Long Before Oprah There Was Della
Mayukh Sen reports: ‘Depending on whom you ask, the name Della Reese conjures a different cultural memory. For most, it evokes Tess, the wry, sarcastic, kind-hearted angel she played in mid-’90s staple Touched by an Angel. For others, it’d be the landlady Della Rogers in the ’70s television show Chico and the Man or her lead role as Victoria Royal in the short-lived The Royal Family in the early ‘90s opposite Redd Foxx. Or, perhaps, they’d recognize her voice, popularized by such singles as 1959’s “Don’t You Know?†and her 1960 rendition of “Someday (You’ll Want Me to Want You)â€. But Della Reese isn’t just a successful singer or actress. Her legacy is far more profound: Reese was the first black woman to host her own syndicated talk show in the United States. This historic fact, though, has been reduced to a footnote in her biography for a simple, maddening reason.
No full episode of this show, which ran for 197 episodes between 1969 and 1970, exists in the public domain.
The digital remains are down to two 10-minute clips on YouTube. One is an episode with singer Eric Burdon of the Animals; another is with comedian Lou Alexander. No other trace has surfaced of a show that sits as an entry in the Lost Media Wiki, a crowd-sourced compendium of history’s abandoned media artifacts. Its disappearance has inspired curiosity as to whether these episodes will emerge from obscurity, resulting in at least one man’s dogged efforts to recover the show’s full archive.’
