I GREW UP IN HARLEM NEW YORK ad back then hip hop was coming up and you dident we had beat boxes and block partys everyday ,,,some one always has music blasting out the window ans the station was wbls we partyed hard they the blace to be in nyc i rember all of this like it was yesterday parttttya
RICK RICARDO AND MORE It was one of the first Black-owned FM stations in the country, bought in 1974 by a group of Black businessmen from Harlem — a group that included Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton and future New York mayor David Dinkins. Sutton called his company Inner City Broadcasting.
The man they picked to run their newly acquired property, Frankie Crocker, was already a hero to New Yorkers of all colors. He had started as a DJ in the 1960s at WWRL, an AM station that served New York City’s burgeoning Black community, where Crocker was known for his smooth, slick between-song patter (“I’ll put a dip in your hip and a cut in your strut…”) — proto-rap that would be a direct inspiration to the generation of young New Yorkers who later invented hip-hop. Crocker’s overwhelming success at WWRL led to an offer from one of New York’s top pop stations, WMCA-AM, where he became the only Black DJ in the late 1960s.
Crocker remade WBLS in his own image, creating an eclectic playlist designed to blow his listeners’ minds. The core of WBLS was always R&B and soul, but Crocker often added jazz, rock, and pop standards to that mix. You might hear Sinatra right after Stevie, or the Stones after Sylvia Robinson. He was the first to play songs like Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” — records that created the foundation of the dance music phenomenon that would become disco, and that made Crocker, the “Chief Rocker,” a celebrity on the disco scene. He also gave America some of the first exposure to an obscure Jamaican musician named Bob Marley. Crocker’s innovations and idiosyncrasies created an American singularity: At a time when radio was re-segregating along racial lines, Black artists were being purged from pop playlists, and Black radio stations left only scraps from advertisers, WBLS became the number one overall music station in the number one market in the United States.
The decisions that Frankie Crocker made had worldwide impact, determining not only which records would be hits, but what songs we would sing, what dances we would learn, which people would become stars, what ideas would be discussed. A Black programmer at a Black-owned station called all the shots.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Friday, May 4th 2012 at 3:44AM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
