Alan Freed
*Alan Freed was born on December 15, 1921. He was a white-American disc jockey.
Albert James "Alan" Freed was born to a Welsh-American mother, Maude Palmer, and a Russian-Jewish immigrant father, Charles S. Freed, in Windber, Pennsylvania. In 1933, Freed's family moved to Salem, Ohio, where Freed attended Salem High School, graduating in 1940. While Freed was in high school, he formed a band called the Sultans of Swing, where he played the trombone.
While attending Ohio State University, Freed became interested in radio. Freed served in the US Army during World War II and worked as a DJ on Armed Forces Radio. After the military, he landed broadcasting jobs at smaller radio stations, including WKST (New Castle, Pennsylvania), WKBN (Youngstown, Ohio), and WAKR (Akron, Ohio), where, in 1945, he became a local favorite for playing hot jazz and pop recordings. He arrived at a small Los Angeles station, KDAY (1580 AM), and worked there for about one year.
On August 22, 1943, Freed married his first wife, Betty Lou Bean. They had two children, daughter Alana and son Lance, and divorced on December 2, 1949. On August 12, 1950, Freed married Marjorie J. Hess, with whom he had two children, daughter Sieglinde and son Alan Freed, Jr. They divorced on July 25, 1958. On August 8, 1958, he married Inga Lil Boling. They remained together until his death. Freed also worked at WABC (AM) starting in May 1958 but was fired from that station on November 21, 1959, after refusing to sign a statement for the FCC that he had never accepted payola bribes.
Freed also appeared in several pioneering rock and roll motion pictures during this period. Teenagers often welcomed these jukebox musicals with tremendous enthusiasm because they brought visual depictions of their favorite American acts to the big screen years before music videos would present the same image on the small television screen. He produced and promoted large traveling concerts with various acts, helping to spread the importance of rock and roll music throughout North America. In the early 1960s, Freed's career was destroyed by the payola scandal that hit the broadcasting industry, as well as by allegations of taking credit for songs he did not write and by his chronic alcoholism. Alan Freed died on January 20, 1965, from uremia and cirrhosis brought on by alcoholism, at the age of 43.
In 1986, Freed was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His "role in breaking down racial barriers in U.S. pop culture in the 1950s, by leading white and Black kids to listen to the same music, put the radio personality 'at the vanguard' and made him a significant figure'", according to the executive director. Freed was honored with a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 1991. The organization's website posted this note: "He became internationally known for promoting African American rhythm and blues music on the radio in the United States and Europe under the name of rock and roll."
