The City That Named the Music

Freed had arrived at WJW in 1951 from WAKR in Akron, hired to play classical music. He did that for a few months, and might have continued, had a local record-store owner named Leo Mintz not asked him to come by the Record Rendezvous on Prospect Avenue. Mintz wanted Freed to watch what was happening: young white kids, by the dozens, buying rhythm-and-blues records and dancing to them in the aisles. The records were selling; nobody was playing them on the radio. Freed agreed to try.

His show, The Moondog Show, went on the air July 11, 1951, broadcasting from 11:15 p.m. to 1 a.m. six nights a week. Freed played Fats Domino, Ruth Brown, Joe Turner, Ivory Joe Hunter, the Dominoes, and dozens of other R&B acts that were not being heard on mainstream radio. He called the music "rock and roll" — a phrase that already existed in the R&B lyric vocabulary as euphemism — and he meant it as a brand, a way of making music that had been categorized as "race records" palatable to the mainstream audience.

By late 1951 the show had the largest teenage audience in northeastern Ohio, racially mixed in a way that made radio executives profoundly uncomfortable. It was this success that made the Moondog Coronation Ball possible — and made Freed's eventual departure for New York's WINS in 1954 inevitable.

Freed's Cleveland showcased rhythm and blues from elsewhere. But the city also produced its own R&B and soul tradition, rooted in the churches of Hough, Glenville, and the central east-side neighborhoods. The O'Jays formed in Canton and broke through in Cleveland. The Outsiders and Dazz Band emerged from east-side communities. Joe Walsh formed the James Gang in Kent. Bobby Womack grew up in Cleveland singing with his brothers in the Womack Brothers gospel group before breaking into soul stardom.

The local club scene supported a dense circuit of talent from the 1950s through the 1970s. Leo's Casino at East 75th and Euclid — owned and run by a Jewish proprietor in a predominantly Black neighborhood — hosted Otis Redding's final American performance on December 9, 1967, the night before his fatal plane crash. Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and nearly every major Motown act came through Leo's in the late 1960s.

When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation was incorporated in 1983, the question of where to locate the eventual museum was not obvious. Memphis, New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit all had legitimate claims. Cleveland's case rested on its radio history (Alan Freed, WMMS), the Moondog Ball, and a civic campaign of improbable intensity: a petition drive that gathered 600,000 signatures in a metropolitan area of 2 million; fundraising commitments from the city government, the state of Ohio, and the private sector totaling more than $65 million; and a sustained lobbying campaign of the selection committee.

In 1986 the committee selected Cleveland. The Hall broke ground in 1993 on a seven-acre site on North Coast Harbor — landfill extending into Lake Erie. I.M. Pei designed the building: a 150,000-square-foot complex centered on a glass pyramid jutting toward the water, a deliberate echo of the Louvre pyramid Pei had completed in 1989. The Rock Hall opened to the public on September 2, 1995, with an all-night concert at Cleveland Municipal Stadium that featured Bruce Springsteen, Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown.

It has since drawn more than ten million visitors and has inducted over 350 artists. It is also the anchor of Cleveland's North Coast cultural corridor and, arguably, the single event around which the city's late-20th-century civic identity turned.