A Brotherly Love Supreme: Five Historically Underrated Philadelphians
This edition of The Five Spot is inspired by a question posed to me by the humble narrator, Danny Foxworth of At The Plate With Danny Foxworth and Since We Last Spoke podcasts, during a guest appearance we cut last week.
“Who is one Philadelphian you feel doesn’t get the credit they deserve?”
It’s an inquiry that will get your wheels turning.
While if you love the city like so many of us do, you know it contains multitudes.
Philadelphia is the city where America was officially put to paper, among other things.
So considering everything to happen since, aren’t “Philly” and “underrated”, inherently, sort of a dueling combination of culturally oxymoronic municipality tautology?
Long story short?
Probably.
So what’s underrated aligned with the Soul of a City who created its own brand of Soul?
Twice.
To borrow a phrase from a Smokey & The Miracles intro, “all right now, here we go”:
Tammi Terrell
I’m gonna start at my favorite. Favorite person that comes to mind when I have a chance to think about the question of “Most Underrated Philadelphian?”. Favorite female voice in Motown history (send The Boss and Gladys my apologies). Favorite example of performing triumphantly staring down relentless tragedy. Tammi Terrell, born Thomasina Winifred Montgomery, truly embodies all these.
You may not know that name automatically. But you surely recognize a few of the classic songs she had done as part of a dynamic duo with Marvin Gaye before turning 21.
“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”
“You’re All I Need To Get By”
“Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing”
“Your Precious Love”
We will never know how hard it was to get there. Born in Philadelphia days after WWII ended, to a working-class family of a barber father and mentally ill mother expecting a boy they’d name Tommie. They went with Thomasina. She segued into Tammie. Tammie at 11 was raped by three neighborhood boys walking home from school one day. Tammie left off an ‘e’ then to become Tammi. As a bright student who became the first black woman accepted on an academic scholarship to UPENN for the Pre-Med program, Tammi possessed an even brighter voice. Her first professional record came at 15. She graduated from Germantown High upon being recruited to join James Brown’s revue at 17. She fell into a relationship with the Godfather of Soul then later fled following a vicious beating that made her decide to save her own soul, only months after her country belatedly granted the black people who helped build this place their right to vote.
But that’s a struggle that goes on every day. What was unique and otherworldly was that voice. A voice that had her attending UPENN while on the road with the Temptations putting up with David Ruffin. That voice had her signed to Motown on literally her twentieth birthday. That voice, coupled with its incumbent Philly Girl spirit, is what captivated a young Marvin Gaye, giving him and them an artistic liftoff for the growing legend of the Motown label as its flagship male/female duo.
By the earliest days into 1967’s Summer of Love, Marvin & Tammi were fitted atop the charts together like a Motor City Wedding Cake. That Fall, Tammi collapsed into Marvin’s arms onstage. On New Year’s 1968, doctors discovered the fall was a result of a malignant brain tumor on the right side of her brain. She underwent emergency surgery two weeks later. Tammi returned to Motown, still full of the optimism you can hear in her voice on “You’re All I Need To Get By”. Doctors forbid her from touring shortly thereafter. She made her last public appearance with Marvin at the Apollo in ’69. By that point a beautiful 23-year-old Philly girl ready to rule the world had been rendered bald, confined to a wheelchair, experiencing memory loss. The world lost her at 24. Tammi Terrell has been timelessly, perennially, underrated ever since. Marvin lived and worked another dozen years, but never recovered personally or emotionally from it.
Sidney Lumet
Sidney Lumet was born in 1924 to two Yiddish Theater parents. He would go on to Columbia University in New York and then in a five-time-Oscar-nominated career as a filmmaker his catalog boasts at least eight indisputable cinematic classics:
12 Angry Men (1957)
The Pawnbroker (1965)
Serpico (1973)
Murder On The Orient Express (1974)
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Network (1976)
Prince of the City (1981)
The Verdict (1982)
That more-than-a-handful list alone over the course of a literal fifty-year career would be enough to make this man one of modern cinema’s greatest. Stars like Sean Connery and critics like Roger Ebert back then told you as much. But he does not get that level of acknowledgement from the average filmgoer or even the film-school nerds who’ll talk to you for hours about Scorsese, Coppola, Bergman, Houston. They seem to do far less when discussing the steadily-working and constantly rebirthing blueprint laid out by writer/director Sidney Lumet.
So why is that? Who’s to say. Maybe it’s because he spans at least three distinctly different ages in the film industry without his movies having a trademark “tell”. Perhaps it was because he’s a Jewish boy from Philly without a neurotic comic persona to become overrated by New York City tastemakers gushing over Woody Allen for the best stretch of Lumet’s career. Maybe it’s the way he focuses on the human details in the tales he tells, leaving pyrotechnics up to the actors he casts, from before Henry Ford and well past River Phoenix.
In addition to those seven, he’s also got a good handful of additional bangers: Fail Safe, Child’s Play (no not that one), The Wiz, Garbo Talks, Prince of the City, The Morning After, Running On Empty, Q&A, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead.
His four-year peak came during one of the greatest eras in American movie history (the mid seventies). It’s a run on the level of The Stones Beggar’s Banquet thru Exile On Main Street from ‘68 to ‘72.
Angela Nissel
Angela Nissel is an author/television writer/producer, CAPA and UPENN grad. Some might know her from her time as a writer and executive producer on a sterling resume of shows such as Scrubs, The Boondocks, The Last O.G., or Mixed-ish-turned-Black-ish. Or maybe her pair of novels, The Broke Diaries: The Hilarious Misadventures of a Good Girl Gone Broke and Mixed: My Life In Black and White.
But for many potentially reading this, since this page is basically a Ven diagram of folks I’ve known in my travels including a strong subsection of those I met online before folks dated that way and long before “social media” was even a term let alone a phenomenon known to exist, it’s deeper than that.
Two years before 2001’s The Broke Diaries became a bestseller and Angela Nissel’s first published novel was commissioned by Halle Berry at HBO to be a mini-series, she had an important series of conversations with fellow CAPA grad Questlove. Questlove, then the drummer/band-leader of the only live instrumentation hip-hop band of note working (shout-out to Stetsasonic in an earlier Golden Age or The Goats circa Tricks Of The Shade), had just gotten his record advance for what would become arguably their best album Things Fall Apart. He was about to spend that money to buy a Suzuki Samurai. Instead, Ang (soon to be known as ‘Stress by some) helped him tap in to the potential of the internet.
Under her guidance with Questo’s advance and musical clout they founded Okayplayer in 1999. That decision changed many lives, including mine. The alumni of those raised in the powder-keg of ‘Questlove’s ant-farm’ went on to do many amazing things like host late-night shows, write novels, produce television, form international music collectives, write/direct movies, and probably (don’t quote or blame me on this one) govern cities. People met online then went on to meet off of it, maybe to battlerap at a cheesecake factory or maybe to get married or hire each other for their dream jobs. My best check for writing to date came courtesy of an Okayplayer. An Okayplayer just mailed me a package with a framed Larry Johnson autographed picture as a housewarming gift last month. This topic was formed from an aforementioned pod interview I did with an Okayplayer last week. All from a webpage I used to go to while on break in my college computer lab.
The tentacles extending from this odd little neck of the internet woods that could, to this day, seem endless. But it all started with ‘Stress. In her early days at the helm reading the front page updates she wrote daily, before entering discussion boards that were social-media-before-social-media-and-a pre-natal-form-of-Black-Twitter, was mandatory. If you were lucky and good enough (“yeah, that’s us” like Major Figgas) to write a post garnering an inbox compliment from angiee, it was better than getting a gold star from the best teacher you ever had.
She left the site in, I’m not even sure, but I’d guesstimate 2004. I haven’t really posted on the boards actively since Summer 2015, my last post being from the night a dear friend passed and I caught a late D’Angelo show out West killing time and processing grief before people woke up back East. But we keep tabs on each other. You might get a “you good?” phone call or text check. There’s a slew of folks we know are from “The Old Country” we still communicate with on all the main platforms owned by the Zuck/Musk/Bezos Death Star on the daily. There’s kids getting grown with no earthly idea that the only reason they are here is their parents being “Okayplayery”. It doesn’t matter. If you know, you know. Before hashtags were a thing, on #ThatSite we just did acronyms. NERL aka “No One Ever Really Leaves” was one of them.
And it’s true. You never really do. If you were “outside” circa Y2K into the aughts, and by outside I mean inside, not on a fancy phone computer that didn’t exist yet, you had a home wherever you may roam. That connectivity lifted me in many stints spent living all over the country, plus introduced me to folks from many other ports of earthly entry: Sweden, Nigeria, the Netherlands, to name a few of them. We can never thank you enough, angiee.
John Bucci Jr of John’s Roast Pork
It'd be tough to do a list like this centered in the sandwich capital of the world without some food tie-in. Trying to whittle that down gave me agita. I almost defaulted to picking Schoolly D since he is the too-often-not-mentioned Godfather of Gangsta Rap. But we already have a music entry right in the header photo with Tammi T. Let’s talk sangies, shall we? Hot ones, in this case, not hoagies.
Philly being Philly there are many worthy possibilities without ever mentioning the two big tourist ones we won’t name near 9th & Passyunk. Jim’s on South is hopefully recovering from the fire it had a little while back. My guy Roy would name that. I am becoming more and more a chicken-cheese guy than a cheese-steak guy in my old age, so Ishkabibble’s across from the TLA holds some sway, even garnering a mention in a Wudder movie thread the other day. Dellasandro’s is great but not great enough to pull me out that way. Haven’t been to Joe’s out in Tacony since Marilyn (RIP) took me there way back in the day when it was still under the old name. I’ve done Tony Luke’s in Ocean City Maryland more recently than the one in Philly. I don’t even know if Nick’s Roast Beef still exists.
For the best hot sandwiches, and yes of course cheesesteak, you really can’t go wrong at John’s Roast Pork on the corner of Weccacoe and Snyder Avenue. Truly old-heads knew it as John’s Lunch or the Snyder Avenue Lunch Bar. Not I says >this guy<. That’s before I was born. And I had already left the Philly area for the first time before ever making the trek over to the corner shack that John’s Roast Pork occupies. If I really wanna make a special trip that’s not related to where I’m at taking in a show, game, or specific bar/social-event in the city, this is now my spot to take a ride.
I don’t actually know John Bucci Jr personally, nor much about him as a person outside of being third-generation in the establishment, while seeing him in there looking busy most times I’ve been. Unlike one owner of one of the two tourist spots, he doesn’t seem to be actively and proudly problematic. We’re a big fan of the family that delivers these delicacies until further notice without apologies. And when it comes to the sandwiches, we highly recommend a visit to their corner “again and again”. My father is the roast pork guy in the fam. I keep saying I might switch it up next time, but the OG Cheesesteak (American Widdout) keeps pulling me back in.
A Legendary Philly-Bred Wide Receiver, Fairly Recently Elected To The Football Hall Of Fame, Who Shall Not Be Named
Ask me no questions and I will tell you no lies.
If you ever dreamed about making trouble in the Fairmount neighborhood occupied by this guy, it’s high time you wake up and apologize.
Philadelphia produces basketball greats for days, both presently and historically, at levels above New York City (yeah, I said it, go tell it on the mad-ass mountain).
Philly has also built a pretty impressive resume for boxers too, both real and imagined.
But for football you’d be better off venturing out to the Western part of PA, which is something that I don’t particularly enjoy doing very often.
This Roman Catholic High graduate retired from the NFL at second in receptions, third in yards, as an eight-time Pro Bowler with a Super Bowl win.
Some things were alleged to have happen since.
We didn’t see nor hear a thing.
No charges were filed let alone a trial.
Stop Snitching.
We are however aware that his son is currently the country’s best collegiate receiver.
Other than that, I know nothing.
Have a good weekend, sports fans check out an entertaining new ep b/w Philly sports angst therapy session, “Episode 22 (Years & Counting): Processing a Pod-Mortem” at Da Bombcast.
