The legend of Bill Randle, pioneering Cleveland popular music DJ and American cultural preservationist, will return to the airwaves — via Zoom — later this month.
The Shaker Historical Society will host a virtual presentation from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Sept. 21 by musicologist Roger Lee Hall, formerly a teaching assistant of Randle’s at Case Western Reserve University in the 1970s.
Hall is also the author of the book “Bill Randle in Cleveland: From Electric Elvis to The Shakers,” which recounts some of the work and stories they shared.
“Bill Randle was both fascinating and frustrating to talk to,” Hall recalled in a recent interview. “Since I was aware of many of the pop music stars he helped promote, like Tony Bennett, Elvis Presley and others (including Harry Belafonte), I was eager to hear about his experiences. But he was also reluctant to tell much in detail.
“He did tell me about his filming of Elvis in 1955, and I was a fan so I was very interested to know about it,” Hall added.
That was the year Randle was named the “Top Jock in America” by Time Magazine for his work on the radio station WERE-AM 1300.
Presley, then 19, wouldn’t make his first appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show” until 1956, and he was still relatively unknown outside of the South.
“Bill was very influential and Elvis was one of those people who impressed him,” Hall noted.
Randle not only introduced Presley, but also filmed him for a movie short that was going to be called “The Pied Piper of Cleveland,” which has disappeared after it was later sold to Polydor Records.
What does survive is footage from Presley’s afternoon performance in the Brooklyn High School auditorium, headlined by Pat Boone.
Elvis later played at St. Michael’s Auditorium and the Cleveland Auditorium, Hall said.
And there’s also a quote from Tony Bennett in which he states, “I would not be where I am today if it were not for Bill Randle.”
Hall plans to include a photo of the two men together in his Sept. 21 program, for which registration is required.
“When Tony Bennett died recently there was an early pic of him with Bill Randle at an appearance with young kids when he came to Cleveland way back in the early 1950s at the beginning of his career,” Hall recalled.
“So he was grateful for that early promotion”.
Movers and Shakers
Asked how Randle got involved with Shaker music, Hall said he learned that the DJ, who also promoted Dave Brubeck and other jazz performers, happened to be on vacation and stopped at a Shaker museum in Canterbury, N.H.
Randle spoke with the museum director, who said the Shakers were looking for someone to tape their seminars so they would be preserved.
“Bill offered to arrange for all the taping and would pay all the cost himself,” Hall said. “He was interested in preserving the heritage of this unique communal sect, so he produced the 10 LPs in a box set, not released commercially and only intended for research libraries and several Shaker museums.”
Much later, Hall was asked by a producer at Rounder Records, a folk label in Cambridge, Mass., to edit the two albums of Shaker music from that LP set.
“I spent a few months doing research and wrote a 72-page booklet that was issued in 1999 with two CDs for the Rounder release ‘Let Zion Move: Music of the Shakers.’ That CD set got some very good reviews,” Hall said.
Hall, the director of the Center for American Music Preservation (CAMP), based in Stoughton, Mass., said, “Bill’s recordings of the Shakers remain the most extensive audio project of their history and culture.”
Working on his master’s degree thesis at Binghamton University in New York, Hall focused on the Shakers’ unusual music notation, using letters of the alphabet instead of traditional music notation.
“When I began at CWRU, I decided to study the local Shaker community in the Cleveland area, known as North Union, which existed in what is now Shaker Heights,” where he and his wife lived as she worked as a computer programmer in downtown Cleveland.
For the bicentennial commemoration of the Shaker community in 2022, Hall gave a music program about North Union last September at the Shaker Heights Public Library, which is sponsoring the upcoming Zoom conference along with the historical society.
During that most recent visit, Hall said he and his wife enjoyed Market Hall in the Van Aken District, which they had not seen before.
Calling Randle “a man of many talents” — including the ability to spot it in others — Hall said Randle also had a column in the Sun Press in the early 1970s.
In addition to giving a shout-out to a young graduate student named Roger Hall, Randle also recalled a much older article in which he described the 19-year-old Elvis’ style as “a combination of hillbilly nasalities, rock ‘n’ roll, Johnnie Ray and a peculiar sound all his own,” later telling readers to “watch him soar.”
In attempting to settle a dispute, Randle called his earlier assessment “a professional and accurate analysis of what was going to happen to Elvis Presley.”
