Whatever Happened to Adam Wade, TV’s First Black Game Show Host?

Adam Wade broke new ground on television with Musical Chairs, a game show that ended its brief run a half century ago, on October 31, 1975. Though the show only ran for five months, it gave Wade the designation of becoming American’s first Black TV game show host.

But breaking a racial barrier with that program was just one of Wade’s many accomplishments. This is a man who worked with a famed scientist, who opened for Tony Bennett, and who could be seen across the TV dial in the 1970s.

Wade went from basketball player to lab technician to singer

As NorthJersey.com reported in an obituary for Wade, he was born and raised in Pittsburgh, and he earned a basketball scholarship to Virginia State University. After three years, Wade dropped out and became a lab technician working at the University of Pittsburgh under Dr. Jonas Salk, the virologist behind the polio vaccine.

But Wade was also a gifted singer, landing a recording contract with Coed Records in 1959. In 1961, he released three ballads that reached the Top 10 on Billboard charts: “Take Good Care of Her,” “The Writing on the Wall,” and “As if I Didn’t Know,” with his vocal stylings drawing comparisons to those of Johnny Mathis.

“When I left Pittsburgh to come to New York City, I was trying to imitate Nat King Cole, my boyhood idol, not Johnny Mathis,” he told Connecticut Public Radio in 2014. “So I guess that tells you how good my imitating skills were.”

Wade also got an invitation to play New York City’s Copacabana nightclub. “My knees were knocking,” he recalled. “That’s how new I was. I was in show business for five minutes, and the next thing I knew I was opening for Tony Bennett at the Copacabana. It was like I instantly had to learn how to fly.”

Musical Chairs made Wade a TV pioneer

On June 16, 1975, CBS “[broke] the color line” in game shows, as The New York Times reported at the time. That’s when the network debuted a daily afternoon program called Musical Chairs, with Wade’s role as emcee making him the first Black game show host on television.

Musical Chairs was filmed at New York City’s Ed Sullivan Theater, later home to The Late Show, and featured performances from recording acts like Irene Cara and the Spinners. The gameplay involved contestants answering questions about music and completing lyrics to songs, as the Times reported later.

One CBS affiliate, a station in Alabama, refused to air the show because it had a Black host, Wade told Connecticut Public Radio. “I’m sure [the show’s producers] hid some of the letters from me, so I wouldn’t get upset,” he added. “One I did see was from a guy who used all kinds of expletives, saying he didn’t want his wife sitting at home watching the black guy hand out the money and the smarts.”

He valued the experience, though, saying, “It probably added 30 years to my career.”

After the show ended, Wade returned to acting — and college

By the time Musical Chairs came along, Wade had already started an acting career, appearing in Search for Tomorrow, The F.B.I., and other shows. And after the game show was canceled, Wade continued acting, taking roles in Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and many other shows throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.

Additionally, he and second wife Jeree Wade ran a company called Songbird, which staged Black historical revues, including the 1983 Off Broadway production Shades of Harlem, per the Times. The couple also performed together on cruise ships for several weeks a year, Jeree told NewJersey.com. “It was wonderful, a great time in our lives,” she said.

And decades after dropping out of Virginia State, Adam resumed his higher education. “I went back to college, which I hadn’t finished, at age 60, and earned two degrees: my B.A. from Lehman College, and my MA from Brooklyn College, where I studied theater history and criticism,” he told Connecticut Public Radio.

Working for Salk as a young man and receiving those diplomas as an older man were his two proudest achievements, he said. “I promised my grandmother back then that I would finish college someday. Many years later, I kept that promise.”

He died in 2022 at age 87

The entertainer died at age 87 on July 7, 2022, at home in Montclair, New Jersey, of complications from Parkinson’s disease, as Jeree told NewJersey.com. “He was a beautiful man, gentle and kind,” she said.

Jeree explained that her husband learned to work around the mental effects of Parkinson’s. “But with the physical element of Parkinson’s he just couldn’t win, he couldn’t make it through this last bout,” she said. “Though he couldn’t speak in his last days, He would smile at me and mouth the words, ‘I love you.’”

In addition to Jeree, Adam was survived by four children — one with Jeree and three from his marriage to Kay Wade — and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And Jeree said that his funeral was stand-in room only. “The place was packed,” she said, “It was a lovely testament to who he was.”