Jerry Blavat’s South Philadelphia style will live forever

Philadelphia is quieter today, and not talking quite the same.

With the passing of Jerry “the Geator” Blavat Friday morning, we’ve lost more than just the greatest radio DJ our city has ever known (and that’s saying a lot, in a city with as rich and rhythmic a radio history as ours). We’ve lost a uniquely South Philadelphia way of speaking — one that was as much the sound of Philadelphia as Gamble and Huff’s strings, Hall and Oates’ horns, or Questlove’s drums.

Across a more than two-decade journalistic relationship turned friendship, I amassed probably dozens of hours of recorded conversations with Blavat. That pales in comparison to the many Philadelphians who spent 60-plus years listening to him on the radio, showing up and shaking it at his weekly DJ appearances, dancing in the aisles of his Kimmel Center revue shows, and making annual summertime pilgrimages to his Memories in Margate club. But it’s enough to notice things about his patter that were distinctive, and made listeners tap their feet and snap their fingers when he spoke — even if the music wasn’t yet playing.

“I amassed probably dozens of hours of recorded conversations with Blavat.”

Start with the way he said Philadelphia.

Most people give it just four syllables: Fill-uh-DEL-fyuh. Blavat — for whom it was usually Philadelphia, not Philly — would add an extra half-syllable back in: Fill-uh-DEL-fee-uh.

Maybe because it’s written that way.

More likely, though, because it scanned more rhythmically.

Rhythm was inextricable from the way the Geator talked, as he explained to me in a 2020 interview. “If you’re a dancer, there’s a rhythm that you hear in music that goes along with what I say,” he said. “I have the rhythm of a dancer. That’s the secret of it.”

He chose his legendary moniker, “The Geator with the Heater,” as a play on the word gator, and its catchiness helped cement his ubiquity across Philadelphia. Why change gator to Geator? It rhymes with heater, and his record platters were always smoking hot. And maybe that long-E sound falls off the tongue a little more easily than gator’s long-A.

For that matter, why gator?

Why not?

» READ MORE: Jerry Blavat, ‘The Geator with the Heater,’ has died at 82

Not just on the air, but in casual conversation, Blavat would punctuate his sentences with beats and finger snaps. He was acutely aware of the way that words sounded — that’s part of what made him so good at his job.

Even when I answered my phone and heard, “Yo Jeff! It’s the Geat!” I sensed that he opted in the moment for Geat rather than Geator because it sounded better in parallel with the one-syllable Jeff.

For more than 60 years, Jerry Blavat helped shape the way we speak. He was a polyglot, fluent in more languages than most of us — the languages of dance, of melody and harmony, of rhythm — and used them all to communicate his love for his music, his audiences, and his city.

The ways we all speak are from our environment. No one comes out of the womb with a British or Southern or Delco accent; we develop words and sounds based on those we hear around us. The Geator’s inimitable take on language came from the music he heard and loved, and played for us.

We may have lost his encyclopedic knowledge of music history, his zeal for Phil-a-del-phi-a, and the youthful joy that he inspired among his fans and friends. But as long as we keep his music alive, his unforgettable way of speaking lives on in all of us.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and inflections to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.