A versatile velvet voice crewer who won the Billboard Top 10 hits three times in a row in a year, Adam Wade has appeared in numerous films, plays and television shows, and in 1975, a network video game show. Became the first black host of. He was 87 years old at his home in Montclair, NJ on Thursday.
His wife, singer, actress and producer Jerry Wade said the cause was a complication of Parkinson’s disease.
In May 1975, CBS announced that it would break the racial barriers of network television by appointing Mr. Wade as the master of the ceremony for the weekly afternoon game show Musical Chair.
A program performed at the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan and co-produced by Don Kirshner, a musical impresario. Featured guest musical performance, Four contestants are competing to complete the lyrics of the song and answer questions about music. (Some guest performers were groups like The Spinners and singers like Irene Cara.)
The novelty of Black MC was not universally accepted. Alabama’s CBS affiliate refused to broadcast the show and was flooded with harassment emails. Connecticut Public Radio In 2014, a letter from a man said, “I don’t want my wife to sit at home and see a black man give out money and wisdom.”
The show was canceled in less than 5 months. Still, Wade said, “Probably added 30 years to my career.”
His career began when he worked as a testing engineer for polio vaccine developer Dr. Jonas E. Thorke, and a songwriter friend invited him to New York to audition for a music publisher. .. He first recorded on Coed Records in 1958 and moved to Manhattan two years later, where he co-starred with singer Freddy Cole, the brother of idol Nat King Cole, and quickly climbed the show business ladder. Lively, Tony Bennett and Joe E. Lewis, a comedian at the fashionable Copacabana Nightclub.
“Two years ago, he was Patrick Henry Wade, a $ 65 weekly aide to a virus research experiment in Dr. Jonas E. Thorke’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh,” the New York Times wrote in 1961. Adam Wade is one of the youngest singers in the nightclubs and records. “
That same year, he recorded three songs that soared to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 charts: “Take Good Care of Her” (7th), “The Writing on the Wall” (5th), ” As if I didn’t know “(No.10).
Patrick Henry Wade was born on March 17, 1935 in Pittsburgh to Pauline Simpson and Henry Oliver Wade Jr. He was raised by Henry Wade, the caretaker of his grandparents, the Mellon Institute of Technology (now part of Carnegie Mellon University). And Helen Wade.
He attended Virginia State University on a basketball scholarship, dreaming of playing at Harlem Globetrotters, but dropped out three years later and worked for Dr. Soak’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh. It was undecided whether to accept the recording contract provided by Coed, and Wade consulted with Dr. Salk.
“He told me he had this opportunity,” Dr. Thorke told the Times at the time. “I told him I had to look for his own soul to find out what I wanted to see in him.”
He changed his first name because the agent said he had too many putts in show business and released his first hit with the song “Ruby” in the early 1960s. His smooth vocal style was often compared to that of Johnny Mathis. Wade said he was largely influenced by early boyhood idol Nat King Cole.
“So you can see how good my imitation skills were,” he said.
He has appeared on television in soap opera such as “Guiding Light” and “Search for Tomorrow” and in Sitcom such as “Jeffersons” and “Sanford & Sun”. He also starred in movies such as “Shaft” (1971) and “Comeback Charleston Blue” (1972), and appeared on stage at the 2008 “Color Purple” tour company.
He and his wife ran Songbird, the company that produced the historic review of African-Americans, including the musical “Shades of Harlem,” which was staged at the Village Gate in Broadway in 1983.
The couple appeared at the anniversary party at the end of this year.
In addition to Mr. Wade, who married in 1989, he is survived by his son, documentary filmmaker Jamel. From her marriage to Kay Wade, which ended in 1973, she has three children: Sheldon Wade, Patrice Johnson Wade, and Michael Wade. And some grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Wade is particularly proud to have a bachelor’s degree from Lehman College and a master’s degree in theater history and criticism from Brooklyn College 40 years after dropping out of college for all of his success in the show business. I said I was thinking. Of New York. He taught speech and theater at Long Island University and Bloomfield University in New Jersey.
“I went to college for the first time in my family,” he told Connecticut Public Radio. “At that time, I promised my grandmother that I would graduate from college someday. Years later, I kept that promise.”