R.I.P.: Bobby Rydell, Philly Teen Idol Dies at 79

Bobby Rydell April 26, 1942 – April 5, 2022

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 maintained a career in show business that lasted six decades, has died.

The  Philly Inquirer reports Rydell’s death was confirmed by his marketing and event coordinator, Maria Novey, who said he died Tuesday afternoon at Jefferson Abington Hospital.

She said that Rydell’s death was unexpected, though he had many health problems, dating to 2012 when he underwent a double transplant to replace a liver and a kidney.

Along with Frankie Avalon, Chubby Checker, and Fabian Forte, Mr. Rydell was one of four South Philly teen idols who found a national audience in the late 1950s and early 1960s through Dick Clark’s Philadelphia based television show, American Bandstand.

On Twitter, singer Tommy James called Mr. Rydell “a good friend and one of my idols. He will be sorely missed.” Adam Weiner of the Philadelphia band Low Cut Connie called him “a South Philly legend. ... Bobby did the greatest 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 performer to ever headline the Copacabana in New York in 1961.

His hits were many, starting when he signed with Philly’s Cameo Records (which would later become 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 hit it big with a cover version of Domenico Modugno’s “Volare,” and “Wildwood Days,” in 1963, became a song of celebration and nostalgia for generations of Philadelphia-area Jersey Shore-goers.

That same year, he starred opposite 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 period of vintage rock-and-roll that the school in the 1971 musical and 1978 film Grease was known as Rydell High.

Rydell’s father, Adrio, began taking him to entertainment venues in South Philadelphia like the RDA Club and Erie Social Club when he was 7, asking if his talented son could sit in and play drums with the house band.

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 pompadoured teen heartthrobs when Elvis Presley’s career was put on hold when he went in the Army in 1958.

If asked for the favorite song in his repertoire, Mr. Rydell would respond without hesitation. It was “Wildwood Days,” the ode to the beach town where, when he was growing up in a rowhouse on 11th Street in South Philly, he could escape to. His grandmother owned a boardinghouse there. “It’s the national anthem of the Jersey Shore,” he said.

The big hits stopped coming for the Philly teen idols in the mid-1960s, after Bandstand moved to Los Angeles and the Beatles arrived. But Rydell kept performing.

The title to Rydell’s memoir referred to his struggles with alcohol, which he said 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 had gotten where I was. Decades of drinking had ravaged my body and wrecked my liver and kidneys. I had no one to blame but yours truly.

Rydell married Hoffman, a nurse and X-ray technician, in 2009. After his 20-hour double kidney and liver transplant in 2012, he had heart bypass surgery the next year.