Press & broadcasting / Music
Tom Clay
1929–1995 · disc jockey, radio personality, recording artist
Flamboyant Detroit Top 40 DJ at WJBK and CKLW, caught up in the payola scandal, who scored a 1971 hit on Motown's MoWest label with his What the World Needs Now medley.
- Born
New York- Died
Valley Village, Los Angeles, California
aged 66- Birth name
- Thomas Clague
- Also known as
- Guy King · The Magnificent Tom
- Detroit years
- 1950s–1970s
- Field
- Press & broadcasting, Music
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
New York-born Clay made his name in the 1950s at Detroit's WJBK, where his on-air comic characters made him a local celebrity. He admitted during the payola scandal of the late 1950s to taking money for playing records and was fired, then worked briefly at the short-lived Detroit Top 40 station WQTE and in Los Angeles. Back in the Detroit market in the 1960s he joined CKLW, the powerful Top 40 'Big 8' station across the river in Windsor, and rode early Beatlemania to renewed fame. In 1971 he released on Motown's MoWest label a spoken-word collage setting speeches of the assassinated Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. to What the World Needs Now Is Love and Abraham, Martin and John, which became a national hit. He later worked at other Detroit stations and in New York before dying in Los Angeles in 1995.
Highlights
- Popular WJBK disc jockey in the 1950s
- CKLW 'Big 8' DJ in the 1960s
- 1971 hit What the World Needs Now Is Love / Abraham, Martin and John on MoWest
- Fired in the late-1950s payola scandal