There’s nothing like an audience at the Apollo. They were wide awake early in the morning. They didn’t ask me what my style was, who I was, how I had evolved, where I’d come from, who influenced me, or anything. They just broke the house up.
—Billie Holiday
From vaudeville through swing, bebop, doo-wop, R&B, rock ’n’ roll, soul and funk, numerous stars have played the Apollo, including, from top, Lionel Hampton, Little Richard and Stevie Wonder.
Since the mid-’70s it hasn’t meant what it once did. It remains one of New York’s very best theaters: great sound, great sightlines. But there are those who remember it almost as a living organism. People didn’t just enter it; it entered them.
Several things made the Apollo special. One was its location: not just in New York City, where a musician might get some national attention, but on a major thoroughfare in Harlem. The Apollo became one with its surroundings: the Braddock Hotel and bar, at 126th and Eighth Avenue, where musicians drank and socialized; the United House of Prayer for All People, across the street on 125th, run by Charles Grace, better known as Daddy, and famous for its shout bands and its soul-food cafeteria; and the theater’s back alley, which became a kind of open-air green room.
The theater has roots and longevity: from vaudeville through swing, bebop, doo-wop, R&B, rock ’n’ roll, soul and funk. In its prime decades its booking policies were a careful combination of opportunism and nurturing. And its Amateur Night transformed the careers of some important musicians.
But above all there was its audience.
“There’s nothing like an audience at the Apollo,” Billie Holiday wrote (with her co-author, William Dufty) in “Lady Sings the Blues.” “They were wide awake early in the morning. They didn’t ask me what my style was, who I was, how I had evolved, where I’d come from, who influenced me, or anything. They just broke the house up.”
Anthony Gourdine, better known as Little Anthony, started frequenting the Apollo with his mother to see gospel shows in the early ’50s and played there dozens of times with his vocal group, the Imperials. “New Yorkers are sophisticated, and very forcefully attuned to their environment,” he said of the Apollo audiences in a phone interview from Las Vegas, where he lives. “When they got their minds set that they liked you, they really let you know. They went bonkers.”
The singer Nancy Wilson remembers it as “the greatest stage.” “If they loved you, they loved you to the point of ecstasy and abandon,” she said by phone from Los Angeles. “When you walk out onstage and haven’t sung a note or said a word and they’re screaming, that’s love.”
And fate too. Ms. Wilson’s manager, John Levy, used the Apollo as a weather vane: he would start tours there to see the crowd’s reactions and make changes in the show for the rest of the tour. “It was like a cult thing,” he said. “When you played there, you could pretty well judge from then whether you were on the right track.”
There were comparably famous theaters for black entertainers in other cities — other stops along the chitlin circuit, like the Howard Theater in Washington, which was a bit smaller (about 1,200 seats to the Apollo’s 1,500), and the Regal in Chicago, which was twice as big.
“But Chicago was just a big country town,” sniffed the veteran jazz drummer Roy Haynes, by telephone a few days ago. “Harlem, that was a serious audience. People knew what they were in for.”
