call letters to WVUE, and hoped to move the station’s facilities from Wilmington closer to Philadelphia. The plan faltered, and the station suffered significant operating losses over the next year.37 Thomas’s show was among the first victims of the station’s financial problems. While advertisers started to pay more attention to black consumers in the 1950s, a product-identification stigma lingered throughout the decade, preventing many brands from sponsoring black programs.38 WVUE canceled The Mitch Thomas Show in June 1958, citing the program’s lack of sponsorship and low ratings compared to the network shows in Thomas’s Saturday time slot.39 Shortly after firing Thomas, Storer announced plans to sell WVUE in order to buy a station in Milwaukee (FCC regulations required multiple broadcast owners to divest one license in order to buy another). Unable to find a buyer for WVUE, Storer turned the station license back to the government, and the station went dark in September 1958.40 The manager of WVUE later told broadcasting historian Gerry Wilkerson: “No one can make a profit with a TV station unless affiliated with NBC, CBS or ABC.”41 As Clark and American Bandstand celebrated the one-year anniversary of the show’s national debut, local broadcast competition brought The Mitch Thomas Show’s groundbreaking three-year run to an unceremonious end. Mitch Thomas continued to work as a radio disc jockey through the 1960s, until he left broadcas
ting in 1969 to work as a counselor to gang members in Wilmington.42
Thomas’s short-lived television career resembled the experiences of African American entertainers who hosted music and variety shows in this era. The Nat King Cole Show (1956–57) failed to attract national advertisers and lasted only a year. Before Nat King Cole, shows hosted by black singers Lorenzo Fuller (1947) and Billy Daniels (1952) and the variety program Sugar Hill Times (1949) also fared poorly. Among local programs, the Al Benson Show and Richard Stamz’s Open the Door Richard both had brief periods of success in 1950s Chicago. Two other local dance programs featuring black teens proved more successful than The Mitch Thomas Show. Teenage Frolics, hosted by Raleigh, North Carolina, deejay J. D. Lewis, aired on Saturdays from 1958 to 1983, and Washington, D.C.’s Teenarama Dance Party, hosted by Bob King, aired from 1963 to 1970. Most famously, Soul Train started broadcasting locally from Chicago in 1970 before being picked up for national syndication from 1971 to 2006. Fifteen years before Soul Train, however, Mitch Thomas brought the creative talents of black teenagers to television.43
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