How Philly’s WPVI Updated Its News Music and It All Went Wrong

By Paul Greeley
817-578-6324, Paul@NewsBlues.com

It has to be the most played song in Philadelphia television history.

The song has been used by WPVI, the ABC O&O, for more than 60 years as its news music.

WPVI viewers hear it at the beginning and the end of every newscast, every day.

Little kids sing it.

And Roots, the house band for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, plays it when appropriate.

(Here’s an example of the theme song used as a newscast open date unknown.)

According to a September 2015 article by Billy Penn, a newsletter by Philadelphia’s PBS station, WHYY, the music was composed in 1972 by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the vocals were done by The Hillside Singers, a folk ensemble that was pulled together by an advertising agency specifically to sing vocals for TV commercials. Their most famous ad was the 1971 Coke commercial, “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.”

Jim Gardner, who retired in 2022 after 46 years on the anchor desk at WPVI, said the song invokes the same feeling for him that it does for many Philadelphians: familiarity.

“I’m very grateful we have a theme that doesn’t change every four or five years as new people are coming into a television station,” Gardner says. “We have this piece of music that was written in the early 1970s that’s still with us, and it kind of means permanence.”

That feeling of permanence was interrupted in 1996 when the station thought to modernize the song by mildly switching up the composition.

WPVI hired 400 musicians from the London Symphony and London Philharmonic to perform a slower version of the song,

That newer version debuted during the 5 p.m. Action News broadcast on September 20, 1996.

WPVI was inundated with calls from viewers who were angered that the iconic song had been messed with.

Three days and 11 newscasts later, the new version was dumped and the station returned to the original version which is still used to this day.

On Friday, September 20th, 2024, WPVI released a video that uncovered some mysteries surrounding the whole process of modernizing the song.

“We had no intentions of making a long form video,” says Mike Monsell, WPVI’s marketing VP. “But after we spoke with Tom Hedding (former music producer at NFL Films), everything changed. We discovered that this story was more layered and complex than anyone ever imagined.”