Walkin’ Talkin’ Bill Hawkins

The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2016

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1948, Bill Hawkins became Cleveland’s first black disc jockey. He had a jiving, rhyming style. People gathered on the street to watch him broadcast from a glass booth at the front of his record store. His popularity grew rapidly. Over the next decade Hawkins was heard on up to four different stations on the same day. He had plenty of imitators and influenced a whole generation of DJs. Hawkins also had something else – a son he never knew.

William Allen Taylor didn’t find out Hawkins was his father until he graduated from college. The two met once when Taylor was a teenager. At the time, Hawkins never hinted at who he was. And Taylor had no idea that he had met his father. Hawkins died before his son got to know him.

There are no known tapes of Hawkins. Taylor became an actor and playwright. He lives in San Francisco. But he’s always wished he had a recording of his father’s radio program or even just a snippet of his voice.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Radio Topia. Welcome to the Kitchen Sisters present.
0:04.0	From PRX. We're the Kittron Sisters, Davia Nelson, and Nikki Silva.
0:09.0	Testing, testing, testing. This is May 11.
0:12.0	This is Alan Taylor. Continuing my search for Walk and Talk and Bill Hawkins, I'm here with my mother.
0:18.0	I guess the first thing I'll ask you, Mama, is, when was the first time you laid eyes on Bill Hawkins, I'm here with my mother. I guess the first thing I'll ask you, Mama, is when was the first
0:22.0	time you laid eyes on Bill Hawkins? It was during the middle 40s, traveling on the Mercury
0:29.7	train from Cleveland to Chicago, with my husband, a Baptist minister and pastor, Bill Hawkins, your father, he was a Pullman Porter.
0:42.8	His job was to take care of passengers and to make them comfortable and that he did.
0:49.1	He made the trip nice for all that traveled with him.
0:57.0	Welcome to Fugitive Waves, lost recordings and shards of sound, along with new tales of
1:03.5	remarkable people from around the world.
1:05.7	We're the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva.
1:09.5	You lose your history, you make your history.
1:12.6	William Allen Taylor was born in Cleveland in the 1950s and raised by a single mom.
1:18.2	He became a DJ in college and went on to become an actor and playwright.
1:22.6	Alan has spent his life on a quest, searching for the sound of his father's voice,
1:28.9	a father he never knew,
1:33.7	the legendary Cleveland disc jockey, Wauken-Talkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins.
1:41.8	All right, this is Alan Taylor in search of Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins. I'm sitting here in the Burger King parking lot in Cleveland, Ohio,
1:51.7	with my new friend Emery King, who knew my father during another era. Good morning. When I was a little kid, I come up, boom, Bill Hawkins. That was it. You know, listen to his movie. In the 50s, he was one of the first black dicks
1:59.4	jockeys in Cleveland that was spinning the records.
2:01.6	And he did his radio program out of his record shop.
	...

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