America is turning 250, and it’s as spry and sprightly as you’d expect anybody turning 250 to be. I think the semiquincentarian will need help blowing out all those candles. In that regard, the Great American State Fair is a good reflection of the country.
Nonetheless, an anniversary on a number that round isn’t going to be ignored by content providers, no matter how tenuous the connection. For example, Philadelphia Inquirer music critic Dan DeLuca was tasked with selecting “the 76 most iconic Philly songs,” a daunting endeavor considering there aren’t even 10 songs the casual listener would identify with the city. Off the top of my head I’d be stumped after “Philadelphia Freedom.”
He cast a wide net to compile a list that long, so there are lots of songs linked with the city in various ways, covering everything from classical to hip-hop with broad swaths of Philly soul in between. Great stuff, but in most cases it’s a stretch to call their links to the city iconic. I’ve heard his top choice, McFadden and Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” hundreds of times, and it’s never made me think of Philadelphia.
Way down the list at No. 55, though, is a bit of music that does – the Action News theme song. It is not unique to the city – broadcast stations all over the county adopted the Action News format and the song with it – and a Boston station used it first. The song and y were joined after they were paired at WPVI in 19072 When one of its executives took over at WPVI in Philly he brought the song with him, and it spread from there, though not always with the same instrumentation.
Veteran jingle writer Al Ham composed the music, TV executive Walt Liss wrote the lyrics, and the duo hired the Hillside Singers, of Coca-Cola’s “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” fame, to sing them. The music is perfect for its function; the lyrics are so loopy a boss of mine once stood in the middle of the newsroom and said in an agitated voice, “Move closer to the world my friend, take a little bit of time … what does that even mean?”
More evidence of its iconic Philly-ness: WPVI is one of only two stations still using it. The other is in Scranton.
If you’ve been in the area long enough to know its TV trivia, you might remember that WPVI started Action News in 1970 with a different theme song, one it commissioned from Tom Sellers, then a Temple student, who employed studio musicians as the Assembled Multitude. Though WPVI dropped it in 1972 various stations around the country used it into the ’90s.
