Nicest Kids in Town

by Delmont, Matthew F.

  I got into civil rights because there was discrimination against black people everywhere, and I felt it personally. Then I met Cecil Moore and he asked me to join in some pickets and demonstrations and things like that, and I’d go on the air and tell people where I was going to be demonstrating, and a mob of people would show up and I had a microphone and I was directing people. When school let out I had all the kids in town listening to me. When school got out all the teenagers came and got into the pickets lines because I was there demonstrating for our rights.102

  FIGURE 20. NAACP Philadelphia branch president Cecil B. Moore (far right) presents singer Jackie Wilson (left) and deejay Georgie Woods (center) with awards for their support of local NAACP’s activities. September 10, 1963. Used with permission of Philadelphia Tribune.

  Moore’s demands for black leaders who were in touch with black working-class communities echoed Woods’s critique of the lack of black leadership in the city’s media. After Moore’s election, Woods became the vice president of the Philadelphia branch of the NAACP and used his talents as a concert promoter to help raise money for the NAACP. Woods held his first fundraising concert at the Uptown Theater on May 14, 1963. Singers Jackie Wilson and Linda Hopkins, comedian Bill Cosby, and other acts performed to a sold-out crowd of two thousand people in an atmosphere the Philadelphia Tribune said had “the flavor of an old-fashioned, ‘down home’ revival.”103 The show raised $60,000 for the local branch and provided Moore and Woods with an opportunity to urge fans to support the NAACP.

  The concert came days after Moore and the Philadelphia NAACP organized one of the city’s largest civil rights demonstrations to support the Birmingham civil rights movement. Moore made a provocative comparison between Philadelphia and Birmingham in his speech at the concert: “Personally, I can’t see much difference between a Philadelphia policeman and a Ku Klux Klansman in Birmingham. The only difference is the geographic location.”104 Focusing on employment discrimination in Philadelphia, Moore went on to detail differences in pay for white and black construction workers. Moore noted that white construction workers were paid $200 and asked the crowd: “They want to pay your daddies and husbands $75 a week. We aren’t going to put up with that are we?” Moore concluded his speech by asking for support for the upcoming pickets of city construction sites, which developed into a week-long picket at the Strawberry Mansion Junior High School construction site in North Philadelphia. Woods praised Moore’s words and actions, calling him “a leader who has the nerve to point his finger in the white man’s face and tell him when he’s wrong. That’s the only reason Cecil Moore is criticized. He’s criticized because he stands up for the Negro.”105 In addition to his fundraising and words of support, Woods also participated in the NAACP’s school construction protest two weeks later.106

  Woods expanded his civil rights activism over the next two years, supporting the NAACP with fundraising concerts, using his radio show to publicize issues and protests, and participating in pickets. In fall 1963, for example, Woods and Nat King Cole headlined a memorial and protest rally in Center City following the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four young girls.107 Woods also hosted a Freedom Show in March 1964 to raise money for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Opportunities Industrialization Center, a North Philadelphia job training center run by the Reverend Leon Sullivan.108 Held at the Convention Hall in West Philadelphia, the concert featured Sam Cooke, Jerry Butler, the Shirelles, Martha and the Vandellas, and comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley.109 The concert raised $30,000, and the Tribune estimated that fourteen thousand people filled the hall, with another five thousand waiting outside.110 Woods hosted a second Freedom Show on March 23, 1965. In the weeks leading up to the show, Woods traveled to Selma, Alabama, to protest the attacks on civil rights marchers by state and local police. Civil rights activists in New York, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Boston, San Francisco, and other cities organized sympathy protests against racial violence in Selma.111 In Philadelphia, Woods led four thousand marchers from the Uptown Theater down Broad Street to City Hall, where they were joined by Moore, comedian Dick Gregory, and eight thousand other marchers. Almost all of the marchers were black, and many were teenagers from the city’s public high schools, whom, the Tribune reported, “frequently left the main body of demonstrators to stage their own demonstration, featuring freedom ‘war chants,’ hand-clapping and rock ’n’ roll-type singing.”112 Woods marched in a blue denim workman’s jumpsuit rather than his usual silk suit and explained to the Tribune reporter, “This is a day for walking, not talking.”113 The Freedom Show following the protest march raised another $30,000 for the NAACP. The Philadelphia Tribune praised Woods’s accomplishments, calling him “a true champion of the civil rights offensive in Philadelphia.”114

  As historian William Barlow has shown, black deejays like Woods played an important role in mobilizing turnout for civil rights protests. Among civil rights organizations, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference worked to cultivate a network of black radio hosts across the country. In addition to Woods, Nat Williams in Memphis, Louis Fletcher in Nashville, Hot Rod Hulbert in Baltimore, Mary Mason in Philadelphia, and many others kept listeners abreast of local and national civil rights developments, interviewed civil rights leaders, and encouraged meeting attendance. In addition to providing a broadcast platform for civil rights information, deejays were well known and respected members of their communities who could move thousands of people to attend rallies.115 For these broadcasters, the localism of radio made it the ideal medium for organizing grassroots actions. Woods used radio to this end in the mass protest organized by Moore and the NAACP at Girard College, a North Philadelphia boarding school for fatherless boys that, by rule of the founder’s will, excluded black youth. As historian Matthew Countryman describes, for Moore “the goal of desegregating Girard College was … less important than finding a protest target that would attract the black youth of North Philadelphia, and in particular the teenage members of the area’s street-corner gangs, to join the NAACP picket line in front of [Girard’s] ten-foot walls.”116

  Woods contributed to the Girard protest by leading marches of young people to the picket line and recruiting other teenagers through his radio and stage shows.117 With Woods’s help, civil rights activists picketed Girard every day from May 1 to December 18, 1965. Moore suspended the protests after two attorneys appointed by Governor William Scranton filed a lawsuit in federal court to overturn Girard’s will.118 On May 19, 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Girard College could no longer admit only white students.119

  Although the Girard victory was largely symbolic and did not impact the de facto segregation in the city’s public schools, the protests at Girard mobilized anger among black Philadelphians over persistent racial inequality in the city. With Woods as one of the leading organizers, the protests also exposed many black teenagers to activism for the first time. Kenny Gamble, for example, remembered that in his early twenties he became more aware of discrimination through the Girard protest. Gamble attended West Philadelphia High School, just blocks from the American Bandstand studio. As an aspiring singer, Gamble brought coffee and records he cut in penny arcade recording booths to Woods at the WDAS studio.120 In a tribute to Woods’s civil rights work, Gamble wrote:

  The public school system didn’t teach us anything about our culture or our heritage or anything like that. So the Girard College demonstrations sort of opened my eyes to discrimination. … I felt good that Georgie Woods was there because this was somebody that I knew. … And when they were talking about how Girard College would not admit Black people, and how racist Stephen Girard and his whole system had been, it really opened my eyes up. From that day on I started to be more aware.121

  By the end of the Girard protest in 1965, Gamble and his musical partner Leon Huff had started their first record label. With the help of writer-producer Thom Bell, Gamble and Huff became one of
the leading R&B production teams of the late 1960s, and they founded Philadelphia International Records in 1970 as an upstart competitor to Motown. The soul-funk “Philadelphia Sound” they developed featured gospel-inspired vocals and narrative lyrics over tight rhythm tracks and lush string and horn arrangements.122 Like Motown, Philadelphia International scored crossover hits on the R&B and pop charts in the early and mid-1970s with songs like “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, “Back Stabbers” and “Love Train” by the O’Jays, and “I’ll Be Around” by the Spinners.123 With his radio show at WDAS, Woods helped to break many of Gamble and Huff’s songs, and helped to reassert Philadelphia’s status within popular music.124

  In 2009, Philadelphia dedicated the stretch of Broad Street in front of the Uptown Theater as Georgie Woods Boulevard, and a mural of Woods appears on the side of the building. These acknowledgements honor how Woods used his radio show and concerts to popularize rock and roll and R&B and how, in turn, he used this popularity to fight for civil rights and more black voices in media. While Mitch Thomas did not become an activist of Woods’s stature, Thomas’s television show broke ground as one of first televised dance show for black teenagers. The Mitch Thomas Show also made black youth culture visible at a time when black teens were excluded from American Bandstand. Despite their roles as rock and roll pioneers, neither Woods nor Thomas is well known outside of Philadelphia. Dick Clark, in contrast, became one of the most successful entrepreneurs in music history. Clark’s breakthrough moment was when ABC turned Bandstand into the nationally televised American Bandstand, making Clark the only national rock and roll deejay. Like Clark, Woods and Thomas sought to capitalize professionally from the popularity of rock and roll, but unlike Clark, Woods and Thomas remained focused on Philadelphia’s local music scene and their local communities of fans. For Woods and Thomas, segregated local markets marked the opportunities and limits of their careers, and activism followed from these close community ties. Clark’s understanding of the local community of fans was necessarily complicated by the fact that his show broadcast not just to Philadelphia, but also to Portland, Peoria, and dozens of other media markets as well. He had unique access to a nation of young consumers that he leveraged to great profit. With American Bandstand, commerce and community mixed at a national scale, and the next chapter explores the national youth culture that emerged in the process.

  CHAPTER 6

  “They’ll Be Rockin’ on Bandstand, in Philadelphia, P.A.”

  Imagining National Youth Culture on American Bandstand

  Cause they’ll be rockin’ on Bandstand

  In Philadelphia P.A.

  Deep in the heart of Texas

  And ‘round the Frisco bay’

  Way out in St. Louis

  And down in New Orleans

  All the cats wanna dance with

  Sweet little sixteen.

  — Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen,” 1958

  It was no accident that Chuck Berry made reference to American Bandstand when he released “Sweet Little Sixteen” in January 1958. Berry made his national television debut on American Bandstand in 1957, and including these lyrics helped ensure that this new song would receive ample airtime on the program. Indeed, Dick Clark later recalled “Sometimes we heard a hit the first time we played the record—Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ was like that.”1 Berry’s song reached number two on the Billboard chart and stayed on the chart for sixteen weeks, thanks in large part to its frequent exposure on Clark’s show. Less obvious than his references to Philadelphia and American Bandstand, Berry’s nods to teens dancing in Texas, San Francisco, St. Louis, and New Orleans underscored a point that American Bandstand called attention to every afternoon—the existence of a national youth culture. As the show sought to establish itself as a national program, it pointed to its local fans and television affiliates in different parts of the country as evidence of its national reach. In helping viewers and advertisers imagine a national youth culture, America Bandstand promoted the idea that teenagers were united in their simultaneous consumption of television and rock and roll. This chapter examines how, through a range of production strategies, American Bandstand encouraged the show’s viewers, advertisers, and television affiliates to see the program as the thread that stitched together different teenagers in different parts of the country into a coherent and recognizable national youth culture.

  In exploring how American Bandstand producers articulated this vision of national youth culture, this chapter builds on Josh Kun’s notion of “audiotopia” and Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities.” Kun uses the concept of audiotopia to describe how “music functions like a possible utopia for the listener, that music is experienced not only as sound that goes into our ears and vibrates through our bones but as a space that we can enter into, encounter, move around in, inhabit, be safe in, learn from.”2 American Bandstand adds a visual component to Kun’s formulation. Teenagers tuned into American Bandstand to watch other teenagers dance to records, to see musical artists perform, and to try out the latest dance moves in their own living rooms. American Bandstand’s daily images encouraged teenagers to imagine themselves as part of a national audience enjoying the same music and dances at the same time. American Bandstand offered its viewers a teenage television audiotopia every afternoon. This televised audiotopia was most pronounced for the Italian-American teenagers who were prominently represented on the show. For them, American Bandstand made their neighborhood peer culture an integral and visible component of the national youth culture. The show’s ongoing segregation, examined in the next chapter, makes it clear that this televisual audiotopia was not equally available to all viewers.

  American Bandstand also adds a visual component to Anderson’s theory of imagined communities. Anderson highlights newspapers as one of the ways that people first understood (or imagined) themselves as part of a community without face-to-face contact with other members of this community. He describes the “extraordinary mass ceremony” of the “almost precisely simultaneous consumption” of newspapers. The importance of this consumption ritual, Anderson argues, is that

  each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.3

  As was the case with the newspapers in Anderson’s example, teenagers watched American Bandstand simultaneously with little face-to-face knowledge of the millions of other viewers watching the show. Unlike newspapers, however, as a television program American Bandstand visualized this imagined community through its studio audience, viewer letters, and maps, and by consistently addressing its viewers as part of a national audience. As political scientist Diana Mutz notes, “[w]hat media, and national media in particular, do best is to supply us with information about those beyond our personal experiences and contacts, in other words, with impressions of the state of mass collectives.”4 American Bandstand used its production techniques and mode of address to offer teenagers daily evidence that the imagined national youth culture was “visibly rooted in everyday life.” American Bandstand’s popularity and profitability flowed from its ability to get viewers, advertisers, and television affiliates to imagine a national youth culture with the show at the center.

  In an era when advertisers “discovered” teenagers, American Bandstand offered daily access to the largest market of young consumers. Almost every minute of American Bandstand was dedicated to selling products. From paid advertisements for consu
mer goods to promotions of records and musical guests (also often paid for by record promoters), the show presented its viewers with a host of messages every day. The show urged teenagers to drink Seven-Up and Dr. Pepper, snack on Rice-A-Roni and Almond Joy, buy records by the newest hit-makers and carry these records in an American Bandstand case, read about the show’s regulars in publications like ‘Teen magazine, wear the same “Dick Clark American Bandstand” shoes as these dancers, learn new dances from the American Bandstand yearbook, and apply Clearasil to their pimples. This was an extraordinarily high level of promotional activity, even by the standards of commercial television. By representing the show’s teenagers consuming all of these products, American Bandstand constructed a national youth culture centered on simultaneous consumption. By inviting viewers to participate in the same consumption rituals as the studio audience, American Bandstand encouraged teens across the country to identify with each other.

  American Bandstand established Philadelphia as the locus of this national youth culture, and it drew extensively from the creative abilities of the city’s youth. Some of these contributions were well documented, others obscured. On the one hand, Italian-American teens figured prominently in the show’s image of youth culture. Many of the show’s regular dancers and local fans hailed from working-class Italian-American neighborhoods, and they later remembered American Bandstand as providing them with unique exposure. On the other hand, the program’s racially discriminatory admissions policies remained in place. With the program broadcasting nationally, black teens were erased not just from the “WFIL–adelphia” regional market, but also from the national youth culture American Bandstand worked to build. While the next chapter examines the struggles over segregation surrounding the program, this chapter shows how American Bandstand became established as the afternoon site of the nation’s youth.