When New York radio legend Frankie Crocker died of pancreatic cancer in Miami on October 21, 2000¹, his was just the latest death of an influential African American disk jockey that year, including Martha Jean Steinberg, Rosko, Jocko Henderson, and Jack “The Rapper” Gibson.

On November 10, 2000, On the Media contributor Rex Doane memorialized Crocker and gave a brief history of the influence of African American disk jockeys.

Crocker arrived in New York in the late sixties and worked at rhythm and blues powerhouse WWRL and at WMCA during that station’s waning days as a Top Forty leader. In 1971, as FM was beginning to overtake AM for music programming, he moved to WLIB-FM to serve as both program director and the afternoon drive time host. Soon WLIB-FM changed its call letters to WBLS and Crocker was developing a smoother, more sophisticated format than the machine gun pace of AM pop music radio. Crocker recruited and groomed radio newcomers Vy Higginson (the first female pop music disk jockey in New York), Fred “Bugsy” Buggs, and Ken “Spider” Webb to host what the station called “the total Black experience in sound.”² It was a format eclectic enough to mix Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Frank Sinatra, James Brown, Billie Holiday, Johnny Mathis, and Kool and the Gang. As BLS knocked perennial number one WABC from its ratings perch and the station’s audience grew more diverse, he introduced non-black acts like New York New Wave darlings Blondie and British punk rockers The Clash to his listeners. It was the beginning of the format that became known as Urban Contemporary.³

On the air Crocker was, as New York Daily News writer David Hinckley explained to Doane, “the radio equivalent to Muhammad Ali.” He called himself “The Chief Rocker,” “The Eighth Wonder of the World,” and “Hollywood,” and told his listeners, “If Frankie Crocker isn’t on your radio, your radio isn’t on.” As with Ali, it was up to his competitors to prove it wasn’t so. 

Doane’s remembrance also discussed the importance of Crocker and other African American disk jockeys played in their communities. Howard University professor William Barlow told Doane, “The DJs were a significant player in the black community. . . A [DJ was a] civic leader. . .a mobilizer. . .a relayer of information pertaining to the community. . . black radio DJs filled a huge vacuum in terms of providing civic leadership and morale.” New York hip hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy has talked about Crocker’s influence on his Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, where during the summer with the windows open you could walk down the street and hear Crocker’s show uninterrupted for blocks. 

Doane’s retrospective has many airchecks of Crocker, and Crocker can be heard in a long form interview with WNYC’s program director Richard Pyatt in the WNYC archive during this late 1973 episode of Visitors From the Other Side. 

¹ Williams, Monte. “Frankie Crocker, a Champion of Black-Format Radio, Dies” The New York Times, 2000, October 24, C23. 
² Barlow, William. Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999, 233-235. 
³ WBLS. “WBLS -  ‘In A Class By Itself’ - The 1970's, Frankie Crocker, Building a Station”. youtube.com, 2019, June 11. Accessed February 14, 2020.

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Related links from the New York Public Radio Archive:

On the Media, 1993-2000

Visitors From the Other Side