_When the Oxford American dispatched a call for stories about Memphis music, I called Verna Vaughn, my favorite local librarian. At eighty years old, bespectacled in silver harlequin frames, she lives in pursuit of good food, blues music, and an ever more meticulous understanding of Memphis history. I asked, “What Memphis artist is uncelebrated and needs a revival?”

Verna served a swift directive. She said, “Write about A. C. ‘Moohah’ Williams and the Teen Town Singers. Remember Moohah? He was a disc jockey on WDIA.”

I was born in Memphis a year before Dr. King’s assassination in 1968. When Verna mentioned Moohah, I zipped back in time to 1978, the year my father, Kenneth Duncan, left home to exorcise the demons he’d had since serving double tours in the Vietnam War. I found solace in Moohah Williams’s WDIA morning show while getting dressed for Snowden School. Between the comforting sounds of his baritone voice and boom-boom chuckle, he played r&b artists like Aretha Franklin, Rick James, and the Commodores. My favorite song in 1978 was “Brandy,” the O’Jays’ lament about a runaway dog. Brandy was a stand-in for my runaway daddy. I would shout those sad lyrics like I was Koko Taylor. DJ Moohah Williams was my heart-fixer in elementary school. While I had no memory of his Black glee club, I remembered his chuckle and morning playlists with audible clarity.

Like Verna, I am loyal to books, blues music, and 1070 WDIA on the AM dial. These days, the station’s Saturday blues show remains my weekend jam. And when some Memphis scandal is afoot, I listen on weekday mornings to hear WDIA personality Stan Bell offer his views on the tricky situation.

Launched in 1947, WDIA was the first station in the United States programmed entirely for Black listeners. The original owners were white businessmen John Pepper and Bert Ferguson. In 1948, after struggling to find success with country and western programming, the owners switched to Black music, featuring everything from jazz to gospel to blues. The pivot captured Black devotion and led to rising profits. The station’s new success revealed the power of the Black community as a radio audience. And as WDIA catered to Black listeners, it showcased captivating Black disc jockeys like the late Bobby O’Jay, Nat D. Williams, and A. C. “Moohah” Williams. (Nat D. and Moohah shared the same last name, but they were not related.)

Born December 7, 1916, Andrew Charles Williams was raised in Memphis. He graduated from Booker T. Washington (BTW) High School in the early 1930s. His daughter Joan Patterson, an eighty-six-year-old retired medical technologist, remembers her father as a generous parent who “cared deeply for children.” He attended what is now Tennessee State University in Nashville, where he was a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity and came to be known by the nickname “Moohah.” After college, he returned home in 1938 to teach biology in North Memphis at Manassas High, the school that educated luminary musicians Charles Lloyd, Harold Mabern, and Isaac Hayes.

A. C. Williams was a member of Salem Gilfield Baptist Church. Joan calls him a “student of the Bible.” He believed that God and good music could save Black folks from emotional despair, while education and books were elevators to their financial advancement. When he left teaching in 1949 to be a disc jockey and director of public relations for WDIA, Mr. Williams did not leave his love for children behind. Taking notes from “Young America Sings,” a chorus of white teenagers on radio WMC, he pitched his idea to start the Teen Town Singers, a Black glee club on WDIA. Owner Bert Ferguson liked Williams’s vision as a community service. He also knew teenagers would attract radio ads and philanthropic donations. It was not a hard choice.

The first Teen Towners came from segregated Black high schools in Memphis, including Manassas, Booker T. Washington, Douglass, and Melrose. Students practiced on Wednesdays and Fridays after school at the Abe Scharff YMCA. There were twenty-five to thirty teenagers in the group each school year. Sometimes more. As a director, Williams was not slack with his time, speech, or appearance. Tall like a basketball player, he wore glasses and suit coats like the teacher he was. The expectations he put upon himself were the expectations he had for his glee club students.

Williams’s chorus helped WDIA earn its reputation as the “Goodwill” station. In the 1950s, during segregation, the station provided aid to Black children in Memphis. Using proceeds from two annual concerts called the Goodwill and Starlight Revues, WDIA purchased buses to transport disabled Black students to school and contributed donations to Goodwill Homes, a local Black orphanage. The station sponsored Black little league teams and annually awarded college scholarships to dozens of Black high school graduates. From 1949 to 1970, when the glee club was on the air, most scholarship recipients were Teen Towners in Williams’s singing group.

Once I decided to amplify the impact of the WDIA glee club and its founder, Verna served a second directive: “Interview ‘Mother’ and Mark Stansbury.” Meanwhile, as I searched for Mr. Williams’s legacy in old newspapers, she promised to find more surviving Teen Towners. I read books about WDIA and phoned Mark Stansbury. I call him “Professor.”

Black, poor, and living in South Memphis, my daddy and Professor Stansbury were boys together in the Foote Homes housing projects. Before his death in 2009, Daddy told me many times how in grade school, he would visit Mark’s porch to hear him call out blues music and jingles on his make-believe radio. Mark’s childhood dream was to be a DJ. Now, at eighty-two years old, with a crown of white hair, Professor Stansbury is a retired college administrator. And with no end in sight, after sixty-six years announcing music part time on WDIA, he continues to work his gospel shift from 3:30 to 7 PM every Sunday.

Professor Stansbury joined the WDIA Teen Town Singers in 1957 when he was a tenth-grader at BTW. He remembers, “Mr. Williams was a stickler for time. If you were one second late for practice, you did not sing on Saturday morning.” During high school, Stansbury formed the habit of setting his watch thirty minutes early, inspired by his mentor. With the passing of time, Stansbury’s tradition remains unaltered.

Mr. Williams’s rebuke for tardiness was, “Let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya!” His inflexibility might have seemed cruel to some teenagers eager to sing and socialize with friends. But with the clarity of hindsight, Professor Stansbury said, “He was building character and responsibility.”

Musician Catheryn Rivers Johnson was a BTW teacher and served as pianist for the club. Mrs. Johnson encouraged Mark to join. When Mr. Williams discovered the boy’s speaking gifts, it became Mark’s job to introduce the Teen Towners during their live radio show, every Saturday morning at ten o’clock. He served as host until he graduated in 1960 and entered Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, on a WDIA scholarship.

Always one to keep her promises, Verna soon sent me a list of more living Teen Towners. One of them was seventy-three-year-old Cheryl Fanion Cotton. She is a retired GED program tutor who joined the glee club during its final years, when civil rights activist Rev. James Lawson lived in Memphis and pastored Centenary United Methodist Church. It was Lawson who encouraged Dr. King to march with Black workers during the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968. While Cheryl was a devoted Teen Town singer, she was also passionate about civil rights and would attend the evening strike rallies with her father, as an eager listener. She says, “The Memphis Movement made me an activist. It influenced my work in literacy. Everywhere I went, I told people about James Lawson and A. C. Williams.”

Cheryl said Mr. Williams’s run of show never changed. “We opened Saturday programs with gospel and church music. I think ‘Live Humble’ was his favorite song.” The second half of the studio performance was music she called “Mr. Williams’s heyday.” Students sang standards from artists like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and the Gershwin brothers. Programs would end on a soulful note with Teen Towners singing r&b music from Black artists. Cheryl remains confounded. “I don’t know how Mr. Williams knew all of those songs. He never used paper.”

My father’s baby sister Evelyn Ruth is a BTW graduate from the class of 1961. Aunt Evelyn auditioned and was accepted as a Teen Town Singer during her ninth-grade year. She remembers that the harmonizing glee club sang background vocals for popular musicians like Brook Benton, B. B. King, and Bobby “Blue” Bland, when such caliber of artists visited Memphis’s Ellis Auditorium to help WDIA raise money for its Goodwill fund. Aunt Evelyn said, “Singing was something to do on Saturday. But once I realized Mr. Williams was a perfectionist and had us practicing like professionals, I quit after two weeks. The children were really singing and I wasn’t serious like that.” In place of music, Aunt Evelyn went on to discover sewing and used Saturdays to make clothes for church, school, and the WDIA annual concerts.

Joan Patterson says that Teen Towners were gifted vocalists who received priceless lessons in singing, speaking, and stage presence under her father’s guidance. However, Mr. Williams’s vision for the several hundred students who joined his group during its twenty-one years was comprehensive and focused beyond music and the arts. His ultimate goals were the fostering of goodwill and the making of good citizens. Joan said her father used the power of music to develop “Black pride, confidence, integrity, the ability to lead.”

Memphis journalist Wiley Henry is working with Joan Patterson and Professor Stansbury to write a biography about A. C. “Moohah” Williams and the WDIA Teen Town Singers. Wiley said, “Mr. Williams deserves a book. He shaped a great generation of Black Memphis entertainers, teachers, and city leaders.”

Wiley called roll to show the impact of Mr. Williams’s influence. Radio announcer Mark Stansbury was first on his list. Using leadership skills learned as a Teen Towner, Stansbury served as a special assistant to the governor of Tennessee, worked for four universities, and was interim president for a Memphis community college. Insurance executive Fred Davis was a Teen Towner from Manassas High. He founded one of the first independent Black-owned insurance agencies in the South, was the first Black chairman of the Memphis City Council, and helped establish the Assisi Foundation, a group dedicated to philanthropy.

Judge James Swearengen, a Teen Towner and graduate of Douglass High, toiled through evening law school while raising a family to become the first Black member of the Tennessee Bar Association. Attorney Samuel Perkins was a Teen Towner and BTW graduate who served as president of the Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Like A. C. Williams, before Perkins passed, he mentored Memphis youth and sponsored the local Young Historians Club to teach students public speaking and expand their knowledge of civil rights.

The Teen Town Singers did not make recordings as a group. However, individual members found fame and success in the music industry. For instance, during the early 1970s, former Teen Towners and best friends Bobbie Joyner “B. J.” Worthy, Tina Bryant, and Marilyn Jackson worked as background vocalists for Memphis producer and Royal Studio owner Willie Mitchell. Stax artist Carla Thomas is a Hamilton High graduate and one of the few Teen Towners to have joined the group during middle school. After her Billboard hit “Gee Whiz,” Carla collaborated with Williams in 1963 to write the holiday song, “All I Want for Christmas is You.” Soul singers Spencer and Percy Wiggins were Teen Towners from BTW. The brothers refined their harmonizing under Williams’s guidance.

Perhaps the most charismatic and fascinating personality inspired by Williams’s light is the club singer turned Pentecostal evangelist Frances Burnett Kelly, who is a leading voice in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) Christian denomination. During the early 1950s, disc jockey Wink Martindale heard Frances on the radio when she was an eleventh-grade Teen Towner attending BTW. Martindale offered her a radio job in Jackson, Tennessee. Frances accepted the disc jockey assignment but left shortly after to pursue a singing career in Detroit, Michigan. She had recorded music on the Coral label but suffered a debilitating illness and returned to Memphis. As her health was restored, Frances gave up secular music to sing sacred songs and live a life of faith. Today, at ninety years old, when she remembers A. C. Williams and how his glee club served her the confidence to leave home and march toward her dreams, Frances says, “The man was a blessing to children.”

According to biographer Wiley Henry, several Teen Town Singers became teachers. The list includes B. J. Worthy, Glenda Grear Mitchell, and Principal Elsie Lewis Bailey. Wiley says, “His students followed his footsteps.” One such teacher is “Mother,” Verna Vaughn’s sister friend, whose actual name is Barbara Griffin Winfield.

I called Barbara. She is eighty-four, a BTW graduate, and a former Teen Towner. Her WDIA scholarship paid for books at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. She said, “Mr. Williams wanted me to get an education after high school. That scholarship helped.”

Famous for her lilting voice, gold feathered curls, and gold painted fingernails, Barbara was the opening singer for Bo Diddley when he played guitar at segregated beaches on the Chesapeake Bay. Barbara taught in the Memphis schools for thirty-eight years. English was her subject, but she says, “I exposed my students to the arts. They learned singing and dancing. I taught stage presence.” Her dedication mirrors her mentor’s. She said, “Mr. Williams was my second father. Many of us called him ‘Dad.’”

A. C. Williams worked for thirty-four years at WDIA until his retirement in 1983. He passed away on December 3, 2004, at the age of eighty-seven.

With help from Verna Vaughn, herself an uncelebrated librarian whose light uplifted children in the Memphis schools, I was able to contact nine WDIA Teen Town Singers. They are elders now, hoary-haired and slow of step. Only a few of them still sing, but all of them are honorable citizens and evidence of a man’s goodwill. His name was A. C. “Moohah” Williams.

This story was published in the print edition as “Making Good Citizens.” Subscribe to the Oxford American with our year-end, limited-time deal here. Buy the issue this article appears in here: print and digital.