"Memphis' and the real dawn of rock 'n' roll

Memphis: The Musical seems unnecessary. The subject of racial integration among music lovers was well covered ten years ago in Hairspray. That musical showed how an all-white TV program was integrated while a white teen gal fell in love with a black dancer.

Memphis, which opened in New York in 2009, concerns the same subject, except this time it's a Memphis radio station instead of a Baltimore TV station, and this time it's a white boy with a black girl instead of the other way around.

The songs by composer-lyricists David Bryan and Joe DiPietro are undistinguished and the story is melodramatic. The best thing about this show is Sergio Trujillo's choreography, athletically performed by the cast.

The worst is the annoying impersonation of a young white disk jockey who introduces what were called "race" records to Memphis radio and falls in love with a black singer. He has an exceedingly broad and grating accent, apparently based on a real Memphis deejay of the '50s. But it turns off an audience that's supposed to empathize with him.

Accidental innovator

Philadelphia had its own real-life racial rock "'n' roll drama during the same era. Bob Horn was a veteran Philadelphia radio personality who played mainstream pop records (Perry Como, Doris Day) and produced live jazz concerts by Erroll Garner and Sarah Vaughn. But when he was assigned the job of hosting a teenage dance party on TV's Channel 6, Horn took the task seriously.

From the debut of "Bob Horn's Bandstand" on October 7, 1952, Horn asked kids who attended the afternoon telecasts at 46th and Market Streets what songs they'd like to dance to. Jerry Blavat (then 13) and others suggested songs like "Sh-Boom" by The Chords, "Little Darling" by the Gladiolas and "Earth Angel" by The Penguins. Horn played these records by black groups on the air— music he'd previously ignored— without interference from station executives (unlike the stereotyped white executives portrayed in Memphis).

Horn broke new ground when he made the youngsters the stars of the show, and when he gave teenagers a forum to set their own standards of music, dance steps and style. He also presided over a racially integrated audience that was roughly evenly divided between blacks and whites. Harvey Sheldon, a white high school student who later became a disc jockey and songwriter, jitterbugged with a black girl on the show and no one objected.

To be sure, this was Philadelphia— not Memphis. But race prejudice and de facto separation were very much the order of the day here as in the South.

Slow dance with a white girl

One day in 1953, when I was working part-time at the station, a black teenager tried to slow-dance with a white girl. I heard some of the white boys muttering about how they'd like to beat up the guy after the show. Others had to calm them down.

On the other hand, the integrated setting provided a rare opportunity for blacks and whites to meet and learn from each other. Frank Spagnuola, a white Italian-American who became a "Bandstand" regular a bit later, said he loved to see blacks in the studio "so I could learn their dance steps."

Some Channel 6 executives worried that the program could become identified as a black show and white kids would stay away. Horn responded by implementing two strategies.

Suits and ties

First, he required that boys wear suits and ties to the show— a policy that subtly discriminated against blacks, since the white kids who attended parochial schools dressed that way normally. Second, he created a restrictive reservation system. If you got on the show once, you were assured of returning— ahead of people who phoned in or wrote— as long as the selection committee liked you.

As a result, by 1955 or '56 the show's audiences were almost entirely white. "Anything that looks like a black face in a picture is probably a white face in the shadows," a black kid named Henry Gordon once told me. "The only black people who went in that building were cleaning people."

Horn may not have been racist, but he had other vices. He was a heavy drinker, and he solicited record promoters to supply him with booze and women. One female was only 13 years old when she first came to the station, and Horn carried on with her for several years. (I'd see them together when I worked the 6 p.m. to sign-off shift.) In November 1956 Horn was indicted for statutory rape and corrupting the morals of a minor.

Dick Clark's formula

Dick Clark took over the show and built it to even greater popularity. Clark put many black singers on the air, but he did retain the dress code and the de facto racial segregation on the dance floor. When the program went network as "American Bandstand" in October of 1957, the producers didn't want to upset Southerners by showing interracial mingling. Integration finally began to return to the show after Clark moved it to California in 1964.

Horn, meanwhile was convicted of drunk driving but acquitted of the sex charges because of technicalities. He died in 1966 of a heart attack at age 50.

"I've never been sexually attracted to very young girls," Dick Clark remarked in his 1976 memoir, Rock, Roll and Remember. "It may not be the secret of my success, but it sure as hell kept me out of a lot of trouble."

Now, there's a dynamite story suitable for a rock 'n' roll musical revival. And if any producers today were to stage a musical about how Bob Horn brought black music to Philadelphia in the '50s, I doubt if they'd care about replicating Horn's looks. What mattered wasn't how the deejay looked or sounded, but what happened with his audiences.