Remembering Adam Wade, TV's first Black game show host

By early summer of 1975, that most ubiquitous, most addictive form of television was ascendant once again. Or put another way, you couldn't avoid a game show for trying.

With names like "Gambit," "High Rollers," "Showoffs" and "The Magnificent Marble Machine," a total of 17 filled New York's local airwaves from early morning until late at night. For the first time in a decade, games outnumbered that other staple of the airwaves, the soap opera.

Games were easy and cheap to make. Perhaps most important, they were uncontroversial. By 1975 the game show rigging scandals had faded far into TV's past. They were once again safe to make.

Or were they? Over at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway, that question was about to be put to the test.

UNHERALDED ARIVAL

On June 16, with little fanfare, network TV's newest game show had arrived. CBS' "Musical Chairs" — not to be confused with an NBC show by that name from a decade earlier — featured four contestants, each of whom sat at moving desks (not quite "chairs"). Whoever correctly guessed the lyrics of a song, would win $100, then advance to the champion round. Get it wrong, and that desk would abruptly jerk backward into a wall opening, where the contestant would be heard from no more.

So far, no big deal. It was the host, in fact, who was the big deal.

Here's how Newsweek observed the occasion:

"CBS [has] combined a live orchestra, a rotating platoon of recording stars and — guess who's come to daytime? — TV's first black game-show host."

TV's first Black game show host was, by most accounts, the perfect choice to break the color barrier in game shows — the last barrier in all of entertainment television, in fact. (Network TV news' first Black anchor, Max Robinson, wouldn't arrive until 1978).

Adam Wade had a poised stage presence, and was a skilled musician and performer whose vocal chops had been compared to Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis. He'd even had a few hit singles in the '60s. Not-quite-famous, he was well-known in New York City's tight-knit group of Black entertainers, musicians and actors.

Wade had lots of experience in front of cameras, too, as a commercial pitchman, and with bit parts in a few TV shows like "Tarzan" and "Adam-12." In 1971's "Shaft," he was billed as "Brother No. 1."

Now, at last, the big time, and TV history.

A brief, enthusiastic acknowledgment in Jet Magazine reported, "They said it would never happen but it has and CBS will be eyeing the Nielsen ratings like crazy, when actor Adam Wade bows as the first black network game show host."

Wade, 40, at the time, told the New York Daily News, "People come up to me and say 'let's celebrate!' But celebrate what? An announcement? I haven't even taped my first show. A celebration? That's further up the road, when I win an Emmy as best game show host next year, and they sign a black host on NBC and ABC.

"Then I'll be a star. Then that'll really be something to shout about."

That celebration never came. "Musical Chairs" was gone by November. The next Black host of a network game show wouldn't arrive for another 10 years. Nipsey Russell's stint as host of NBC's "Your Number's Up," lasted half a season in 1985.  

FORGOTTEN PIONEER

Wade, who died in 2022 at the age of 87, went on other things — stage, TV and restarted his singing and touring career. Nevertheless, his widow, and wife of 33 years, Jeree Wade, said in a recent interview the cancellation "broke his heart [because] it just didn't open the doors. It didn't."

Jeree Wade, who lived with her husband in Montclair, New Jersey, recalled neither of them talked much about it over the years but "he said he thought maybe America just wasn't ready for a Black host. He was glad he did it and would have liked to have continued but he said, 'I have to move on with my life.' "

Why CBS killed the show and reduced Wade to a footnote in TV history remains something of a mystery 51 years later. The press didn't bother to make note of the cancellation, and CBS didn't send out a news release announcing the end. The final "Musical Chairs" episode aired Oct. 31, and was replaced at 4 p.m. the following day with another game show ("Give-N-Take"). That one didn't last long, either.

While there's no definitive count, hundreds of game shows have aired on TV over the years, with the first — according to "The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows" — "CBS Television Quiz," in 1941. Game shows were the most expendable form of TV, but why just one Black host over most of that history? (There are several today, notably Wayne Brady on "Let's Make a Deal" and Steve Harvey on "Family Feud.").

J. Fred MacDonald, in his updated 1992 history of Black representation on TV, "Blacks and white TV," wrote, "Along with relevancy, Black actors and social issues had left [network] television by the end of 1971," and hadn't recovered by the middle of the decade. Soaps — which had started to integrate casts — had also begun to cut back, he wrote. Ellen Holly, the first Black actress in a leading role on a soap ("One Life to Live") told TV Guide at the time that Black representation on TV had fallen so dramatically "it's a wonder [Black actors] could get together even the minimum ego necessary to survive."

Nat King Cole's milestone variety show launched on NBC in 1956, then a year later was pulled for lack of advertising (Cole's own assessment: "Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.") But "Musical Chairs" didn't seem to have that problem. (You can still check out the show — commercials and all — on YouTube.

Wade himself had other suspicions. He'd heard of at least one station boycotting the program, and when he visited Hartford in 2014 to perform in a tribute to Cole, he said in a Connecticut Public Radio interview CBS had been swamped with hate mail.

"I’m sure [the show’s producers] hid some of the letters from me so I wouldn’t get upset," Wade recalled. "One I did see was from a guy who used all kinds of expletives, saying he didn’t want his wife sitting at home watching the Black guy hand out the money and the smarts."

But Wade went on to insist — as he usually did when asked — that he had nothing bitter to say about the experience.

"It probably added 30 years to my career," he said. "It’s crazy. You’re nobody, and then you’re somebody, and then you’re nobody before you snap your fingers. As my friend, the great singer Billy Eckstine, once told me, ‘Show business is the only business in the world where you can go to bed a star, and wake up the next day, and be on the other side where nobody knows your name.’ "

A HIT SINGER

Wade most likely never expected to be a pioneer, but he did expect to become a singer. Born Patrick Henry Wade in 1935 in Pittsburgh, he was abandoned by his mother when he was 3, and he was raised by his grandparents. He attended Virginia State College (now University), on a basketball scholarship but dropped out in 1956 to support his family. He'd also started singing by then.

Back home, he got work at the University of Pittsburgh, in the lab of Dr. Jonas Salk. It must have been a prominent position because Salk remembered him a couple years later when a reporter called to ask about him: "[Wade] told me he had this opportunity [and] I told him he must search his own soul to find out what is in him that wants to come out," Salk recalled.

That opportunity was unexpected. Wade had gone to New York to perform some songs a friend had written for a record label. The label ignored the songs but wanted Wade. He signed with the Coed Records — which had a hit with The Crests' "16 Candles." `In 1961, Wade had three top 10 songs  ("Take Good Care of Her," "The Writing on the Wall," "As If I Didn't Know").

By that same year, he had moved his family to New York, where he was singing at clubs, including the Copacabana. Comparing him to Mathis, The New York Times judged him "one of the country's rising young singers in nightclubs and on records,"

"When I left Pittsburgh to come to New York City," he said during that Connecticut Public Radio interview, "I was trying to imitate Nat King Cole, my boyhood idol, not Johnny Mathis. So I guess that tells you how good my imitating skills were."

But, he added, "my knees were knocking. That’s how new I was. I was in show business for five minutes, and the next thing I knew I was opening for Tony Bennett at the Copacabana. It was like I instantly had to learn how to fly."

After moving to Epic Records later that year, the hits stopped coming. While he kept performing, Wade also pivoted to acting — commercials, bit parts in network series, and the occasional movie.

It was in this show-biz twilight world — making just enough to get by, but doing nothing substantial enough to break through — where rock impresario Don Kirshner discovered him.

As a producer-promoter, Kirshner launched a dozen prominent careers by then, and in the '60s packaged songs for "The Monkees," one of the great breakout TV hits (and acts) of the decade. By the 1970s, Kirshner had become a major TV producer ("Don Kirshner's Rock Concert"). Game shows would be a low risk-high reward move to him. For the one idea he eventually pursued, a singing game show, he needed a host who could sing.

Why Kirshner chose an itinerant actor and sometime performer is a mystery (he died in 2011), and why he wanted to break the color barrier was, too. But Wade had charisma, stage presence and chops. Along with guest singers and musical groups like Sister Sledge, The Tokens and The Spinners, Wade would accompany them in covers of their own hits or the hits of others. Sometimes they'd cover the Great American Songbook. Their performances were polished, clean and — best of all — listenable.

During the game, Wade would stop before the last line of the lyric of a well-known number, then contestants were told to choose the correct line from a short list of possibilities. He would then sing through each of those.

MEETING HIS WIFE

The popular folk group the New Christy Minstrels showed up for a taping, and one of the performers in the group was Jeree Palmer who — like Wade — had spent years touring as a solo act.

They would get married 14 years later.

Jeree Wade says, "I thought he was the cat's meow" when we met on the set of the show. "He was so wonderful and sweet, and then we went our separate ways." Years later, "we met at a rehearsal studio and he said, 'didn't you do 'Musical Chairs?' Don't you remember?' And that was it. Within a month we were together, and got married shortly after" in 1989.

The marriage, she said, "was beautiful for me. My husband was the greatest gift I ever got in my life."

The marriage was eventful, too. Both continued touring, and started their own production company. They launched their own Off-Broadway musical, "Shades of Harlem." Meanwhile, 40 years after leaving Virginia State, Wade earned a college degree, at Lehman College, and went on to get a masters.

Over the years, the subject of "Musical Chairs" rarely came up, Jeree Wade said.

Her husband learned "not to worry about it. He knew who he was, and he knew the Black community" knew he had been a pioneer. Whenever he met someone "they'd say, 'Oh I just loved you on 'Musical Chairs.' "

"In his life, he was open to whatever happened. If it was good, it was good. He loved everyone and everyone loved him.

"Yes, it was heartbreaking, but he got over it."