Created by composer and lyricist Sherman Edwards (1919-81) with book writer Peter Stone (1930-2003), 1776 depicts historical events from May 8 through July 4, 1776, with a sprinkling of dramatic license. Produced on the eve of the nation’s bicentennial, in the charged political climate of the 1960s and 1970s, 1776 showed how the nation began in conflict. The musical opens in Independence Hall’s Assembly Room with John Adams (1735-1826) complaining that Congress cannot come to an agreement on whether to separate from Great Britain. Frustrated, he states: “I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a congress!” This sets the tone of fundamental disagreement, which becomes evident as Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee (1732-94) proposes independence. John Dickinson (1732-1808), from Pennsylvania, moves to indefinitely postpone this notion. At first, five colonies vote in favor of debate while five vote against, as New Jersey is absent and New York abstains. Rhode Island’s vote is delayed, but the notion is passed after their vote of “yea” is ultimately heard. Adams then seeks to buy time by calling for postponement until a written Declaration of Independence can be prepared. The president of the Congress, John Hancock (1737-93), agrees and breaks the tie to favor postponing. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) is then nominated to write the Declaration, despite missing his wife and claiming he is unable to concentrate without her. The film version of 1776 shows Jefferson walking up the stairs to his rented rooms at Seventh and High (Market) Streets to write, play the violin, and spend time with his wife, which enabled him to successfully write.

The Slavery Issue

Jefferson’s draft, when completed, triggers additional disagreements, including conflict between North and South over whether the text should denounce King George III’s responsibility for the slave trade—a reminder that the roots of racial tensions run deep in American history. After Jefferson’s words against slavery are removed, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia join northern and middle colonies in voting “yea” on Lee’s resolution for independence on July 2. New York abstains (“courteously”), and Pennsylvania passes at first but ultimately votes in favor. The resolution passes, and the story is depicted as ending on July 4 as the names of delegates from every colony are called and they sign the Declaration of Independence. (In reality, the delegates approved the written declaration on July 4, and signing did not begin until August 2). The bell in the State House, later known as the Liberty Bell, is heard ringing dramatically (a myth invented later, in the nineteenth century).

Throughout, the show calls attention to Philadelphia’s stifling heat. The song “The Egg” playfully refers to hot and humid Philadelphia acting as an incubator for the unborn majestic eagle that will ultimately represent the United States. Philadelphia figures play key roles in the suspenseful vote for independence. Within the Pennsylvania delegation, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) favors independence while Dickinson does not, and James Wilson (1742-98) tends to follow Dickinson’s actions. After all other colonies have voted “yea,” the divided Pennsylvania delegation has the final vote. Wilson’s character, responding to Dickinson’s pressure to vote against independence, states, “If I go with them, I’ll only be one among dozens; no one will ever remember the name of James Wilson. But if I vote with you, I’ll be the man who prevented American independence. I’m sorry, John—I just didn’t bargain for that.” Wilson’s choice assures Pennsylvania’s approval and a unanimous vote in favor of independence. Dickinson is shown leaving Congress, and he did not sign. He did, however, join the Pennsylvania militia.

Breaking the Tie Vote

Similarly, the musical portrays Caesar Rodney (1728-84) as the tiebreaking vote in favor of independence for the Delaware delegation. After riding approximately eighty miles on horseback through a thunderstorm, Rodney arrives in Philadelphia on July 2 still wearing his muddy boots just as the vote for independence is about to take place. New Jersey also plays a role in the show as Benjamin Franklin notes the strain in his relationship with his illegitimate son, William Franklin (c. 1730-1813), a Loyalist who served as Royal Governor of New Jersey from 1763 to 1776.

The Broadway production of 1776, directed by Peter Hunt (1925-2002) and choreographed by Onna White (1922-2005) with musical direction by Peter Howard (1927-2008), received warm reviews. Critics found the book for the show to be well researched and written. Although they commented that musical numbers often sounded alike and acted as filler with large gaps in between, they show was a smash hit with audiences. 1776 won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1969, and it came back to Broadway as a revival in 1997. Numerous professional, regional, community, and school theaters have produced the show nationally, including at least nine regional theater companies during the year of the Bicentennial. In Philadelphia, the Walnut Street Theatre produced the show in 1997.

The director of the 1969 Broadway production also directed the screen version, and many actors from the stage repeated their roles in the movie, including: William Daniels (b. 1927) as John Adams, Howard Da Silva (1909-86) as Benjamin Franklin, and Ken Howard (1944-2016) as Thomas Jefferson. Although set in Philadelphia, filming for the movie of 1776 took place in California at the Columbia Ranch (later known as the Warner Brothers Ranch, or Warner Ranch) in Burbank and Sunset Gower Studios in Los Angeles. A fire at the Warner Ranch in the 1970s destroyed the film’s recreation of a colonial Philadelphia street and other sets. The movie cost an estimated $4 million to make and grossed $6.1 million, but it was not generally admired by critics.

Throughout 1776, Adams’ character repeats the words “Is anybody there? Does anybody care?” These words have continued to resonate and take on new meanings to viewers of all ages. Set in and around Independence Hall, 1776 has helped to sustain recognition of Philadelphia’s role in American history.

Alexandra Jordan Thelin is a Ph.D. student in History and Culture at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and specializes in fashion history, visual culture, and art. (Author information current at time of publication.)

First called Bandstand, the program premiered October 6, 1952, hosted by Philadelphia radio DJ Bob Horn (1916-66). It was shot live from Studio B at Forty-Sixth and and Market Streets, where the two-and-a-half-hour show was broadcast regionally on WFIL-TV Channel 6. Via this network, which advertised itself as “WFIL-adelphia,” the show reached almost six million viewers in the Delaware Valley, the nation’s third-largest market at the time.  Pennants from local high schools lined the walls of American Bandstand’s production studio, emphasizing to viewers and advertisers the show’s local orientation.

Dick Clark (1929-2012) replaced Horn as host in 1956, just before the show was renamed American Bandstand, shortened to ninety minutes, and expanded to a national ABC audience on August 5, 1957. The show then aired at 3 p.m., Monday through Friday, corresponding with the typical school day’s end. American Bandstand was an immediate success, with an estimated audience of twenty million viewers.

From its earliest days, the show featured young people dancing to a rock-and-roll soundtrack or other popular genres of the day.  This included dances the Bop, the Twist, the Jitterbug, and the Stroll. The show also incorporated appearances by acts like Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, and Connie Francis, who would lip-sync performances. Being featured on the show all but guaranteed a spike in popularity; even before it moved to a national platform American Bandstand offered a remarkably large audience base for musicians, often generating national popular demand for a new group or single.  Another component of the show was its Rate-a-Record segment—where people evaluated a record on a scale of 35 to 98—which originated the saying, “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.” For this era’s music industry, American Bandstand was arguably the most significant television venue in the country.

Local Teens as National Celebrities

Throughout its Philadelphia years, the show was so popular that it transformed average local-area teens into national celebrities. On each broadcast day the line of teens hoping to appear on the show snaked around the block; some were granted entry and others denied. In order to help establish a clean-cut image for the show, guys were required to wear ties with suit jackets or sweaters, while girls dressed in “good taste,” for example a high-cut blouse with a dress or skirt. Clark felt such conventions helped boost the perception of rock-and-roll, which in the 1950s was a controversial genre often disliked by older generations.

Several teens belonged to a select group of taste-making gatekeepers who helped monitor dress code and admission. Clark and producer Tony Mammorella (1924-1977) dubbed this group “The Committee,” led from 1954 to 1956 by future DJ Jerry Blavat (1940-2023). Such white Philadelphia-area teens (many from South Philadelphia or near the show’s production site in West Philadelphia), among others, regularly appeared on American Bandstand.  Many subsequently became celebrities (albeit temporarily), appearing in other media, receiving fan mail, and starting fashion trends. Many of the show’s female dancers wore Peter Pan collars—a feature of their Catholic school uniforms—and at one point this even sparked a nationwide trend imitating the look.

Racial Influences

Arguably, American Bandstand both contributed to racial integration and supported racial segregation. For instance, the show’s producers allegedly practiced discriminatory policies that excluded or limited appearances by African American teen dancers, presumably to appease advertisers. In the early years of American Bandstand, African Americans were rarely seen on television. However, musicians such as Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Sam Cooke all made national appearances on American Bandstand during the late 1950s. Conceivably, this helped promote racial equality and intercultural understanding.

Over the decades, American Bandstand’s location, air days, duration, and content changed. The program moved production in 1964 from Philadelphia to Hollywood, months after it began airing once per week.  In its later years the show was challenged by the diversifying tastes of fragmented audiences.  As music styles evolved, American Bandstand incorporated more emerging genres. Throughout its run the show featured various types of popular music, such as rock-and-roll, R&B, Motown, British rock, psychedelic rock, disco, new wave, and more.

Despite changes over the years, the show continued to embody and represent evolutions in American music, fashion, dance, and other sociocultural norms.  Still, American Bandstand’s Philadelphia years are recalled with particularly impassioned nostalgia. Emphasizing this sentiment, Philadelphian John Oates (of musical duo Hall & Oates) said, “The show had such an impact on the music business, it set the tone and the pace for teenage style and attitude and everything else across America.”

Jordan McClain is Assistant Teaching Professor of Communication at Drexel University. Amanda McClain is Assistant Professor of Communications at Holy Family University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The blues is a musical genre created by African Americans in the southern United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Its roots are in work songs, field hollers, spiritual songs, and ballads that Blacks sang on plantations and in rural areas of the South, during and after the period of slavery. In the early years of the twentieth century these musical expressions coalesced into a distinct blues style, with African-derived melodic and tonal qualities and standardized lyric structures and chord progressions. At its heart, the blues is a personal commentary or lament by a singer on his or her situation—their love life, relationships, work, finances, or other circumstances. Vocal blues stylings were adapted to instrumental music, and both vocal and instrumental blues exerted a major influence on American music in the twentieth century.

While originally a folk music practiced by and for Blacks, the blues came into widespread popularity in the “blues craze” of the 1910s, when the music industry produced numerous commercialized blues songs and recordings. African American bandleader and composer W. C. Handy (1873-1958) was one of the key figures in the popularization of the blues at this time. An Alabama native who played throughout the South around the turn of the twentieth century, Handy adapted blues elements he heard in his travels into popular songs such as “The Memphis Blues” and “St. Louis Blues,” published in sheet music form in 1912 and 1914, respectively.

The Victor Military Band, a white ensemble sponsored by Victor Records, made the first commercial recording of “The Memphis Blues” at Victor’s studios in Camden, New Jersey, in 1914. One of the three major early-twentieth-century American record companies, along with Columbia and Edison, Victor recorded several popular blues numbers by white artists in the 1910s. Thus, while the blues continued to evolve as a vernacular folk music in the largely insulated rural African American communities in which it originated, a commercialized version became part of the mainstream of American popular music.

Rise of the “City” Blues

The Great Migration, the mass movement of African Americans out of the rural South to urban areas of the North and West in the early twentieth century, gave rise to the “city” blues. Where the rural or “country” blues was folk music—largely improvised songs performed by artists with no formal training, played primarily on acoustic string instruments, and transmitted orally—city blues was more formalized, played by professionals in bands often featuring piano, wind and brass instruments, and rhythm sections, and incorporating popular music styles. City blues had a major impact on jazz, a new genre that became widely popular in the late 1910s through a blending of blues, ragtime, and popular music. The lines between jazz, city blues, and country blues were often blurred, with jazz and city blues artists moving freely between the two closely related genres and country blues artists often performing city blues songs that had become popular.

In 1920 Mamie Smith (1891-1946), a blues singer based in New York City, recorded “Crazy Blues,” the first commercial recording by an African American blues artist. The recording was a big hit, reputedly a million seller, and gave rise to “race records,” recordings targeted specifically to African American audiences. Numerous blues recordings by Black artists followed in the 1920s as record companies sought to exploit this previously untapped market. “Crazy Blues” also initiated the era of the classic female blues recording artist, with African American female blues vocalists assuming an especially high-profile role in the recording industry. 

It was against this backdrop that the blues took hold in Philadelphia in the early twentieth century. The city’s African American population increased dramatically in this period, from 63,000 in 1900 to 220,000 in 1930, and the migrants brought their southern musical traditions with them. No doubt country blues was played in private homes and other places where rural transplants gathered, but it was the more polished city blues style that predominated in Philadelphia. The area around Broad and South Streets in South Philadelphia was the city’s primary African American entertainment district at this time, home to numerous clubs and bars and to larger Black venues such as the Standard, Royal, and Dunbar theaters that featured well-known blues singers such as Mamie Smith, Ethel Waters (1896-1977), and Bessie Smith (1894-1937), as well as jazz ensembles that played blues.

Ethel Waters was born in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania, and by the early 1910s was singing professionally in Philadelphia before going on tour and eventually becoming one of the most successful jazz and blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s. Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and sang throughout the South before settling in Philadelphia in 1922, just as her very successful recording career was about to begin. Dubbed the “Empress of the Blues,” Smith was the highest-paid African American entertainer of the 1920s and one of the most influential blues singers of all time. Although she toured often, South Philadelphia remained Smith’s home and she performed in the city often until her death at age forty-three in an automobile accident. Accompanying Smith on some of her early recordings was clarinetist George Baquet (1881-1949), a New Orleans native who settled in Philadelphia in 1923 and spent the rest of his career in the city. Baquet also played with New Orleans pianist, composer, and bandleader Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941, real name Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe), when Morton and his Orchestra recorded jazz and blues numbers for Victor Records in Camden in 1929.

White Musicians and the Blues

While blues was created and developed primarily by African Americans, white musicians adopted and popularized the genre as well. South Philadelphia jazz guitar virtuoso Eddie Lang (1902-1933, real name Salvatore Massaro), the son of Italian immigrants, made a series of blues recordings in the late 1920s with influential African American guitarist Alonzo “Lonnie” Johnson (1899-1970), a New Orleans native who was known primarily as a blues musician but who was also adept at jazz. Since interracial musical groupings were unacceptable in this period, Lang was listed on the recordings as “Blind Willie Dunn,” a play on typical names of blues artists of the time.

As popular music styles changed over the years, the blues continued to be an important influence. The post-World War II era saw the rise of a new type of blues—jump blues, later called rhythm and blues. Usually played in small combos featuring a few horns, a rhythm section, and a vocalist, jump blues fused basic blues-based harmonies and melodies and swing jazz rhythms into good-time dance and party music. Popular Philadelphia-based jump bands of the late 1940s and 1950s included Jimmy Preston (1913–84) and His Prestonians, Chris Powell (1921–70) and His Five Blue Flames, and various ensembles led by Bill Doggett (1916-1996). Preston and Powell had minor and regional hits with some of their recordings and Doggett had a big national hit in 1956 with “Honky Tonk,” a mid-tempo blues instrumental.

These were all African American groups, but white musicians began to adapt the jump blues style, including country and western musician Bill Haley (1925–81), from Boothwyn, Delaware County, whose blending of jump blues and country-and-western styles in the early 1950s helped give rise to rock and roll. Haley’s massive 1955 hit “Rock Around the Clock,” featuring a simple blues-based melody and chord progression, ushered in the mid-1950s rock and roll craze. An important foundational music to rock and roll, the blues has remained a major influence on the genre ever since.

Local Blues Recordings

Jimmy Preston recorded for Gotham Records, which was based in Philadelphia from 1948 to 1956. Specializing in rhythm and blues and gospel, Gotham also recorded blues singers, primarily out-of-town artists but some local bluesmen as well. The latter included Doug Quattlebaum (1929-1996), who was born in South Carolina and moved to Philadelphia as a teenager. Quattlebaum’s 1953 Gotham recordings did not sell well and his recording career stalled until he was rediscovered in the early 1960s while driving a Mister Softee ice cream truck in Philadelphia and playing his music through the loudspeaker. Philadelphia native Pete J. Welding (1935-1995), a music historian and record producer, heard Quattlebaum and arranged for him to record the album, Softee Man Blues, released in 1963 on another label. Welding also facilitated the recording career of Blind Connie Williams (c. 1915-1974), who was born in Florida and in the 1930s settled in Philadelphia, where he was active as a street musician, mixing blues and spirituals. A compilation album of Williams’ recordings was issued in 1995 as Philadelphia Street Singer Blind Connie Williams: Traditional Blues, Spirituals, and Folk Songs. Harmonica player Charlie Sayles (b. 1948), a Massachusetts native who fought in Vietnam, also played on the streets of Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s and eventually had a recording and touring career as well.

Blues Links to Other Genres

Blind Connie Williams’ repertoire illustrates the close links between blues, rhythm and blues, and Black religious music, all of which were part of the larger body of twentieth-century vernacular African American music. There were many notable Philadelphia singers in the mid-century who moved across these genres, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973), an Arkansas native who settled in Philadelphia in the 1950s towards the end of her very successful career in gospel and rhythm and blues; Solomon Burke (1940-2010), the “King of Rock & Soul,” who was a boy preacher and singer in Philadelphia before becoming a pioneer of soul music in the early 1960s; Howard Tate (1939-2011), born in Georgia and raised in Philadelphia, who was active in gospel and rhythm and blues before he had several soul hits in the 1960s; and Lloyd “Fatman” Smith (c. 1922-1989), an entertainer and rhythm and blues and jazz singer and instrumentalist who was also a popular DJ on Philadelphia Black radio station WHAT.

Original country blues made a comeback as part of the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Along with white folk music of the British Isles and rural America, folk aficionados embraced Black “folk blues” as part of the revival, which helped rejuvenate the careers of many older African American bluesmen. Area folk clubs such as the Gilded Cage and 2nd Fret, both located near Rittenhouse Square in Center City Philadelphia, and the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, often featured folk blues artists. The folk blues harmonica-guitar duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (real names Saunders Terrell, 1911-1986, and Walter Brown McGhee, 1915-1996), from Georgia and Tennessee, respectively, recorded the album At the 2nd Fret in 1962. The Philadelphia Folksong Society, founded in 1957, also sponsored performances by blues musicians, both in local clubs and coffeehouses and at its annual Philadelphia Folk Festival, which began in 1962. Folklorist Kenneth Goldstein (1927-1995), co-founder and early program director of the Philadelphia Folk Festival and chair of the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, was a prime mover in the 1960s folk music revival. He produced a number of albums by folk blues musicians, including Terry and McGhee’s At the 2nd Fret.

Gerald Lawrence “Philadelphia Jerry” Ricks (1940-2007), an African American singer and guitarist who was born and raised in the city, was a booking agent at the 2nd Fret from 1960 to 1966, where he came to know and learn from older country blues masters. Ricks subsequently carved out a career in folk blues, performing and recording in both America and Europe into the early 2000s.

In particular, Ricks learned from two older southern bluesmen who settled in Philadelphia and resurrected their careers during the 1960s folk revival: Lonnie Johnson and Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James (1902-1969). Johnson, after a varied career following his late 1920s duets with Eddie Lang, including some successful mid-1940s rhythm and blues recordings, had given up music and was working as a janitor in Philadelphia when local disc jockey Christiern Gunnar “Chris” Albertson (1931-2019) arranged for him to record the 1960 album, Blues by Lonnie Johnson. This marked Johnson’s return to performing and recording. (Albertson later wrote the definitive biography of Bessie Smith.) Mississippi-born Skip James was rediscovered in 1964, came into prominence at the Newport Folk Festival that year, moved to Philadelphia shortly thereafter, and spent his final years in the city, where one of his local appearances was recorded in 1966 and released years later as Skip James Live at the 2nd Fret, Philadelphia. (English rock and blues guitarist Eric Clapton (b. 1945), whose band Cream had recorded James’ song “I’m So Glad” in 1966, paid for James’ West Philadelphia house.)

Bonnie Raitt, David Bromberg, and Others

Local white musicians had notable careers fusing rock, folk, and blues styles as well. Singer/guitarist Bonnie Raitt (b. 1949), a California native, moved to Philadelphia in 1969 and began her career playing folk blues at the 2nd Fret, Main Point, and other area venues, often performing with and learning from older African American blues musicians. The blues was a major part of the repertoire of multi-instrumentalist David Bromberg (b. 1945), who was born in Philadelphia and raised in Tarrytown, New York. Working in a variety of vernacular roots music styles since the mid-1960s, Bromberg moved in 2002 to Wilmington, Delaware, where he was still active in the early 2020s. Also still active in the greater Philadelphia area in this period were Wilmington native George Thorogood (b. 1950), a guitarist and vocalist who had a successful career in blues-based rock and roll beginning in the 1970s; harmonica player Steve Guyger (b. 1952), who was born in Philadelphia and spent many years playing with Chicago blues greats; and the Dukes of Destiny, an interracial band founded in 1985 that played local clubs and parties.

Radio disc jockeys did much to keep the blues alive in Philadelphia over the years. DJ, record label owner, and producer Ulysses Kae Williams (1921-1987) played primarily blues during his long tenure as “Kae Williams” on Black radio station WDAS in the 1950s and 1960s. Longtime Philadelphia folk music DJ Gene Shay (real name Ivan Shaner, 1935-2020), co-founder, early producer, and emcee of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, championed many blues musicians on his Philadelphia radio shows from the early 1960s to late 2010s. The Blues Show, hosted by Jonny Meister (b. 1949), a Saturday night staple on WXPN that began in 1977 and was still on the air in the early 2020s, featured both historic and contemporary blues while also highlighting local artists and serving as a clearinghouse for area blues shows and activities. Many of these events were sponsored by non-profit organizations such as the Philadelphia Folksong Society, Bucks County Blues Society, and Philadelphia Blues Machine, the latter two founded in 1977 and 1986, respectively. In the commercial realm, Warmdaddy’s, a blues club that opened in 1995 in the Old City section of Center City and moved several times thereafter, was Philadelphia’s most prominent blues-focused venue in the late twentieth/early twenty-first -century, while local rock, folk, and jazz clubs sometimes featured blues artists.

Through all its stylistic developments and adaptions, the blues remained a popular musical genre in Philadelphia from the early twentieth to early twenty-first century, and the region served as home to a number of important blues artists and organizations.

Jack McCarthyis a longtime Philadelphia archivist and historian who has held leadership positions at several area historical institutions and directed a number of major archives and public history projects. He specializes in Philadelphia music history and regularly writes, lectures, and gives tours on the subject and has curated exhibits and consulted on documentaries on Philadelphia music. He serves as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and Mann Music Center and directed the first phase and currently serves as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Jazz Legacy project. The author wishes to thank Jonny Meister for providing much useful information and insight for this essay. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In planning a Quaker “holy experiment” on the Delaware River, William Penn (1644–1718) did not expect it to include music. But Quaker migrants were vastly outnumbered by German, Welsh, and other English settlers with no attachment to Quakerism and who had large community investments in musical performance, especially in the context of religious worship. Swedish Lutherans installed an organ in their first parish church, Gloria Dei, for use in services in 1700, and by the 1740s, Philadelphia’s German-speaking Moravians employed not only organs, but supporting instrumental bands of violins, oboes, flutes, and clarinets. The publication of religious music began in 1761, when James Lyon (1735–94) published the first native Philadelphia musical imprint, Urania, or A Choice Collection of Psalm-Tunes, Anthems, and Hymns. Andrew Adgate (1762–93) organized a short-lived Uranian Academy in Philadelphia in 1784 to promote church music.

Secular classical music performance soon followed religious performance. Philadelphia’s first opera production, Alfred, by Thomas Arne (1710–78), was staged in 1757, and “subscription concerts” of secular music appeared in 1764. The first secular compositions published in Philadelphia came from the pens of lawyer and amateur musician Francis Hopkinson (1737–91) and Alexander Reinagle (1756–1809), who composed the earliest sonata-form music in Philadelphia for keyboard, his four “Philadelphia Sonatas,” in 1786. Raynor Taylor (1747–1825), who had been Reinagle’s teacher in London, followed his pupil to Philadelphia in 1792 and wrote the two most outstanding operas of the federal period, Pizarro, or The Spaniards in Peru (1800) and The Aethiop, or The Child of the Desert (1814). John Bray (1782–1822) composed The Indian Princess (based on the Pocahantas legend) in 1808, after moving to Philadelphia from the Royal Theatre in York, England, in 1805. Benjamin Carr (1768–1831), a prolific composer of sonatas, marches, and overtures, was the early republic’s most successful music publisher. They were joined by Charles Hommann (1803–72?), who made the first large-scale effort at American symphonic composition in the 1830s, writing a four-movement symphony in E flat, along with overtures, three string quartets, and a string quintet.

Development of Orchestras

Orchestral concertizing in Philadelphia developed out of the small-scale ensembles of musicians hired to accompany plays and operas. None of them achieved much permanence until 1820, when Carr, Taylor, Hommann, and Hommann’s brother-in-law, Charles F. Hupfield (1822–95), founded the Musical Fund Society. The society offered its inaugural concert on April 24, 1821, at Washington Hall, on Third near Spruce Street, with a small orchestra of strings, flutes, and bassoons. In 1824, the society erected its own concert hall (on a design by William Strickland [1788–1854]) at Eighth and Locust Streets and gave its first concert there on December 29. A year later, the society organized a small music school to train new players. But by 1831, the music school had petered out, and although the society’s orchestra had risen in number to sixty-four players and programmed Philadelphia premieres of Beethoven symphonies, Haydn and Handel oratorios, and Weber and Mendelssohn overtures, it could not compete with the popular passion for imported Italian opera companies and celebrity performers from Europe—Ole Bull (1810–80) in 1845, Jenny Lind (1820–87) in 1850 and 1851, Henriette Sontag (1806–54) and child prodigy Adelina Patti (1843–1919) in 1852, Louis Antoine Jullien (1812–60) and his touring orchestra in 1853.

Operatic performance received further encouragement in Philadelphia from the construction of the new opera house at Broad and Locust, the Academy of Music, designed by Napoleon Le Brun (1821–1901) after the pattern of Milan’s La Scala. For two decades, until 1873, the Max Maretzek (1821–97) Italian Opera Company was the primary performer at the Academy of Music. It also played host to a variety of performance groups, including, from 1864 until 1891, the touring orchestra led by Theodore Thomas (1835–1905). But opera, beginning with Verdi’s Il Trovatore in 1857, dominated the stage, and in 1889, New York’s Metropolitan Opera began offering weekly performances, including Philadelphia’s first complete Ring des Niebelungen cycle.

One of the most successful of the touring orchestras was the Germania Musical Society, and in 1856, as the Musical Fund Society’s orchestra spluttered into oblivion, a local Germania Orchestra was organized in Philadelphia to showcase German classical music. The Germania mustered twenty-eight musicians, conducted by Carl Sentz (1828–88), Charles M. Schmitz (1824–1900), and William Stoll (1847–1910). The orchestra drew on Philadelphia’s large German immigrant community—the fourth-largest in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century—for both audiences and membership, and relied on a heavily Germanic repertoire, from Mendelssohn to Lizst, until it, too, folded in 1895. It was quickly succeeded by a new professional orchestra, known as the Thunder Orchestra from its conductor, Henry George Thunder (1865–1958), which performed at Musical Fund Hall, and by an amateur orchestra, the Symphony Society of Philadelphia, under William Wallace Gilchrist (1846–1916), who also directed choirs at Philadelphia’s Holy Trinity Church, St. Mark’s Church, and St. Clement’s Church.

In 1899, an eighty-member Philadelphia Symphony Society was organized to perform benefit concerts for widows and orphans of U.S. soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and from these concerts, a permanent Philadelphia Orchestra was created in 1900, which gave its first concert at the Academy of Music under the direction of German-born Fritz Scheel (1852–1907) on November 16. After Scheel’s sudden death, he was succeeded by Karl Pohlig (1864–1928), and then in 1912 by the flamboyant Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977), who began a comprehensive campaign to restock the orchestra with first-line players and introduced a dizzying varieties of daring premieres—Gustav Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand in 1916, Alexander Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy in 1919, Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps in 1922, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder in 1932. Stokowski led the Philadelphia Orchestra in the first commercially sponsored orchestral radio broadcast in 1929. Stokowski also pioneered the orchestra’s first recordings, beginning in October 1917, with acoustic recordings of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances No. 5 and No. 6 for the Victor Talking Machine Company in neighboring Camden (released commercially in 1918).

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s place as one of the “Big Five” American orchestras (beside New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago) was extended through the long directorship of Eugene Ormandy (1899–1985, director 1938–80), but began to falter under the controversial leadership of Ricardo Muti (b. 1940, director 1980–92) and Christoph Eschenbach (b. 1940, director 2003–8). Further criticism pursued the orchestra when it moved in 2001 from the Academy of Music to a new performance venue, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, whose acoustics were considered inferior. In April 2011, the orchestra was forced to file for bankruptcy protection; it emerged from the proceedings in July 2012, only after reorganization of the orchestra’s endowment and pension fund and substantial concessions by claimants and the orchestra’s musicians.

Music Education

The principal partner of the orchestra in Philadelphia’s classical music world was the Curtis Institute of Music, founded in 1924 by Mary Louise Curtis Bok (1876–1970), a major supporter of the orchestra. Not only did the orchestra’s principal players teach at Curtis, but Curtis supplied a major portion of the orchestra’s recruits (Mason Jones [1919–2009], principal horn, 1938–78; John de Lancie [1921–2002], principal oboe, 1954–77; Anshel Brusilow [b. 1928], concertmaster, 1959–66). Curtis also trained a series of prominent instrumental soloists conductors and composers.

However, the Curtis Institute was not the first major music education enterprise in Philadelphia. It was preceded by the Zeckwer Academy, founded by Richard Zeckwer (1850–1922) in 1870 at Twelfth and Spruce Streets, which merged in 1917 with the Hahn Conservatory, founded by Frederick Hahn (1869–1942), to become the Zeckwer-Hahn Philadelphia Musical Academy, and then simply Philadelphia Musical Academy (PMA). Two of the most important names associated with PMA were the composers Marc Blitzstein (1905–64) and Leo Ornstein (1893–2002). The academy merged in 1962 with yet another music school, the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music (founded 1877, at 216 S. Twentieth Street). PMA eventually retitled itself as the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts in 1976 just before it merged with the Philadelphia Dance Academy. Finally, after another series of mergers, it was reinvented yet again in 1987 as a college within the University of the Arts, at Broad and Pine Streets. The Academy of Vocal Arts, at Nineteenth and Spruce, was founded in 1934 to offer training in opera (and operatic languages) and voice, and counts among its prominent alumni Joyce DiDonato (b. 1969) and Joy Clements (1932–2005).

The city’s universities also have also been home to music departments with substantial performance reputations, especially the Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University, created in 1962, and the music department of the University of Pennsylvania, founded in 1875 by Canadian-born Hugh Archibald Clarke (1839–1927), who also wrote several outstanding textbooks in musical theory: A System of Harmony (1901), Counterpoint Strict and Free (1901), and Harmony on the Inductive Method (1880). The New School of Music, founded by Max Aronoff (1906–81) in 1943 and housed from 1968 at Twenty-First and Spruce Streets, concentrated exclusively on training orchestral musicians and was absorbed in the creation of Temple’s Boyer College in 1985.

Younger musicians enjoyed participation in orchestral performance through the Youth Orchestra of Philadelphia (beginning in 1939) and the Settlement Music School, which was originally a project by Jeanette Selig Frank (1886–1965) and Blanche Wolf Kohn (1886–1983) in 1908 to provide music education to the school-aged children of immigrant communities in Southwark. Settlement operated multiple branches throughout the city for musically gifted children.

The Curtis Institute and the city’s universities and colleges have been home for a number of prominent twentieth-century Philadelphia-based composers. Curtis trained Gian Carlo Menotti (1911–2007), Lukas Foss (1922–2009), Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962), and especially Philadelphia’s own Vincent Persichetti (1915–87) and Samuel Barber (1910–81). Harl McDonald (1899–1955), the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Music Department, composed four symphonies (1932–35) and a concerto for two pianos; his successor, George Rochberg (1918–2005), wrote six symphonies, Cheltenham Concerto (1958), and seven string quartets. Louis Gesensway (1906–76) wrote the only distinctively Philadelphia-themed symphonic work, The Four Squares of Philadelphia, for narrator and orchestra, in 1955.

Other Classical Organizations

Opera in Philadelphia enjoyed more numerous but more short-lived incarnations. Three separate Philadelphia Grand Opera Companies attempted to attract audiences between 1916 and 1932. The New York operatic entrepreneur Oscar Hammerstein (1895–1960) built a Metropolitan Opera House on North Broad Street in 1908 to house an experiment he christened as the Philadelphia Opera Company, but the company survived for only two years. Sylvan Levin (1903–96) organized a second Philadelphia Opera Company in 1938, but it closed in 1944. Fourteen years later, the Philadelphia Lyric Opera Company launched yet another effort to establish a regular opera presence in Philadelphia with a production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme—which also served as its last opera production in 1974, when the Lyric Opera merged with its rival, the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company, which had originally debuted in 1924 as the La Scala Grand Opera Company. The merger, originally known as the Opera Company of Philadelphia, renamed itself in 2013 as Opera Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, founded in 1966 by Anthony Checchia (b. 1930), and the thirty-three-member Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra, founded by Marc Mostovoy (b. 1942) in 1964 as the Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia, offered full seasons of small-ensemble performances. In the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century, The Mendelssohn Club, Choral Arts Society, and the Singing City Choir, along with numerous city church choirs, provided musical performance outlets for both professional and amateur singers.

Radio broadcasts have been an important adjunct to classical performance in Philadelphia. An all-classical commercial radio station, WFLN (an acronym for the station’s parent owner, the Franklin Broadcasting Company), went on the air on March 14, 1949. Through live broadcasts, its large recorded library, talk-show interviews by host Ralph Collier (1922–2013), and its monthly magazine, the WFLN Philadelphia Guide, WFLN provided performance announcements, music advertising, and an on-air musical community. However, Philadelphia’s major public radio outlet, WHYY, abandoned its classical broadcasts in 1990, and WFLN experienced a series of sales of the station that resulted in its conversion from classical to heavy-metal rock in September 1997. This left classical music only part-time outlets through the Temple University public radio station, WRTI, and the University of Pennsylvania’s WXPN (which also subsequently dropped classical programming in favor of experimental pop fare). However, between 2012 and 2016, the Philadelphia Orchestra, WWFM/The Classical Network, and WRTI developed high-definition broadcast and streaming services, moving classical music in Philadelphia out of the world of analog broadcasting to digital.

The constituency for classical music in Philadelphia shrank in the twenty-first century, as in other places, as the costs of classical musical education and performance increased. The ease with which “pop” music dominated the performance and broadcast landscapes also made the complexity of classical music less attractive. Private funding for classical music by wealthy individuals, which was the norm in Philadelphia in the first half of the twentieth century, and from public sources—in school curriculums and municipal subsidies—diminished substantially. In an era of reduced public profile, classical composition and performance in Philadelphia became increasingly the preserve of academic environments.

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Like the English assemblies it mimicked, Philadelphia’s eighteenth-century assemblies included both formal dances like the minuet and more boisterous “country dances.” Early assemblies also provided entertainment for those inclined not to dance, in the form of card games, and served light fare and drinks, including alcoholic punch. In the first season, the Assemblies were held at Hamilton’s Store or Warehouse on the wharf at Water Street. This location was symbolically fitting and convenient, near the area between Pine and Market Streets where Philadelphia’s leading citizens then lived. It was also near the Delaware River, Philadelphia’s connection to the Atlantic World and the epicenter of the port city’s enviable commercial success.

From the beginning, to attend one either had to be a subscriber (a person invited to be a member who paid a fee for the privilege of attending) or sponsored by a subscriber. The first year each of the fifty-nine subscribers paid a mere forty shillings for the privilege. Despite this initial low cost, it was an extremely elite institution. Early subscribers included members of the Burd, Chew, Hamilton, Inglis, McCall, Mifflin, Penn, Peters, Plumsted, Powel, Shippen, Tilghman, Wallace, and Willing families. Although prominent Jewish families like the Franks and Levys also attended—reflecting Philadelphia’s religious diversity—the Society of Friends frowned on dancing, so leading Quaker families like the Logans, Morrises, Norrises, and Pembertons did not.

Sponsored Guests Only

Regardless of one’s wealth or social standing, it was never possible simply to appear at the Assemblies unsponsored. At times the invited guests were outsiders to the local social scene, however. In 1755, a group of Mohawk Indians joined the Assembly and performed a “scalping dance”; in 1768 the presence of the British Duchess of Gordon (Jane Gordon, c. 1748-1812) caused a stir. For outsiders and locals alike, the Assembly remained a “by invitation only” event throughout its history. At times, this exclusivity invited derision. For example, French refugee Moreau de St. Méry (1750-1819), no doubt chagrined at his own inability to secure an invitation in 1795, observed that there was considerable “snobbery in Philadelphia, where classes are sharply divided. This is particularly noticeable at balls.”

Once Philadelphia’s City Tavern was constructed at Second and Walnut Streets in 1773, the Assemblies were held there. Later, the event moved to Oeller’s Hotel, built at Sixth and Walnut Streets in 1791. At both sites, by day men met to talk business and politics. On the nights when Assemblies were held, however, women played important roles as dancers and arbiters of taste and behavior as they flaunted their genteel knowledge of formal dancing, their clothing and jewels, and, in some cases, their marriage potential.

Despite the importance of women at these events, from its beginnings, the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly operated under the aegis of a group of elite men, first called “directors” and later “managers.” These men (no doubt with the input of their wives, mothers, and sisters) laid down strict rules for the institution. In the eighteenth century, the Assemblies consisted of a series of balls held weekly throughout an entire winter social season, January through May.

The Politics of Dancing

During the American Revolution and again in the 1790s, when Philadelphia was temporarily the capital of the young United States of America, the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly took on a political cast. Loyalists (and some of uncertain political leaning) who visibly supported the British during the occupation of Philadelphia in 1777-78 found their politics made them pointedly excluded from later Assemblies. As a notice in a local newspaper announced in 1780: “Such characters are either too detestable or too insignificant for Whig society. The company of those who were so insensible of the rights of mankind and of personal honour, as to join the enemies of their county in the most gloomy moment of the Revolution, cannot be admitted.” In the 1790s, when Philadelphia was the capital, President George Washington (1732-99) was a regular at the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly, which became the place for regular celebrations of Washington’s Birthday and one of the central gathering places of the “Republican Court” (as the political and social elites who attended George and Martha Washington’s presidential levees became known in the nineteenth century).

Dancing assemblies in other cities followed the model of Philadelphia but functioned more like debutante balls. The Baltimore Bachelors Cotillion began in 1796. In Boston, an Assembly had its heyday in the 1840s, and in New York, the Patriarch’s Ball formed in 1872 and had a female equivalent in the Ladies’ Assemblies, a series of winter balls run by a committee of women.

Philadelphia’s Assemblies were temporarily halted during the Civil War, but they resumed at war’s end in another of Philadelphia’s great cultural institutions: the Academy of Music, built in 1857 at Broad and Locust Streets. Dancing classes and clubs appeared in the nineteenth century to prepare young men and women for the Assembly. Dancing classes—held fortnightly—became their own kind of ritual and tradition. Such classes had their own junior recital balls—events that Godey’s Lady’s Book, in a March 1888 article on the Philadelphia social scene, called “a sort of step-great-grandchild of the Assembly.” A separate ball, the Philadelphia Charity Ball, was founded in 1884 as a debutante ball for prominent Philadelphian families. But while the Philadelphia Assembly has never been a “debutante ball,” members have debuted there, including Main Line socialite Hope Montgomery (1904-95).

Over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the waltz replaced the minuet, and big bands were substituted for violin players, the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly continued to thrive as one of the—if not the—highlights of the Philadelphia social season. The tradition of preserving a social hierarchy around founding families continued. In 1904, the Assembly moved to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. Although another a wartime gap occurred between 1941 and 1946, the Assembly resumed after World War II ended and celebrated its bicentennial in 1948.

In the 1980s, the Assembly Ball saw a resurgence of popularity, which some observers attributed to the Reagan era’s emphasis on tradition and conservatism. The Assembly drew over 1,700 subscribers, and those who delayed in making their reservations found themselves turned down. Somewhat mysterious to the general public, the Assemblies of the early twenty-first century remained more exclusive than other “assembly balls” in cities like Cleveland, Boston, Baton Rouge, and Charleston. The Philadelphia Dancing Assembly retained a tradition of admission to membership by heredity according to the male line for a grand, annual, white-tie ball.

Zara Anishanslin is Assistant Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware and the author of Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016). Erica Lome served as research assistant for this essay. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia was one of several key cities where, in the 1950s and early 1960s, singers created the small-group vocal harmony style of rhythm and blues known as doo wop. Doo wop was an urban style, sung on city street corners and in school hallways. Its name, derived from a type of sound singers made in their vocalizations, has been disparaged by many historians of the music, who prefer to call it “classic urban harmony” or “street-corner harmony.” Although primarily African American in origin, white groups adopted the doo wop style early on and achieved popularity with it as well.

Several streams of African American music fed into the creation of doo wop, which began to emerge as a distinct style in urban neighborhoods of the United States in the late 1940s: the smooth singing style of popular Black vocal groups of the 1930s and 1940s such as the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots, a cappella gospel groups and barbershop quartets, and jazz and blues vocalists. Borrowing elements from these various types of music, young Black singers in Philadelphia and other cities (they were almost exclusively male; there were very few female doo wop groups) fused them into a distinctive vocal style that began to achieve popularity in the early 1950s with both white and Black audiences. Doo wop was a sub-genre of rhythm and blues, the broader body of African American popular music that grew out of jazz, blues, and gospel music in this period.

There were two major types of doo wop songs: ballads and up-tempo tunes. The former were slow romantic songs, usually featuring a high tenor singing lead, backed by close harmony vocal accompaniment and a bass singer interjecting spoken words and vocalizations. The latter were livelier dance tunes, generally with blues-inflected harmonies and melodies. Some groups specialized in a particular type, but many became adept at both. While doo wop groups often performed a cappella, the recorded versions of their songs frequently featured instrumental accompaniment.

Philadelphia Hits

In Philadelphia, early doo wop groups included the Castelles, Capris, Silhouettes, Turbans, and Lee Andrews (real name Arthur Lee Andrew Thompson, 1936–2016) and the Hearts. They recorded for various small independent rhythm and blues record labels based in Philadelphia in the 1950s or, in some cases, for larger New York–based labels. Most of these groups were one- or two-hit wonders, enjoying some success but unable to sustain it over the long term. Their personnel changed frequently and they often bounced from label to label in search of the next big hit. In several notable cases they achieved it: the Silhouettes’ 1957 record “Get a Job” reached number one on the pop and R&B charts, while Lee Andrews and the Hearts had big hits in 1957 and 1958 with “Teardrops,” “Long Lonely Nights,” and “Try the Impossible.”

A number of white Philadelphia doo wop groups also found success. In 1958 Danny & the Juniors had a number-one hit with “At the Hop” and a top twenty hit with “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay.” The Dovells reached number two in 1961 with “The Bristol Stomp” (inspired by a dance teenagers were doing in nearby Bristol, Bucks County) and had hits with a series of follow-up dance tunes in 1962. As these groups incorporated doo wop vocal arrangements into early rock and roll, they joined the many successful local artists who made Philadelphia a national leader in youth pop music in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

By the early 1960s doo wop had begun to fall out of favor as a new and different African American vocal style, soul, gained in popularity. Then in early 1964 the British Invasion, the wave of English rock groups initiated by the Beatles’ February 9, 1964, appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, took the United States by storm and knocked doo wop groups off the charts.

While its heyday was over by the early 1960s, doo wop retained a small but devoted fan base and enjoyed several revivals. One was spurred by the appearance of the group Sha Na Na at Woodstock in 1969, where, among other songs, they performed two enduring Philadelphia doo wop hits, “Get a Job” and “At the Hop.” During another revival in the 1980s, Lee Andrews revived his group Lee Andrews and the Hearts with his wife and children as band members. On drums was his son Ahmir (b. 1971), later known as Questlove, leader of the well-known Philadelphia band The Roots. In the early twenty-first century, doo wop continued to be played on oldies radio programs—indeed, it was the first popular music to be designated “oldies”—and heard in movies and TV shows to evoke the 1950s. Philadelphia played an important role in developing and popularizing this uniquely American musical style.

Jack McCarthy is a music historian who regularly writes, lectures, and gives walking tours on Philadelphia music history. A certified archivist, he directs a project for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focusing on the archival collections of the region’s many small historical repositories. He has served as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and the 2014 radio documentary Going Black: The Legacy of Philly Soul Radio and gave several presentations and helped produce the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s 2016 Philadelphia music series “Memories & Melodies.” (Author information current at time of publication.)

Gospel music emerged from urban African American churches in the early twentieth century, growing out of longstanding sacred Black music traditions. In colonial Philadelphia, African Americans sang sacred songs from their African homelands as well as European-derived psalms and hymns that they infused with African elements. The music became more formalized in the city’s first Black churches in the 1790s, particularly Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1794 by Richard Allen (1760-1831). In 1801 Allen published a hymnal for his congregation titled A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected From Various Authors by Richard Allen, African Minister, the first American hymnal compiled for a Black congregation. Allen later issued expanded editions of the hymnal, which included primarily traditional Protestant hymns along with some he wrote himself.C

While gospel music first developed in urban Black churches in the North, its roots lay in the rural South. Prior to the Civil War, the harsh conditions of slavery in the South produced two major African American vocal traditions: the blues and the Negro spiritual—the former secular, the latter sacred. Spirituals, the great body of African American religious folk songs, served as the foundation for gospel.

Following the Civil War, African Americans migrating from the South brought their musical traditions to northern cities, where the urban environment gave rise to a new kind of worship music, the gospel song. In contrast to spirituals, which were improvisatory folk songs passed down orally, gospel songs were composed, formally structured tunes that incorporated elements of popular music and blues. Their lyrics reflected the new realities of urban Black life.

Charles Albert Tindley

One of the creators of the gospel style, Charles Albert Tindley, moved to Philadelphia during the increasing wave of African American migration from the South at the turn of the twentieth century. Born into a slave family in Maryland and largely self-taught, Tindley became pastor of Bainbridge Street Methodist Episcopal Church (later renamed Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church) in South Philadelphia in 1902. Under his leadership, the congregation expanded significantly and in 1906 moved to its longtime location at Broad and Fitzwater Streets (where it was later renamed Tindley Temple). Tindley wrote gospel hymns, which he began publishing in 1901, the first such songs in the new style to be published. He later issued several gospel hymn collections, published by companies he helped to establish. Through preaching and singing, songwriting, publishing, and radio broadcasts, Tindley became an important figure in gospel music in Philadelphia and beyond. Several of his hymns became gospel standards, including “I’ll Overcome Someday,” which served as the inspiration for the well-known civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” Six of his hymns appeared in Gospel Pearls, a collection published in 1921 that was the first hymnal geared toward African American congregations to use the word gospel in the title.

Tindley sometimes has been called the “Father of Gospel Music,” but most historians give this title to Thomas Dorsey (1899-1993), the Chicago-based pianist and songwriter who originally worked in blues before turning to gospel in the early 1930s. Following in Tindley’s footsteps, Dorsey became a prolific gospel songwriter and promoter. An astute businessman as well as musician, he successfully marketed his songs, founded gospel choirs and conventions, and promoted the career of Mahalia Jackson (1911-72), the most famous gospel singer of the twentieth century. Dorsey and other gospel songwriters of the period, most of whom acknowledged Tindley’s influence, helped to usher in the “golden age” of gospel in the 1940s and 1950s, a time when Black congregations across the nation sang gospel music in their worship services and gospel recording artists and performers enjoyed great popularity.

Several distinct musical styles developed within Black gospel. More-traditional Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal congregations generally took a reserved approach. Their performances, while spirited, retained traditional song forms and harmonies and they rendered the songs in a dignified manner. Conversely, in Pentecostal or “holiness” churches, the music was highly charged and improvisatory, with exuberant shouting, hand clapping, and dancing. The Church of God in Christ, a denomination founded in the 1890s, became the chief home of the Pentecostal style. The repertoire of these churches varied, from centuries-old Protestant hymns, to Negro spirituals, to the gospel songs of Tindley, Dorsey, and others. The use of instruments also varied. Some congregations and performers sang a cappella, eschewing instruments as too secular. Others employed instrumental accompaniment, from just a guitar or tambourine to a full band.

One of Philadelphia’s preeminent churches in the Pentecostal style emerged under the leadership of Ozro Thurston Jones (1891-1972), who moved from Arkansas to Philadelphia in 1925 to assume the pastorship of Holy Temple, a small Church of God in Christ congregation located in West Philadelphia. Holy Temple was originally located at Fifty-Seventh and Vine Streets before moving to Sixtieth and Callowhill Streets in 1935. For a time, the congregation included Elizabeth Dabney (c.1890-1967), a Virginia native who became a leading figure in the Church of God in Christ. She later helped her husband, a singing preacher, establish another prominent Church of God in Christ congregation, Garden of Prayer, in North Philadelphia. Gertrude Ward (1901-81), who moved to Philadelphia from her native South Carolina around 1920, attended the lively services at both Holy Temple and Garden of Prayer regularly, bringing her daughters Clara (1924-73) and Willarene (Willa, 1920-2012). The three later formed the nucleus of the Ward Singers—also known at various times as the Famous Ward Singers and Clara Ward and the Ward Singers—one of the most popular gospel groups of all time.

Singers Drawn to Philadelphia

By the mid-twentieth century, gospel emanated from the numerous churches in the growing Black neighborhoods of South, North, and West Philadelphia, as well as other cities in the region with significant African American populations. Some of the biggest names in gospel music moved to Philadelphia from the South in this period, including the nationally popular male quartets the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Sensational Nightingales. Soon after settling in the city in 1942, the Dixie Hummingbirds secured a daily program on radio station WCAU, laying the groundwork for a long, successful career. In the mid-1940s, Hummingbirds singer Ira Tucker (1925-2008) began staging gospel shows at the Metropolitan Opera House at Broad and Poplar Streets in North Philadelphia. Featuring his own group and other local and national gospel acts, these very successful shows made “the Met” an important gospel venue.

Philadelphia became known especially for its female gospel groups, including the Ward Singers, Davis Sisters, Stars of Faith, and Angelic Gospel Singers. Of these, the Ward Singers achieved greatest success. Performing in elaborate gowns and hairstyles, they took gospel into nightclubs and jazz festivals, which enhanced their popularity but alienated more-conservative gospel adherents. Marion Williams (1927-94) moved to Philadelphia from Florida in 1947 to join the Ward Singers and sang with them for eleven years before breaking away to form the Stars of Faith and later embarking on a solo career. Considered one of the greatest gospel singers of all time, Williams was honored by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1993. Mary Johnson Davis (1899-1982), an influential singer and group leader who moved in the 1950s from her native Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, maintained an active performing career and, with her friend Gertrude Ward, nurtured gospel talent in the area.

Singer/guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-73), perhaps the most successful—and unusual—female gospel artist of the period, moved to Philadelphia in 1957 after years of touring and living in other cities. Major gospel artists routinely received tempting offers to cross over to the more lucrative secular world of jazz, rhythm and blues, and popular music. While a number of prominent gospel singers refused to abandon sacred music, many did make the transition, to the consternation of their more traditional audiences. Uniquely, Tharpe moved back and forth between secular and sacred music several times in the course of her career, enjoying great success in both realms. Tharpe also developed a distinctive virtuoso guitar style, earning her the title “Godmother of Rock and Roll.”

Changes in society, musical tastes, and the music business in the 1960s signaled an end to the golden age of gospel, as well as other Black music styles. While traditional gospel remained popular, a new “contemporary” gospel style began to emerge, incorporating elements of modern popular music and often featuring elaborate musical arrangements and sophisticated recording techniques. Gospel music, both contemporary and traditional, remained an active, thriving tradition into the early twenty-first century in the Philadelphia area. It formed an integral part of the services of Black churches throughout the region and gospel artists continued to enjoy the support of loyal audiences who listened to local gospel radio stations and attended concerts at churches and major venues such as the Robin Hood Dell and Temple University’s Liacouras Center.

Jack McCarthy is an archivist and historian who specializes in three areas of Philadelphia history: music, business and industry, and Northeast Philadelphia. He regularly writes, lectures, and gives tours on these subjects. His book In the Cradle of Industry and Liberty: A History of Manufacturing in Philadelphia was published in 2016 and he curated the 2017–18 exhibit “Risk & Reward: Entrepreneurship and the Making of Philadelphia” for the Abraham Lincoln Foundation of the Union League of Philadelphia. He serves as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and Mann Music Center and directs a project for Jazz Bridge entitled Documenting & Interpreting the Philly Jazz Legacy, funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. (Author information current at time of publication.)

“Hail, Columbia,” written in Philadelphia in the closing years of the eighteenth century, became a popular patriotic song in early America and served for many years as the unofficial national anthem. Bands began to play it in honor of the vice president of the United States in the 1830s, and later it became the official song of that office.

Philadelphia lawyer Joseph Hopkinson (1770–1842) created “Hail, Columbia” in the spring of 1798 when he put lyrics to the tune of the “President’s March,” a patriotic instrumental piece written in 1789 by Philip Phile (1734?–93), a German immigrant musician active in Philadelphia in the 1780s and 1790s.

In his later years, Hopkinson related the story behind the song: In April 1798 a young singer-actor named Gilbert Fox (1776–1807?) asked Hopkinson to write a song for Fox to perform at an upcoming benefit concert in Philadelphia. Fox needed a rousing song for the concert and asked if Hopkinson could write lyrics to Phile’s “President’s March.” Hopkinson obliged and came up with lyrics that opened with the stirring proclamation “Hail Columbia, happy land! Hail, ye heroes, heav’n born band.” With Philadelphia then serving as the nation’s capital and the United States on the verge of war with France, Hopkinson envisioned the song as a patriotic rallying cry.

The public first heard the song when Fox performed it at the Chestnut Street Theatre on April 25, 1798. The audience loved it and demanded multiple encores. A Philadelphia music publisher issued a sheet music version a few days later and the song quickly became very popular in both Philadelphia and New York.

Unlike other early American patriotic songs such as “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America (My Country Tis of Thee),” which featured new lyrics set to traditional English melodies, both the words and music to “Hail, Columbia” were written in the United States. Philip Phile, who wrote the tune, first appears in the mid-1780s as a performer, composer, and music teacher in Philadelphia and New York. In 1785 he led the orchestra at Philadelphia’s Southwark Theatre. He wrote the “President’s March” in 1789, reportedly in honor of the presidential inauguration of George Washington (1732–99). Philadelphia music publisher Benjamin Carr (1768–1831) first published the piece in 1793. Phile died later that year in Philadelphia, perhaps a victim of the city’s infamous yellow fever epidemic.

Joseph Hopkinson, son of well-known Philadelphia patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence Francis Hopkinson (1735–91), was a prominent lawyer who later served as a U.S. congressman and federal judge. Joseph followed in his father’s footsteps in mixing law, statesmanship, and the arts. Francis Hopkinson, in addition to being a lawyer and judge, also became well known as a poet and musician.  Considered America’s first “Poet-Composer,” Francis Hopkinson was the first native-born American to write a secular song, “My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free,” composed in 1759.

“Hail, Columbia” remained popular through the centuries and was one of several songs that served as an unofficial American national anthem until Congress officially gave that designation to “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1931.  Written in the new nation’s capital during a formative period in American history, “Hail, Columbia” was one of the first pieces of music to define the young United States in song.  Later, as the official song of the vice president, it continued to play a role in America’s musical identity.

Jack McCarthy is a music historian who regularly writes, lectures, and gives walking tours on Philadelphia music history. A certified archivist, he is currently directing a project for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focusing on the archival collections of the region’s many small historical repositories. Jack has served as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and the 2014 radio documentary Going Black: The Legacy of Philly Soul Radio and is giving several presentations and helping produce the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s 2016 Philadelphia music series, “Memories & Melodies.” (Author information current at time of publication.)

Jazz was created primarily by Black musicians in its early years, but white musicians adopted the style early on and made contributions to its development. It was, in fact, a white New Orleans group, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, that made the first jazz recordings in 1917.

As jazz gained national popularity in the late 1910s, many of its early practitioners began to leave New Orleans for the cities of the North. Chicago and New York were primary destinations, but Philadelphia also welcomed some of these jazzmen. Trumpeter Freddie Keppard (1889–1933), a key early figure, had a successful extended gig in Philadelphia in 1917. His former New Orleans bandmate, clarinetist George Baquet (1881–1949), moved to Philadelphia in 1923 and remained active in the city’s music scene for the rest of his life.

Frank Johnson, Bandleader and Composer

These musicians came to a city with a long tradition of African American popular music. Frank Johnson (1792–1844) was a well-known African American bandleader and composer in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia who led bands for several of the city’s military units and was the favored music director for the balls of the city’s social elite. Johnson was the first African American to have his music published (in 1818) and the first American, Black or white, to lead a musical ensemble on a tour of Europe (in 1837). Johnson sometimes enlivened popular dance tunes with varied rhythms and melodies, an early example of fusing African-derived rhythmic and melodic elements with European-based harmonic and formal structures that would later give birth to jazz.

A century later, in the 1920s and 1930s, Black Philadelphia bandleaders Charlie Gaines (1900–87), Frankie Fairfax (1899–1972), and others led dance bands in the swing style of jazz then gaining popularity. Philadelphia saw a huge increase in its African American population in this period as a result of the Great Migration, the mass movement of Blacks out of the rural South to the cities of the North. These newcomers brought their southern musical traditions with them, joining urban Black musicians whose families had been living in the city for generations. The result was a particularly vibrant African American musical culture, one that would nurture the careers of numerous important jazz musicians. In 1935 some of these musicians established Local #274 of the American Federation of Musicians, the Philadelphia Black musicians’ union that would serve as a focal point of the city’s jazz community until its dissolution in 1971.

Dizzy Gillespie, Bebop Pioneer

Among the noted jazz musicians who came to Philadelphia from the South in the 1930s were bebop pioneer Dizzy Gillespie (1917–93) and rhythm and blues star Louis Jordan (1908–75), both of whom settled in Philadelphia early in their careers and honed their skills for a few years before moving on to New York City, the great jazz mecca. Others spent longer periods in Philadelphia. Saxophonist John Coltrane (1926–67), one of the most influential figures in jazz history, moved to Philadelphia from North Carolina in 1943 at the age of seventeen, joining native-born Philadelphians such as saxophonists Jimmy Heath (b. 1926) and Benny Golson (b. 1929), pianist McCoy Tyner (b. 1938), trumpeter Lee Morgan (1938–72), and others in the city’s especially fertile midcentury jazz scene. They developed their craft through informal jam sessions, gigging in local clubs and dance halls, and occasionally touring with traveling groups. Other musical luminaries nurtured in the rich Philadelphia jazz tradition of this era include Clifford Brown (1930–56), Percy (1923–2005) and Albert “Tootie” Heath (b. 1935), Bobby Timmons (1935–74), “Philly” Joe Jones (1923–85), Jimmy Smith (1928–2005), Jimmy Garrison (1934–76), Reggie Workman (b. 1937), Kenny Barron (b. 1943), and Archie Shepp (b. 1937).

Although jazz has traditionally been a male-dominated music, women were part of the Philly jazz scene as well. Organists Trudy Pitts (1932–2010) and Shirley Scott (1934–2002) were among those who contributed to the city’s significant jazz organ tradition. Philadelphia has also been home to a long line of important female jazz and blues vocalists, including Ethel Waters (1896–1977), who was born in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania, and began singing in Philadelphia in the 1910s; Bessie Smith (1894–1937), who moved to Philadelphia in 1923 at the beginning of her very successful recording career; and Billie Holiday (1915–59), who, although raised in Baltimore, was born in Philadelphia and performed in the city often throughout her career.

Philadelphia was also home to a thriving white jazz community. While Black and white musicians might play together informally, integrated bands were uncommon prior to the mid-twentieth century. Violinist Giuseppe “Joe” Venuti (1903–78) and guitarist Eddie Lang (real name Salvatore Massaro, 1902–33) were childhood South Philadelphia friends who played with some of the nation’s top white bands and made a series of influential duo recordings in the 1920s and 1930s. Charlie Ventura (1916–72), Buddy DeFranco (1923–2014), Red Rodney (1927–94), and Gerry Mulligan (1927–96) are some of the famous white jazz musicians who came out of the mid-twentieth-century Philly jazz scene.

“Quaker City Jazz”

Jan Savitt (real name Jacob Savetnick, 1907–48) played a more polished style of jazz. A Russian immigrant violin virtuoso, Savitt gave up a promising career with the Philadelphia Orchestra to lead a nationally popular swing band. Jan Savitt and His Top Hatters served for a time as the staff orchestra for KYW Radio, where one of their theme songs was “Quaker City Jazz.” Savitt was one of the first major white bandleaders to hire an African American singer when he began featuring local singer George “Bon Bon” Tunnel (1912–75) in 1937. Another Philadelphia big band leader of Russian Jewish heritage was Howard Lanin (1897–1993), the “King of Society Music,” who led popular ensembles for over seventy years, specializing in dance music and “sweet jazz” for Philadelphia high society.

During the heyday of Philadelphia jazz in the 1940s through 1960s, the city was alive with jazz clubs and home to many of the music’s leading figures. There were jazz clubs and dance halls in many areas of the city, with particularly important concentrations in the area surrounding South Broad Street in South Philadelphia and along Columbia (later Cecil B. Moore) Avenue in North Philadelphia (the latter came to be known as “the Golden Strip”). Better-known touring bands played the theaters, either Black theaters such as the Royal, Lincoln, or Pearl, or, in the case of the biggest name bands, both Black and white, the Earle Theater, the ornate showplace at Eleventh and Market Streets. Many Philadelphia jazzmen who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s saw Duke Ellington (1899–1974), Benny Goodman (1909–86), and their other musical idols at the Earle Theater.

By the late 1960s, changes in public taste and the music business signaled an end to the golden age of jazz in Philadelphia. The city remained an important jazz hub in the early twenty-first century—still home to a number of jazz clubs and still producing significant jazz musicians—but was no longer the preeminent jazz center it had been. The local audience became smaller and more specialized and much of the work of presenting jazz was carried out by nonprofit organizations such as the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts, Jazz Bridge, Philadelphia Jazz Project, Lifeline Music Coalition, and Ars Nova Workshop. These groups, together with local clubs and the city’s many jazz musicians and fans, continued the rich tradition of jazz in Philadelphia.

Jack McCarthy is a music historian who regularly writes, lectures, and gives walking tours on Philadelphia music history. A certified archivist, he is currently directing a project for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focusing on the archival collections of the region’s many small historical repositories. He has served as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and the 2014 radio documentary Going Black: The Legacy of Philly Soul Radio and gave several presentations and helped produce the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s 2016 Philadelphia music series “Memories & Melodies.” (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia songwriter and music businessman Septimus Winner (1827–1902) wrote the song using a tune he heard an African American street musician whistle. Richard Milburn, known as “Whistling Dick,” played guitar and whistled on Philadelphia streets for money in the mid-nineteenth century. One of his entertainments was to imitate a mockingbird by whistling a particular melody. Winner took this melody and wrote lyrics to it. With its catchy “listen to the mockingbird” refrain, the song became hugely popular.

Septimus Winner was a well-known songwriter, music teacher, music publisher, and proprietor of a music store in mid to late nineteenth-century Philadelphia.  He wrote many successful popular songs and was a poet as well. Like many writers of his era, Winner wrote under an assumed name, “Alice Hawthorne.” Hawthorne was the maiden name of Winner’s mother, who was a relative of the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64). Winner first published “Listen to the Mocking Bird” in 1855 through his own publishing company, Winner & Shuster, and listed the songwriting credits as “Melody by Richard Milburn . . .  Written and arranged by Alice Hawthorne.” He later sold the copyright to the song to another Philadelphia publisher, Lee & Walker, whose subsequent editions omitted Milburn and gave the writing credit solely to Hawthorne.

Winner did not reap significant financial rewards from “Listen to the Mocking Bird,” as he sold the copyright for five dollars soon after the song’s original publication. A Philadelphia newspaper in the early twentieth century estimated that the song‘s sheet music sales had totaled over twenty million copies in America and Europe in the fifty years since its publication. It is doubtful that Richard Milburn profited much from the song either. Winner employed him for a time running errands at his music store. Milburn also may have worked as a barber.

Although the melody to “Listen to the Mocking Bird” was upbeat, Winner’s lyrics were in the tradition of the mid-nineteenth-century American sentimental ballad. Songs with sad, often maudlin lyrics of mourning the loss of a loved one, longing for home, or cherishing memories of happier times were very popular in this period. In “Listen to the Mocking Bird,” the singer is mourning the loss of his beloved Hally, visiting her gravesite and listening to a mockingbird sing, as they often did together when she was alive.

Curiously, some of the sheet music versions of “Listen to the Mocking Bird” listed it as an “Ethiopian” ballad. “Ethiopian” was a designation for a minstrel song, another very popular type of song at that time that featured stereotypical, derogatory depictions of African Americans, lampooning them with “Negro dialect” lyrics and music. While labeled on some sheet music covers as a “sentimental Ethiopian ballad,” neither the words nor the music to “Listen to the Mocking Bird” exhibited any characteristics of a minstrel song.

“Listen to the Mocking Bird” became a beloved song in the United States and Europe. Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) described it as “a real song . . . as sincere and sweet as the laughter of a little girl at play,” and later in his life King Edward VII of England (1841–1910) recalled whistling it as a little boy. Into the early twenty-first century “Listen to the Mocking Bird” remained one of the most familiar songs in American history.

Jack McCarthy is a music historian who regularly writes, lectures, and gives walking tours on Philadelphia music history. A certified archivist, he recently directed a major project for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focusing on the archival collections of the region’s many small historical repositories. Jack serves as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Mann Music Center and worked on the 2014 radio documentary Going Black: The Legacy of Philly Soul Radio. He gave several presentations and helped produce the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s 2016 Philadelphia music series “Memories & Melodies.” (Author information current at time of publication.)