Come Celebrate Alley Pat's
2013 Georgia Radio Hall Of Fame
Founders and Director's Award
With This Special Screening
2010 Atlanta Film Festival Audience Award Winner
Alley Pat and director Tom Roche are Scheduled to be In Attendance
"Alley Pat: The Music Is Recorded" will have a rare screening at The Plaza Theater, 1049 Ponce DeLeon Ave in Atlanta on Monday October 14 at 7:30PM. The documentary celebrates the outrageous era of classic Rhythm & Blues radio with the trailblazer who helped start it all, James 'Alley Pat' Patrick. This laugh-out-loud film is full of infectious music, vintage graphics, and a trove of barrier-breaking ''airchecks.'' Pat is the last surviving DJ from the first black-owned radio station in the USA, Atlanta’s WERD-AM, which signed on in 1949.
Alley Pat sang and screamed over classic jazz and blues, and improvised his way through hilarious live commercials. But beneath Pat's clowning was deadly serious business; civil rights pioneers like Andrew Young praise Alley Pat's pivotal role in their shared struggle.
These new "Negro format" radio stations attracted open-minded white listeners, getting hip to the most exciting music of the day.
As DJ and promoter, he befriended many of the music greats of the era. And in the 1960's, as Atlanta's first black bail bondsman, he aligned with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, rescuing jailed civil rights marchers in the small Georgia towns on front lines of the battle.
The film explores Pat's close friendship with beloved civil rights activist Hosea Williams, and concludes with Pat's touching but hilarious eulogy at Williams' funeral on thealtar of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The film is a seven-year project directed and edited by Tom Roche, a filmmaker with such varied projects as early R.E.M. videos, Space Ghost Coast-To-Coast, and Spinal Tap Unplugged. Using decades-old radio recordings sonically restored, the film shares a scrappy, devil-may-care quality with Alley Pat’s unpredictable radio shows. Alley Pat is the righteously real ''Mouth of the South."
'Alley Pat: The Music Is Recorded’ came in in First Place in The Kansas City Cinema Jazz Festival, The BronzeLens Fest, and the Atlanta Film Festival 2010.
Tickets $5