Philly jazz radio legend ‘Bob Perkins with the good music’ is doing his final show on Sunday

There will be no more BP with the GM on ‘RTI.

In other words: Bob Perkins, the beloved jazz DJ who’s been a staple on Philadelphia radio for over half a century and a fixture on Temple University station WRTI-FM (90.1) for the last 25 years, is set to retire from the airwaves.

The legendary broadcaster — whose signature slogan stands for “Bob Perkins with the good music” — mentioned almost in passing last weekend during his Sunday Jazz Brunch with Bob Perkins that the April 2 episode would be his final show.

Perkins confirmed the news to The Inquirer this week

“This will be my last show, this Sunday coming up,” he said. “I’m going to do some other stuff. At 89 years of age, I’ll be 90 come December, I think it’s time to let somebody else take the role of a DJ at WRTI and move on to something else.”

That something is a podcast whose title — Stay Tuned with Bob Perkins — makes clear that he doesn’t intend to go into complete retirement. Instead, the show will use his life in broadcasting as a source for storytelling. More about that in a minute.

For decades, Perkins, who grew up on the same South Philly block as jazz brothers Jimmy, Percy, and Albert “Tootie” Heath, has educated an appreciative Philadelphia audience about Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, and John Coltrane, as well as younger musicians. “The old stuff,” as he puts it, “and the new stuff that sounds like the old stuff.”

Since the deaths of folk-music DJ Gene Shay in 2020, Sinatra-focused Sid Mark last year, and Jerry Blavat this year, Perkins has been the last broadcaster standing among trusted Philadelphia DJs identified with one brand of music for a staggeringly long time.

Perkins is a 2003 inductee into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia Hall of Fame and a 2016 Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame honoree. In 2016, WRTI station manager David Conant spoke for generations of Philadelphia jazz fans when he said: “Bob is jazz radio. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the music and the musicians, and has known many of the greats. . . . Bob’s staying power is a testament to his greatness.”

His presence has remained a comforting, personable, and authoritative presence on the air. “People call and tell me, ‘I didn’t like jazz till you played it,’” he said with pride in 2016.

But in recent years, the DJ who lives with his wife, Sheila, in Wyncote, has been slowing down.

In 2019, he suffered a stroke and was off the air for four months. Last June, he gave up his weeknight drive-time shift and cut back to only four hours on Sunday, starting at 9 a.m.

“I have a pacemaker. I had a stroke. I’m very lucky that the stroke didn’t take me out,” he said, talking on the phone in the same sonorous, deeply relaxing voice that he honed growing up under the influence of formidable Philadelphia broadcasters such as Mark, John Facenda, and Joel Dorn.

“I have some minor infirmities, in the digits. In the hands. So I try to take care of myself as best as I possibly can and keep going as best as I can. But I can’t do what I usetacould,” he said, and laughed.

He’s always programmed his own show, and is thankful for the freedom WRTI has given him: “They’ve let me hang around for 25 years.”

» READ MORE: Talking all that jazz with WRTI legend Bob Perkins

But lately it’s become a burden. “On the radio, you have to watch the clock, you have to watch the phone, you have to pick the recordings. It’s just too damn much for my noggin at this time. After the stroke, I stepped back a bit and I thought maybe I can go another year or so. And now that time has come.”

Perkins learned to love radio from his father, Deforrest, who would outfit a transistor with custom antennas and pull in signals from across the country. He got the jazz bug from his older brother Joe, who took him to see bandleader Lucky Millinder at the Fays Theater at 40th and Market when he was 5 in 1939. He remembers sitting on his coat to see over the hats of the women in front of him.

Perkins practiced at being a DJ in his South Philly bedroom in the 1950s with a turntable, microphone, and a reel-to-reel tape machine. And he sharpened his people skills selling insurance door to door in North Philly in the 1960s.

“I would always wear a suit and smoke a pipe. I didn’t really smoke a pipe, but I figured that would help get me in the door. Like Sherlock Holmes, I looked trustworthy. And that really helped set me up for radio. It taught me to open my mouth to make a living and get people to like me. It got the nervousness out of me.”

He got his first radio gig in Detroit in 1965, when he walked into a small Black-owned station where he was soon on the air “playing Coltrane and washing it down with B.B. King.” He moved home to Philly in 1969 and got a job as editorial director of WDAS-FM, then known as “the voice of the Black community.”

His insurance-selling skills came in handy. “I used that expertise on the radio, and I guess it worked for me in Philadelphia for 53 years,” he says.

He began playing jazz for Philly audiences in 1977, with a Saturday night show on WHYY-FM (90.9). In the ‘80s, he got a side gig on WDAS-AM, and moved to WRTI in 1997.

In BP’s book, Ellington is the GOAT, and Coltrane, Vaughan, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day, and surprising choices like Morgana King (who played Marlon Brando’s wife in The Godfather) are all-time favorites.

The music has sustained him. “I revere the people who play jazz because I appreciate someone who plays guitar or piano, and they’re playing their life. They must have lived something to produce that sound. Something inward. Some microcosm of themselves coming out. Extemporaneously! I think that’s magic.”

Perkins knows his fans will miss him — the emails and phone calls are coming in. “And I will miss them,” he said.

But after 58 years, he won’t miss the radio. He’s looking forward, he said, to working in a new medium. “My heart is in telling stories about people and things I have experienced.”

With producer Ryan Gottlieb, a colleague from WRTI, Perkins has recorded 11 short Stay Tuned pods that mix interviews with musicians and personal recollections. Theme music is by two Philly musicians, Pete Smyser and Dave Posmontier.

The first episode, A Close Call, about a childhood misadventure involving Tootie Heath, is live at staytunedbp.com. A new one will be added every Wednesday for the next 10 weeks, with more being planned..

“So there’ll still be plenty of BP,” Perkins says. “There just won’t be any more BP with the GM on RTI.”

Here’s a Bob Perkins-compiled playlist of some of his favorites: