American Bandstand

From 1957 through 1963 Philadelphia was the “Home of the Hits,” a reflection of the power of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand television show, carried nationally on the American Broadcasting Company network. The program’s format was simple: singers mimed to their records, and the show’s teenage audience danced. Before the advent of Bandstand, no Philadelphia-based label had ever been consistently successful; in the wake of the show, several labels based in the city—including Cameo, Chancellor, Jamie, and Swan—were regularly on the charts.

In 1960, during the congressional hearings on payola (money or gifts given by record labels to disc jockeys to air their records), it was revealed that Clark had part ownership of the labels as well as shares in local pressing plants and distribution companies that out-of-town independent labels were allegedly encouraged to use. Under Clark’s patronage several local singers of modest talent emerged as national stars—Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, and Fabian—while a succession of banal dance records, including “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, became hits. There were talented Philadelphia-based musicians untainted by all this—notably John Coltrane, Earl Bostic, and Bill Doggett—but they all recorded elsewhere. It was not until the emergence of producer-songwriters Thom Bell, Kenny Gamble, and Leon Huff later in the 1960s and the tremendous success of Philadelphia International Records in the ’70s that the city could proudly claim its own sound.