Harriet Coffey and Hattie Leeper photo by Daniel Coston
By Daniel Coston
“Have you eaten here before?” Harriet Coffey asks Hattie Leeper. They’re sitting at a restaurant in the South End area of Charlotte, NC, considering what to order. They continue chatting about the weather, traveling, and other everyday things. For all the shared experiences that the two have, you would never guess that this only the second time the two had ever met.
Both Coffey and Leeper are well-known to longtime listeners of the Charlotte radio market. Leeper broke the lines of both race and gender, while Coffey brought a whole new generation to the music that Leeper had once played. In spite of that, the two did not meet for over twenty years, until the passing of a mutual friend finally brought them together.
Hattie Leeper’s interest in radio began at an early age. By the time she was fifteen, she was hanging out at radio station WGIV, acting as a gofer for the disc jockeys, and learning as much as she could. One day, one of the DJs showed up drunk, crashing his car into the station in the process. In his place, Leeper began playing records on the air.
Spinning the records suited Leeper just fine, but she was initially terrified of speaking on the air. “They said, ‘You’ve got to say the call letters at the top of the hour,’” remembers Leeper. “So I held my breath, and they turned the mic on for me, and I did it. I thought, ‘I can do this.’” After high school, “Genial” Gene Potts hired Leeper, making her the first black female DJ at WGIV, where she quickly caught on with listeners in the midday time slot.
The stories that Leeper has from her WGIV days is endless and fascinating. Pig pickings at Otis Redding’s house, building up the careers of legends such as James Brown. The night that Dionne Warwick’s clothes did not arrive, so Leeper lent her one of her own outfits for the evenings. “I often think back on how we used to make an artist big,” recalls Leeper. “They would call ahead and let us know what dates they would be appearing. We would pick them up, and we’d tell them that they could stay at our house. My mother would cook for the musicians.”
Yet Leeper and her fellow DJs were also heavily involved with the community, which also struck a chord with her listeners. “We would have production meetings,” recalls Leeper, “and we would talk about kids needing shoes for the winter. ‘Let’s work out something with a shoe company.’ Someone would say, ‘Okay, what’s the contest?’ No contest, just come to the radio station, and if you need shoes, then pick some up. As soon as we were done with our shift, we would go out in the community. We wouldn’t go home.”
For Coffey, her road to Charlotte began in the early 1970s, while attending Central Connecticut State College. “One of my friends in the dorm was friends with someone who programmed this tiny college radio station,” recalls Coffey. “They needed someone to read the news, and quick. I just happened to be in there while they were talking.” Despite her immediate love of being on air, Coffey spent six years after college working in other jobs, before finally returning to radio.
By 1986, Coffey was in Philadelphia, “at a Cox owned station that had changed its call letters four times while I was there,” recalls Coffey. “One day, I was talking to someone that used to be the GM. I knew something was going on, but he was getting Magic [96] together, and he asked me to go with him. But I said, ‘No, my son is in school.’ A year later, I was out of work, I called him again, and the midday person happened to be leaving. Timing was everything.”
Coffey was an immediate hit with the Magic 96 listeners, both on the air and off. “I like to do public appearances. Because it’s one thing if they like you on the radio, but when they meet you in person, you can make them love you. And they’ll remember you. I think the bottom line is, I try to give people what I would want on the radio.”
One of Coffey’s favorite catchphrases, and an instant favorite with fans, was “Caller number nine on the Metroline.” “Metroline was the name of the request line,” continues Coffey. “I think I had heard something like that once on a bluegrass record. One day, I just singing that, I was just fooling around. That day, my general manager at the time happened to be in the car, driving his young daughter somewhere, and she started singing along with me. He later came back to the station, and said, ‘Keep it.’”
While Coffey’s name was on the rise, listeners began to ask her about Leeper. “When I first came to town, and people saw me, and since my name is Harriet, people wanted to know if Harriet was my mother.”
One person that wanted to introduce Coffey and Leeper was their mutual friend Ray Gooding. “Rockin’ Ray,” as he was known to Charlotte radio listeners for many decades, worked alongside Leeper at WGIV, and would later sign on as WBT’s first black DJ in 1971. “Ray and I were like sister and brother,” says Leeper. “We talked a lot.” When Gooding went to Magic 96 in 1995, he started working alongside Coffey. “He told me several times that I should meet her,” adds Leeper. “He said that she had so many qualities that were like me, and that she reminded him so much of me. He’d say, ‘You two really do need to meet.’”
“Ray kept saying, ‘I need to get you two together,’” adds Coffey. “But it never happened. I guess our circles were different.” Despite never meeting her back then, Coffey has always held a tremendous admiration for Leeper. “Hattie is a great lady,” continues Coffey. “By the time I came along in Charlotte, Hattie had broken all of the barriers, for all of us in radio. Women are always going to have to work a little bit harder in radio, but Hattie was the trailblazer.”
In 1966, WGIV was sold to an outside group, and things quickly changed. “These people came in from California,” recalls Leeper, “and talking to us like they thought us North Carolina didn’t know when to come in from the rain. The first thing they did was have us play Christmas music in July, to show that things were different.”
One of WGIV’s marketing people told Leeper about WRPL (1540 AM), a small station that was then operating out of The White House hotel in downtown Charlotte. “I said, ‘Can I play what we’ve been playing over here?’ And they said yes, so I went there the next day.” Several other members of the WGIV staff, including Ray Gooding, soon followed her to WRPL.
Leeper and the other DJs worked hard at WRPL. “We wanted to be number one,” Leeper says of her time at the station. “But the owner, he saw the radio station as a novelty, something to do for fun. And after a couple of years, we all said, ‘Oh man, he’s not serious about this. We’re going to have to go somewhere else.’” Leeper soon left WRPL and migrated over another large radio station, “Big WAYS” 610 AM. In the years since then, Leeper opened her own record store, taught at Gaston College, and also opened Chatty’s School of Communications in the 1990s. She was inducted into the Black Radio Hall of Fame in 1989 and stays active in the community to this day.
Harriet Coffey continued to be the highest-rated DJ at Magic 96, as well as throughout the city. “My name recognition was second only to John Boy And Billy,” Coffey proudly says. “Bill Dalton did that research for me.” Then, shortly before Thanksgiving in 2001, Coffey finished her daily shift, and was told that Clear Channel was letting her go. It was a move that caused shock waves in the Charlotte media and prompted an avalanche of cards, letters and emails in support of Harriet.
“That meant a lot,” says Coffey. “They say that you can never take that personally, and I didn’t, because Clear Channel didn’t know me. This is just business. But I loved my audience, because for five hours, every day, that’s who I was talking to. I was their best friend, and I loved them right back. And then suddenly, it’s not there.”
Eventually, Coffey found her way to the midday slot on 95.7 FM, “The Ride,” a job that she continues to this day. “Radio is different now,” adds Coffey. “But this market is still everything to me, and these people have been sweet to me, and still do.”
In May of 2007, Ray Gooding passed away. His funeral brought many out that had worked with me throughout his career, and concluded with his casket being carried away while “Good Night  Sweetheart,” Gooding’s signature sign-off song, was played. Afterwards, several people stood in the lobby and talked. Leeper and Coffey stood several feet from each other, reminiscing with different people.
“Someone said to me, ‘That’s Harriet over there,’” remembers Leeper. “I said, ‘Harriet who?’ ‘Oh, you know, Harriet Coffey.’ And a bell went off. So I went over to her, and I felt that the closer I got to her, that I was meeting one of the most, gracious, kindest personalities in the field. We were drawn to each other. And I said to her, ‘Finally. Finally.’ And we both smiled, even though it was a sad occasion.”
“To be honest with you,” says Coffey, “that day, I was in awe of her. And I’m not in awe of anyone, we’re all human beings. But Hattie lived up to everything. Even in death, Ray [Gooding] had found a way to bring us together.” Later on, calls were made, a time and date was chosen, and lunch with the two was finally arranged.
Sitting with the two, watching them laugh and interact with each other, you begin to think about the deeper meaning of this moment. Both Leeper and Coffey share a common history, yet their shared profession never allowed them to meet. Time and circumstances can push us in different directions and keep us from doing things that we wish would happen. But time, and a beloved mutual friend, finally brought these two legends of Charlotte radio together. The years that it took for this meeting to happen now do not matter and their voices ring together like two old friends, like they have known each other all of their lives. Like voices on the radio that they both know so well.
“That was fun,” says Leeper. “We should do this again soon.”
My thanks to the Charlotte Post for their help with this story.
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