Bobby Rydell, 79, the singer who rose to fame as a South Philly teen idol with hits like ‘Kissin’ Time’, ‘Wild One’ and ‘Wildwood Days’ and had a six-decade show business career, has died.
Mr Rydell’s death was confirmed by his marketing and events coordinator, Maria Novey, who said he died at Jefferson Abington Hospital on Tuesday afternoon.
She said Mr Rydell’s death was unexpected despite having many health issues dating back to 2012 when he underwent a double transplant to replace a liver and kidney.
Philadelphia DJ Jerry Blavat had booked Mr. Rydell to perform at the Kimmel Center in January, but the singer was unable to perform due to health issues. The cause of death was non-COVID-19-related pneumonia complications, according to Novey. Mr. Rydell’s wife, Linda J. Hoffman, was at the hospital with him, Blavat said.
Along with Frankie Avalon, Chubby Checker and Fabian Forte, Mr. Rydell was one of four South Philly teen idols who found national audiences through Dick Clark’s Philadelphia-based television show American Bandstand in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Singer Tommy James called Mr. Rydell on Twitter “A good friend and one of my idols. He will be greatly missed.” Adam Weiner of the Philadelphia band Low Cut Connie called him “a South Philly legend. … Bobby made the best version of ‘Volare’ ever.”
Born Robert Ridarelli, he won a talent contest on Paul Whiteman’s TV Teen Club show in 1950 and soon after changed his stage name to Rydell. Before he was out of his teens he was an international star, touring Australia with the Everly Brothers in 1960 and becoming the youngest artist ever to headline New York’s Copacabana in 1961.
His hits were numerous, beginning when he signed to Philly’s Cameo Records (later Cameo Parkway) in 1959. His first was “Kissin’ Time,” followed by “We Got Love,” his first million-seller, and “Little Bitty.” girl”, his second. In 1960 he had great success with a cover of Domenico Modugno’s “Volare,” and in 1963 “Wildwood Days” became a song of celebration and nostalgia for generations of Jersey Shore-goers in the Philadelphia area.
That same year he starred alongside Ann-Margret and Dick Van Dyke in the film version of the musical Bye Bye Birdie. His name was so associated with the pre-British invasion of classic rock ‘n’ roll that the school was known as Rydell High in the 1971 musical and 1978 film Grease.
Of all the teen idol singers, “he had the best pipes,” Blavat said Tuesday. “He could do Sinatra, he could do anything. Listen to Volare. He could do comedy. He played drums. He was a great copycat. He has been on the Red Skelton Show many times. He could have grown as tall as Bobby Darin, but he didn’t want to leave Philadelphia.”
Mr. Rydell’s father, Adrio, started taking him to South Philly entertainment venues such as the RDA Club and the Erie Social Club when he was 7 years old and asked if his talented son would be in the house band and play the drums could.
He started out as a crooner in his early teens before becoming a rock and roll sensation who, along with Avalon, Fabian and Checker, helped fill the void for pompous teenage heartthrobs when Elvis Presley’s career was on hold was when he joined the army in 1958.
“I wasn’t really a rock and roll singer,” Mr. Rydell told The Inquirer in 2016, at the time of the release of his memoir, Teen Idol on the Rocks: A Tale of Second Chances. “You had to do that to make it. I’m an American songbook guy.”
When asked what his favorite song was in his repertoire, Mr Rydell answered without hesitation. It was Wildwood Days, the ode to the beach town he escaped to while growing up in a row house on 11th Street in South Philly. His grandmother owned a pension there. “It’s the Jersey Shore national anthem,” he said.
When Mr. Rydell’s career took off in 1961, his father left his job as a foreman at the Electro-Nite Carbon Co. to become his road manager. A few years later, Mr. Rydell moved with his parents and grandparents to a house in Penn Valley, where he lived until his move to Blue Bell in 2019.
The mid-1960s saw the end of the Philly teen idols’ big hits after Bandstand moved to Los Angeles and the Beatles arrived. But Rydell kept performing.
“[I] can’t believe the vocal ability [Rydell] has,” Avalon said in 2016. “As an actor, as a comedian, as an impressionist, as a rapporteur with the audience, he is without a doubt one of the most talented people of my entire generation.”
The title of Mr Rydell’s memoir referred to his struggles with alcohol, which began in 1992 when his first wife, Camille, who died in 2003, was first diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I had no right to feel sorry for myself,” he wrote in Teen Idol. “I knew damn well how I got where I was. Decades of drinking had wreaked havoc on my body, destroying my liver and kidneys. I had no one to blame except yours sincerely.”
Mr. Rydell married Hoffman, a nurse and radiographer, in 2009. After his 20-hour double kidney and liver transplant in 2012, he underwent cardiac bypass surgery the next year.
Nonetheless, Mr. Rydell, whose face adorns murals in South Philadelphia and Wildwood, continued to perform, primarily with Forte and Avalon. With the Golden Boys and as a solo artist, Mr Rydell was playing an average of about three dozen shows a year before the pandemic began. The trio returned to the Lancaster stage in August, but Mr. Rydell was unable to perform a show in Florida in January. The singer Lou Christie stood in for him.
A show originally scheduled for March at Atlantic City’s Golden Nugget Hotel & Casino had been pushed back to June, “and we were hoping he would regain his strength to be able to do that show,” Novey said.
Novey first met Mr. Rydell and Hoffman on a Malt Shop Memories Cruise where he was performing, “and he just sat there and talked and took pictures with everyone,” Novey said. “He was just a guy from Philadelphia who never forgot where he came from. I’ve never seen him turn down a request for an autograph, and I mean never. We would wait for the car and he would sign an autograph on the roof. He was just so grateful and he certainly had no ego.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Rydell is survived by his daughter, Jennifer Dulin, and his son, Robert Ridarelli, and five grandchildren. No funeral or memorial services are currently arranged.