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.)

In the 1980s, South Broad Street was in the midst of a long decline. Massive nineteenth-century office buildings that had once housed banks and law firms sat empty, their tenants fleeing to newer skyscrapers and suburban office parks. Few street-level businesses remained. When he was elected, Mayor Edward Rendell (b. 1944) found South Broad Street almost entirely barren. “On a Saturday night in 1991,” he remembered, “you could walk the mile from City Hall to Washington Avenue and you wouldn’t have seen 100 people.” Although a handful of arts-focused institutions persisted—the University of the Arts, the Shubert Theatre, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts—they suffered from the broader decline in Broad Street’s fortunes.

Upon entering office in 1992, Rendell searched for a project that would help to revitalize the city—improving its image, spurring real estate development, and encouraging tourism. South Broad Street, which already had two redevelopment plans in motion, seemed ideal. Since 1977, the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation (OPDC) had tried to revitalize Broad Street by capitalizing on its existing arts facilities. OPDC created the Avenue of the Arts Council (and later, Academy Center Inc.) to direct its activities on Broad Street and raise funds for a new orchestra facility to replace the undersized Academy of Music. And in 1989, the William Penn Foundation had launched the South Broad Street Cultural Corridor plan, which aimed to bring several smaller arts venues to the area.

A Coalition Tries Again

In order to unify renewal efforts, Rendell took control of the nonprofit Avenue of the Arts Inc. (AAI) in 1993. The AAI brought together a coalition of pro-growth forces, including the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), philanthropic foundations, local businesses, and real estate developers. Its board also included Rendell’s wife, Judge Marjorie O. Rendell (b. 1947). The AAI attracted funding from the state, philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg (1908–2002), and dozens of local corporations.

Initially, AAI focused its efforts on the blocks of South Broad Street between City Hall and South Street. It devoted $3.7 million to open the ArtsBank, a venue in a renovated bank building (completed in 1994); $2.4 million towards the Clef Club jazz hall and archive (completed in 1995); $6.1 million to build the 300-seat Wilma Theater (completed in 1996); and $24 million to convert the vacant Ridgeway Library building into the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (completed in 1997). AAI also poured money into streetscape improvements, installing new signage, sidewalks, and lampposts. In its first decade, AAI invested $378 million in the Avenue, with $75 million of that total coming from the state and $30 million from the city.

Meanwhile, negotiations continued over the Philadelphia Orchestra’s new home. In 1998, architect Rafael Viñoly (b. 1944) announced designs for a $203 million, 2,500-seat concert hall on South Broad Street. In 2000, the facility was renamed the Kimmel Center after philanthropist Sidney Kimmel (b. 1928), who donated $15 million towards its construction. The Kimmel Center finally opened to mixed reviews in 2001, $100 million dollars over its initial budget.

Extending to North Broad

In 1995, AAI announced that it planned to extend the Avenue of the Arts onto North Broad Street, promising to devote $60.6 million to the disinvested corridor. The AAI initiative specifically targeted African American cultural institutions, including the Freedom and Uptown Theaters and the historic Blue Horizon boxing gym. While the northern portion of the Avenue received far less investment than South Broad Street, several new residential projects opened in the 2000s, including the AAI-supported Lofts at 640 Broad Street and the Avenue North buildings. In 2011, the Pennsylvania Ballet broke ground on its new rehearsal facility, the Louise Reed Center for Dance, on North Broad Street near Callowhill Street.

By the 2000s, the Avenue of the Arts had proven to be a financial success. In 2012, the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance reported that jobs created by arts and culture institutions in Philadelphia generated over $490 million dollars in wages. The Avenue of the Arts itself, one 2007 study claimed, generated $150 million in earnings for its approximately 6,000 employees. Ex-Mayor Rendell marveled that “when you walk around [the Avenue] on a Thursday night, you see thousands of people on the street. It’s not yet complete, but it’s come a long way.” Those thousands of visitors spent approximately $84 million per year at restaurants and hotels along the avenue. Still, the Avenue was not an unqualified triumph. Tax proceeds from performing arts venues along the Avenue remained modest, totaling only $10 million in 2006, in part due to tax abatements and incentives the city had offered to attract businesses and developers. Once initial subsidies from the William Penn Foundation ended in 1997, the Arts Bank was forced to close. The Kimmel Center’s tenants, including the Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Ballet, struggled to pay rent at the new facility. The Philadelphia Orchestra flirted with bankruptcy due to budget shortfalls and low attendance.

In the 2000s, AAI began to encourage residential construction that capitalized on the Avenue’s arts-related cachet. AAI’s partner, PIDC, held design competitions for several empty lots on Broad Street. Developer Carl Dranoff (b. 1948) won the rights to build Symphony House, a 31-story luxury condominium building at Broad and Pine Streets, in 2002. Its ground floor housed the 365-seat Suzanne Roberts Theatre, the new home for the Philadelphia Theatre Company. PIDC also granted Dranoff permission to build two other mixed-use buildings on South Broad Street, the 777 at Broad and Fitzwater Streets and SouthStar Lofts at Broad and South Streets.

These projects pointed towards the Avenue of the Arts’ future as a mixed-use corridor. As retirees and young people moved back to Center City, the Avenue added businesses to serve them. The historic buildings on South Broad Street never attracted many new offices, but they began to fill with other tenants—hotels, restaurants, retail shops, and apartments. At the same time, the University of the Arts expanded its own footprint along South Broad Street, with classrooms, galleries, and a performing arts theater. Organizations like Wells Fargo and the Union League opened small museums or increased their exhibit spaces, enhancing the appeal of the Avenue of the Arts as a destination area. Drawing tourists and regional visitors for shows, performances, and exhibits, and other entertainment, the Avenue of the Arts initiative sparked widespread residential and commercial development along Broad Street.

Dylan Gottlieb, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, works on recent American urban history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia’s founder, William Penn (1644-1718), a Quaker who disavowed balls and shows as inconsistent with a temperate lifestyle, was among the early detractors of dance. Indeed, the “Great Law” that Pennsylvania’s first legislature adopted in 1682 included penalties for frequenting such amusements, and various bans against theatrical entertainments endured for more than a century, supported in principle by a number of religious denominations along the way. Nevertheless, rope dancers appeared from 1724 onward and dancing masters advertised regularly as early as the 1730s. Moreover, hornpipes, comic dances, and “mock” minuets often accompanied theatrical dramas, which surfaced despite all opposition. Soon after the legal prohibitions ceased in 1789, professional French dancers arrived via the Caribbean islands and introduced theater-goers to sophisticated hybrids of ballet and pantomime. These performers told stories using a codified set of movements and stylized gestures instead of words.

The first French ensemble to alight in the city was led by Alexandre Placide (1750-1812), who early in his celebrated career had danced in popular Parisian theaters and for French royalty.  After his ex-wife accused him of stealing from her and seducing her servant, Placide left France, working for a time in present-day Haiti and then coming to the United States, where he earned a reputation as an able theatrical manager. In Philadelphia and elsewhere, Placide and his troupe acquainted audiences with ballet-pantomimes such as The Old Soldier, about a veteran who rescues a young girl from thieves. During the 1790s, when Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital, its citizenry enjoyed a dazzling array of theatrical entertainments staged by Placide and other impresarios and featuring French, English, Irish, and Italian performers as well as the American John Durang [1768-1822], who owned a house on Cedar (South) Street. The New Theatre on Chestnut Street (opened in 1794 and commonly called the Chestnut Street Theatre) hosted many of these performances.

The French Influence

Through the years, French émigrés also distinguished themselves as teachers. In the 1830s, P.H. Hazard taught young Philadelphians the dances being exhibited at that time by first-rate ballerinas at the esteemed Paris Opéra, where ballet, which originated in Renaissance court entertainments, continued to develop from the seventeenth century onward. Hazard himself had once been a member of the Paris Opéra’s corps de ballet. Due to his efforts, itinerant stars in search of supplemental dancers for their own performances found better ones in Philadelphia than in New York, which by then was the country’s artistic capital. In 1837, two of Hazard’s protégées, Mary Ann Lee (c. 1823-99) and Augusta Maywood (1825-76), appeared together at the Chestnut Street Theatre. Both went on to enjoy distinguished, yet divergent, professional careers.

Lee so enchanted audiences that she was known simply as “Our Mary Ann.” She danced to great acclaim in New Orleans, New York, and Boston before embarking to France for continued study at the Paris Opéra. After a year there she declared “…I much prefer my own dear country…” and returned home with improved technique and new ballets to perform drawn from the Romantic repertoire, which emphasized otherworldly plots and an ethereal style of dancing on pointe. On New Year’s Day, 1846, in Boston, she staged the American premiere of Giselle, one of the few Romantic ballets still produced in the twenty-first century. After retiring at about age 24, she taught, raised children, and supported her widowed mother.

Maywood, too, left Philadelphia to study at the Paris Opéra, but, unlike Lee, she never returned. Instead, she danced on stages all over Europe, showcasing what the French critic Théophile Gautier (1811-72) called “[s]inews of steel, legs of a jaguar, and an agility not unlike that of a circus performer.” After one appearance in Florence, Italy, three carriages were needed to cart away all the bouquets tossed as her feet. Although more talented and accomplished than Lee, she was less beloved back home, criticized for her scandalous affairs and for abandoning her destitute stepfather.

Nevertheless, Maywood became her nation’s first ballerina superstar, and, together with Lee, proved that America—indeed Philadelphia—could produce its own ballet dancers rather than simply import them. A third member of this cohort, George Washington Smith (c. 1821-99), partnered with Lee and virtually every other significant ballerina of the day, including the incomparable Fanny Elssler (1810-84) from Vienna. The manager of the Chestnut Street Theatre, where Elssler appeared in the 1840s, claimed she “…turned the heads of all the ladies and the hearts of all the gentlemen…,” yet it was Smith who apparently turned her head as he danced jigs between the acts of plays. Impressed with his talent, Elssler invited him to join her troupe. Smith learned ballet technique from Elssler’s Irish partner and became proficient enough to sustain a long career as America’s foremost danseur noble.

Risk of Theater Fires

During this period, theaters relied on gaslight for illumination and Romantic ballets especially were enhanced by its soft, haunting glow. Contact with open gas jets, however, led to theater fires around the country. The most tragic of all occurred at Philadelphia’s Continental Theatre, near Eighth and Walnut Streets, in 1861. It began when Ruth Gale (c. 1840s-61), one of four British sisters hired to dance in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, stood on a settee to grab her dress in an upstairs room as the play was underway. The dress grazed a gas jet and ignited, and the fire quickly spread from Gale to other dancers who rushed in to help. Eventually, about a dozen young women—including all four Gales—died from burns or injuries they sustained after leaping from windows to escape the flames. They were eulogized as virtuous and loving girls at a time when female dancers were often caricatured as disreputable, a small but important step in the long process of legitimizing the profession.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, ballet in the United States generally reached a low ebb. Romantic-era artistry had given way to acrobatic tricks, military marches, and spectacular stage effects. It was not until the early twentieth century that Philadelphians again saw ballet’s most fabled interpreters, then mainly Russian graduates of the Imperial Theater School in St. Petersburg. Anna Pavlova (1881-1931) arrived in 1910, followed six years later by the peerless Vaslav Nijinsky (c. 1889-1950), who performed the title role in Till Eulenspiegel, one of only four ballets that he choreographed himself. Both dancers appeared at the capacious Metropolitan Opera House at Broad and Poplar Streets.

A third Russian, Lubov Egorova (1880-1972), retired from the stage and devoted herself to teaching in her Parisian ballet studio, drawing an international clientele that included a young Philadelphian named Catherine Littlefield (1905-51). With Egorova’s methods and artistry in mind, Littlefield trained students at her own school at 1815 Ludlow Street. Russian émigré George Balanchine (1904-83), arguably the twentieth century’s most important choreographer, thought so highly of Littlefield’s pupils that he recruited a number of them for his first ensemble in the United States, while others joined Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre) when it formed several years later. In 1935, Littlefield established her own company, the Philadelphia Ballet, and shortly thereafter staged the first full-length, full-scale version of The Sleeping Beauty in the United States, an undertaking that required 100 dancers, 85 musicians, and elaborate scenery and costumes. Like Mary Ann Lee before her, Littlefield introduced Americans to an iconic ballet that is still regularly performed. Littlefield also became well known for choreographing lively and humorous works with indigenous themes and characters such as farmhands, secretaries, and commuters. These ballets, notably Barn Dance and Terminal, delighted audiences and critics alike during the Philadelphia Ballet’s European tour in 1937, the first ever by an American ballet troupe. Long after Placide and Hazard brought French ballet to the United States, Littlefield took American ballet to France (as well as to England and Belgium).

During this period, ballet, like most other aspects of society, experienced the limitations of racial segregation. The elegant and civic-minded Essie Marie Dorsey (1893-1967) directed the largest dancing school in the city patronized by African Americans. She occasionally arranged for Thomas Cannon (1910-77), a leading member of the Philadelphia Ballet, to work privately with her best students and had them perform at benefits, teas, meetings, and in opulent recitals. Marion Cuyjet (1920-96) and Sydney King (b. 1919) studied with Dorsey and became dedicated teachers themselves, with Dorsey’s positive and personal approach serving as an inspiration. Judith Jamison (b. 1943), longtime artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Joan Myers Brown (b. 1931), founder of the Philadelphia Dance Company, or Philadanco, emerged from this important instructional network. Both used their early ballet training as a foundation for exploring a variety of dance genres and both received the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists by the U.S. government.

Of the same generation as Brown, Barbara Weisberger (b. 1926) studied with Balanchine as a child and then at Littlefield’s school as a teenager. With Balanchine’s encouragement, she started the Pennsylvania Ballet in 1963, filling a void left by the demise of Littlefield’s company in the early 1940s. Significant grants from the Ford Foundation provided early financial stability and the Pennsylvania Ballet became a leader in the regional ballet movement that flourished in the 1960s, when professional troupes sprang up in cities and towns around the country. In the ensuing decades, however, fiscal troubles emerged periodically and in 1987, the company arranged with the Milwaukee Ballet to share a budget and roster of dancers while maintaining separate staffs and orchestras. This novel partnership proved untenable and dissolved two years later. In 1991, a suspension of operations was averted when Artistic Director Christopher d’Amboise (b. 1960) spearheaded a dramatic “Save the Ballet,” which raised $1.2 million from more than 10,000 individual contributors. Roy Kaiser (b. 1957), who joined the company as an apprentice, succeeded d’Amboise and provided steady leadership for nearly two decades, his tenure capped by the organization’s fiftieth anniversary celebration.

In the meantime, two Pennsylvania Ballet-connected dancer/choreographers, Christine Cox (b. 1969) and Matthew Neenan (b. 1974) founded BalletX, an ensemble based at the Wilma Theater and dedicated to producing new work in a contemporary style. BalletX’s diverse and modern offerings, combined with the 2014 naming of Angel Corella (b. 1975), a world-renowned dancer from Spain, as Pennsylvania Ballet’s new artistic director, signaled that Philadelphia would continue its long tradition of attracting high-profile talent and attention.

Sharon Skeel is a Philadelphia-based dance writer and lecturer currently working on a biography of Catherine Littlefield. Her essay on Littlefield’s 1937 production of The Sleeping Beauty was published in the Summer 2015 issue of Ballet Review.

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 contrast to vaudeville entertainments, burlesque shows thrived on crossing boundaries of social acceptability and liberated performers from traditional categories of race and gender, which became slippery and ambiguous. Philadelphia hosted perhaps a dozen burlesque theaters in the late nineteenth century, clustered primarily in the Center City district of commercial sex and vice industries known as the Tenderloin. The venues included Dumont’s Theater, the 11th Street Opera House, the Gayety, the Empire, the Nixon, the Keystone, the Liberty, the Grand, the Star, the William Penn Theatre, the Auditorium, and the Arch Street Opera House.

Established in 1870, the Arch Street Opera House—known in the twentieth century as the Casino Theatre, the Palace Theatre, the Troc Theatre, and the Trocadero Theatre—served as the hub of burlesque performances in Philadelphia throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In the heart of the Tenderloin at Tenth and Arch Streets, the Arch Street Opera House stood within walking distance of brothels, opium dens, saloons, and shooting galleries. Primarily a minstrelsy theater until the end of the nineteenth century, the Arch Street Opera House served as a significant appendage of a wider circuit of traveling burlesque performers into the mid-twentieth century, hosting such celebrated burlesque artists as Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-70) and Blaze Starr (1932-2015). In fact, it was in Philadelphia that Billy Minsky (1887-1932) of Minsky’s Burlesque in New York first saw Gypsy Rose Lee perform, leading him to offer her a position as the troupe’s headliner.

By the early twentieth century, the field of American burlesque had split into two main circuits: the Columbia Circuit and the Empire Circuit. While the former preferred to produce somewhat “cleaner” shows, the latter designed “their shows to be as smutty as they could convince local authorities to overlook.” By this time, Philadelphians could also see burlesque shows at the Lyceum Theatre on Vine Street, and the Bijou Theatre on North Eighth Street, formerly a vaudeville theater, introduced burlesque performances starting in 1910. By the 1920s, however, burlesque became increasingly professionalized and lost its subversive edge, with performers designing their performances to meet the interests of male producers and booking agents, who marketed burlesque primarily toward the voyeuristic pleasure of white male viewers, to the exclusion of mixed-gender audiences and viewers of color. For example, historian Robert C. Allen has noted that, with the rising popularity of the cooch dance—a kind of gyrating, highly sexualized dance—“the burlesque performer’s mouth became the only part of her body that did not move,” indicating the degree to which she had become “linguistically disempowered.” Progressive reformers also worked to clamp down on urban vice, and the Tenderloin district entered into a period of decline.

Burlesque lost much of its titillating appeal with American audiences as nudity became more common in cinema and live theater. In the words of cultural studies scholar Alan Trachtenberg, American burlesque reached “its final shabby demise” by the 1950s. Consequently, venues like the Bijou Theatre closed down. The Troc rebranded itself in the 1970s as an art house cinema and, by the end of the twentieth century, as a concert venue for rock music.

If burlesque’s midcentury demise was shabby, though, it was not final. In the 1990s, American burlesque experienced a revival. Dubbed “neo-burlesque,” the new genre combined elements of traditional burlesque with contemporary ideas from feminism and queer theory (a challenge to standard heterosexual ideas). As neo-burlesque took hold in Philadelphia, these themes came to dominate local burlesque. At the forefront, Anna Frangiosa (b. 1976) performed under the name Annie A-Bomb, beginning her career as a burlesque dancer with the burlesque group The Peek-A-Boo Revue in 1998. Later, she co-founded Cabaret Red Light, a troupe active between 2008 and 2011 that integrated elements of tongue-in-cheek agitprop—that is, overtly political art—into their burlesque shows, promoting what they called “pornographic socialism” with a stated goal of establishing “a carefully orchestrated, nonstop orgy on a national scale.” In 2009, Frangiosa founded the Philadelphia School of Burlesque in Fishtown. Outside of burlesque, Annie A-Bomb maintained an active political presence, participating in direct actions movements such as Occupy Philadelphia, a part of the larger Occupy Movement that protested economic inequality beginning in 2011.

Hallmarks of neo-burlesque included themes of sex-positivity, body-positivity, and queerness—that is, a radical non-assimilation to societal norms—often geared toward audiences of women. In empowering both performers and audience members, neo-burlesque returned to early burlesque’s liberatory potential for women, which had eroded with the dominance of male agents and audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second decade of the twenty-first century saw the rise to prominence in Philadelphia of politicized burlesque performers, such as HoneyTree EvilEye (b. 1982), who actively incorporated more overtly political messages into their work. Concurrently, with the establishment of troupes like Bearlesque, Philadelphia burlesque expanded to incorporate more male-identified dancers. This trend was part of the development of the genre of boylesque—burlesque featuring eroticized portrayals of masculinity.

As the contours of American burlesque evolved throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, Philadelphia performers kept pace. While often unjustly overshadowed by the larger New York burlesque scene, Philadelphia hosted established performers as part of a wider national and international burlesque circuit, and nourished local talent as well. Over the years, burlesque performers modified their routines—sometimes at their own discretion, sometimes at the behest of money-minded managers—to capture audiences’ changing tastes and expectations, intentionally defying those expectations at least as often as they met them.

Timothy Kent Holliday is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies the history of gender, sexuality, and the body in early America. (Author information current at time of publication.)

 Throughout the eighteenth and into the late nineteenth century, theatrical entertainment was generally not segmented by age. Rather than “children’s productions” or “adult productions” theater producers assumed attendance by a general audience that included children with their parents or working youths who could afford the price of admission. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an evening’s dramatic entertainment often included pantomimes (pantos), usually based on fairy or folk tales with strong comic elements. The pantomime Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper by Michael Kelly (1762-1826), first performed in 1804 at London’s Theatre Royal, debuted at the Chestnut Street Theater in 1806 to great success. In addition to legitimate stage productions such as those at the Walnut and Chestnut Street Theaters, Philadelphia’s children and youths attended the first American circus, founded in 1793 at Twelfth and Market Streets by the Scottish circus impresario John Bill Ricketts (1769–1800). Later generations of children and working youth attended vaudeville and minstrel shows at venues such as the Arch Street Opera House (founded in 1870 and later renamed the Trocadero Theater) and spectacles including Philadelphia’s Cyclorama (1888-90), which presented spectacular –360– degree paintings such as The Battle of Gettysburg and Jerusalem on the Day of the Crucifixion in a circular-shaped building at Broad and Cherry Streets. 

While children remained part of a general audience for amusements the city offered, in the late nineteenth century child-specific theater arose in response to the emerging concept of a “protected childhood.” This era of a rising middle class, urbanization, and shifting cultural values produced specialized child-related material culture such as furnishings, clothing, literature, and entertainment. Theaters advertised offerings specifically for children or matinees adapted and advertised as “suitable for ladies and children.” For example, in  1891 the Grand Opera House (Broad Street and Montgomery Avenue) produced Gulliver’s Travels with the Lilliputians played by the “Royal Midgets.” In 1893 the Walnut Street Theater offered a matinee performance of “Terry’s Funny Pantomime,” and in 1895 a “specially adapted” matinee vaudeville performance took place at Mathews and Bulger’s Company at The Auditorium (Eighth and Walnut Streets).  

Encouraging Creativity

Educational theater emerged during the Progressive Era (c. 1890-1920) of social and political reform as teachers, social workers, and other child advocates viewed live theater as a venue for introducing language skills, encouraging creativity, and teaching positive values to the growing number of immigrant children in America’s cities. The City of Philadelphia created play spaces for children and youth as well as opportunities for adult-led leisure activities such as sports, arts, and crafts. By the early 1930s, Philadelphia’s fifteen  recreation centers offered a robust dramatic program for children and youth with a reported 1,100 participants. While the Recreation Department’s productions featured child actors participating in a volunteer activity, the Junior League of America also brought theater to Philadelphia’s children in the form of professionally produced plays with adult actors and the goal of promoting literacy and academic achievement. The Children’s Theater, sponsored by the Junior League of Philadelphia beginning in 1927, continued to serve school children in the twenty-first century. The Women’s International League and the Philadelphia Art Alliance also sponsored professional productions such as those by the Clara Tree Major players for area children at theaters across Philadelphia from the 1920s into the 1950s. 

By the latter part of the twentieth century Philadelphia’s children’s theater community became increasingly interactive and participatory, create a new role for child audiences. In the late 1960s the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts sponsored several successful children’s theater initiatives, including the Society Hill Playhouse’s Philadelphia Youth Theater (1970–83); Society Hill’s Street Theater (1968–70), in which young adult and adult actors traveled to Philadelphia neighborhoods with live productions; and the Free Children’s Theater of the Germantown Theater Guild, which offered free children’s programming throughout the 1970s. 

The Children’s Repertory Theater, founded by Dr. Hans Walter Wenkaert (1909–80) and active during the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrated collaboration between adults and children.  Featuring a company of child actors who performed for a child audience, the company originally was located at 1617 Locust Street home of the Philadelphia Musical Academy. Wenkaert, who immigrated to the United States from Germany before World War II, brought to his work the European tradition of regarding children’s theater as a venue for encouraging agency, identity, and creativity. The company produced shows based on fairy tales and children’s literature such as Puss in Boots and Peter Pan.   

Child Empowerment

The political climate of the 1960s and 1970s shaped educational theater with progressive themes of child empowerment, tolerance, and acceptance. The Philadelphia Youth Theater under the direction of Susan Turlish (b. 1946) produced versions of A Clockwork Orange and Animal Farm. Laurie Wagman (b. 1932) founded American Theater Arts for Youth in 1971 with the goal of educating and entertaining children through theater arts, particularly children who may not have had access to live theater previously. Performances, based on children’s classics and historical figures, featured high production values and Equity actors. They included Black Journey, an original musical that surveyed three hundred 300 years of African American history. Based in Philadelphia, this organization garnered a national reputation for bringing live theater productions to children for over forty years.

As the baby boom of children born 1946-60 produced an expanded youth audience, children’s shows became a staple of the summer tent music venues such as the Valley Forge Music Fair (active 1954–96), the Camden County Music Fair (active 1956-69 and 1972-73), the Lambertville Music Circus (1949–69), and the Playhouse in the Park in Fairmount Park (1952–79). Performance spaces that hosted children’s shows also included the Electric Factory Children’s Theater at 2201 Arch Street, the Karenga Cultural Arts House at 1711 N. Croskey Street, and the Society Hill Playhouse. University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts became home to the annual Philadelphia International Children’s Festival of performing arts in 1975. 

By the twenty-first century, children were encouraged to be not only participants but also writers and artists. The children’s theater community consisted of commercial and non-commercial ventures including professional productions (those employing Actor’s Equity members), non–professional community groups, and educational theater companies.  Children’s series and acting programs continued in Philadelphia at the Walnut Street Theater, the Arden Theater, and the MacGuffin Theater and Film Company (Twentieth and Sansom Streets); People’s Light in Malvern; and the Hedgerow Theater in Media. Philadelphia Young Playwrights (1219 Vine Street) worked with elementary and high school-aged children and to encourage creative writing skills and an interest in the lively arts through its classes and, beginning in 1987, an annual Playwriting Festival. 

As the concept of “child audience” evolved in popular culture from the early the nineteenth century to the present, so did productions in children’s theater. In addition to attending adult-created and produced plays, children and youth in Philadelphia gained a hand in writing and directing their own content. By engaging the next generation of thespians, Philadelphia’s theater community continued a centuries-long history of live stage productions for child audiences.      

Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic  is a Librarian Emerita of the Rutgers Universities Libraries and an adjunct professor of English at Atlantic Cape Community College. (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.)