From Abington to Harrisburg to Philadelphia, Philly DJ Jimmy Bishop’s gold discs have traveled a long way

First, the gold discs honoring Earth, Wind & Fire, Barry White, and Philly soul singer Eddie Holman spent 22 years in the evidence room of the Abington Police Department.

Then, they sat for another 16 years in a Pennsylvania Treasury Department vault in Harrisburg.

And now the awards, marking half a million copies sold of EW&F’s 1973 album Head To the Sky, White’s 1973 songs “Standing In the Shadows Of Love” and “Bring Back My Yesterday,” and Holman’s 1969 hit “Hey There Lonely Girl,” are back where they belong.

The case of the unclaimed gold records has been solved.

On Wednesday, Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity returned the discs to the family of Jimmy Bishop, the legendary Philadelphia disc jockey and influential program director of WDAS-AM who shaped the careers of acts like the Temptations, Gladys Knight, and the Jackson 5. The gold records were gifted to Bishop by the artists or labels in appreciation of his support.

Garrity presented the records to Bishop’s sons Tabb and Jimmy Bishop Jr., and his wife Louise Williams Bishop at the iHeartMedia offices in Bala Cynwyd, which houses the studios of WDAS-FM (105.3).

The event was a Philadelphia music history teaching moment, celebrating legacy of Bishop, a powerful force in the 1960s and early 1970s when ‘DAS was the dominant radio station in the Black community.

Starting in 1964, Bishop led a team that included such classic jocks as Georgie Woods, Douglas “Jocko” Henderson, and Joe “Butterball” Tamburro. Louise Williams Bishop, the “Gospel Queen” who altered music history by introducing Aretha Franklin to producer Jerry Wexler, with whom she would create her greatest work, was also on the air.

“When you work at ‘DAS, you are stepping in the line of some of the greatest voices in Philadelphia radio,” Patty Jackson, current ‘DAS host and 2023 Philadelphia Music Walk of Fame inductee, said Wednesday. “And at ‘DAS, Jimmy Bishop was that guy. He was this huge radio presence who believed in Black music and the heritage.”

Bishop’s influence in the soul and R&B worlds was formidable. He regularly hosted multi-acts shows before screaming fans at the Nixon Theatre on 52nd Street and Uptown on North Broad.

In 1965, he founded Arctic Records, the label that scored a prototypical Philly soul hit with Barbara Mason’s “Yes, I’m Ready” and was a proving ground for artists like Kenny Gamble and Daryl Hall. He recorded his own Civil Rights-era spoken word single, “(If You Could See Through) the Eyes Of A Black Man.”

“There was a time when if you were a Black artist, you couldn’t come to Philadelphia without coming to our kitchen table,” Bishop Jr. said to The Inquirer. “I remember Chubby Checker coming to the house. Gladys Knight. James Brown. The entire Jackson 5 knocking on the door.”

As prominent of a music industry player as he was, Bishop’s life is surrounded in mystery. He shut down Arctic in 1969 and worked at CBS Records in New York in the early 1970s. He dropped out of the music industry shortly thereafter, leaving few clues to where he ended up. A 2021 Oxford American article titled, “Where is Jimmy Bishop?” didn’t arrive at a concrete answer.

Bishop Jr. calls his father “a mystery wrapped in an enigma.” He last spoke to him around 1999, and is unsure if the radio legend, who was born in Alabama in either 1938 or 1939, is alive. “In my heart he is,” he said.

The story of the recovered gold records is also suffused with mystery.

The records were originally found in a pawn shop in Abington in 1986, during an investigation into a burglary ring, Garrity said. They were held as evidence by the Abington police until 2008, then transferred to the treasurer’s office as unclaimed property.

Garrity took office in 2021 and says she has made it a priority to return unclaimed property, which usually includes bank accounts and safe deposit boxes, not gold records. “We set a record last year, returning $274 million.” (Residents can check for unclaimed property at pa.treasury.gov/unclaimed-property.)

Going through the inventory, the treasurer’s office noticed that WDAS was mentioned on two of the records. They contacted Jackson, who connected Garrity to the Bishops.

It came as a surprise to Bishop Jr., but a welcome one. He didn’t recall the house ever being burgled, but said his father didn’t keep his gold records at home anyway.

They were more likely to be in his recording studio or one of his offices in Philadelphia and New York. “In the industry, you hang them on your walls to impress people, so they can see your accomplishments.”

The recognition Bishop is receiving “is wonderful,” says Louise Williams Bishop, who represented West Philly in the Pa. House of Representatives from 1989 to 2015, and will turn 91 next month.

“To know that we have done things that people still remember. He was never caught up in who he was. He wanted to help people. He was gifted with a great voice and a great talent to help those who came along.”

“It means a lot to have some of his belongings stay with us,” Bishop Jr. said, “because we don’t where he is. You want to try to hold on to what you have. So much time has passed without speaking to him, so this is the closest we can be to him being here.”