In 1955, Elvis Presley was new to the North and Bill Randle, a popular Cleveland disk jockey who died Friday at age 81, was one of the few playing the hillbilly trio fronted by the man who would be the King.

In fact, Randle, whom Time magazine had recently named America’s top DJ, was more of a star than Elvis, and a film crew had been following him shooting footage for a project titled “A Day in the Life of a Famous DJ.” Randle’s day included promoting a concert at Cleveland’s Brooklyn High School. Pat Boone was the headliner; Elvis, the opening act, was paid $350.

With a keen sense of what might sell one day, Randle insisted that the crew film Elvis’s performance. He paid them extra to shoot five songs.

The “Day in the Life” project was abandoned, but 37 years later, having established ownership and copyright, Randle sold the footage for a reported $1.9 million.

Randle also played an important role in the careers of Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin, Johnnie Ray, Sam Cooke, Rosemary Clooney, and Fats Domino, among others.

It would be a mistake to credit him with too much foresight, though. The way Randle told the story, Elvis asked him to be his manager during his visit to Cleveland. Randle demurred. Several weeks later, Elvis signed up with “Colonel” Tom Parker, who became very wealthy. In later years, Randle would laugh while labeling Parker a shrewd carnival huckster.

Randle went on to dominate Cleveland radio, where he was a much-loved figure – when he was there. He regularly took years off for alternate careers, working as a DJ at WCBS in New York, as a record producer and promoter, and later as a professor and bankruptcy lawyer. Yet he kept returning to radio, and as late as 1998 he was among the top-rated drive-time personalities in the Cleveland market.

Randle grew up in Detroit and started his career in music introducing big bands at a jazz club. He wrote in a memoir that he once hired as a guard a young man who went by the name of Detroit Red, soon to be known as Malcolm X.

Randle then got a job spinning jazz records on the radio. He was supposedly fired in 1949 for playing a Nat King Cole recording during the day, a taboo in the segregated city. He moved to Cleveland, where he found a job at radio station WERE, which also fired him for playing black performers, but then rehired him. The controversy attracted listeners.

By early 1956, Randle was flying into New York each weekend to work as the emcee of Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s “Stage Show,” which ran Saturday evenings on CBS television.

Said Randle on the January 28 show, “This young fellow we saw for the first time while making a movie short. We think tonight that he’s going to make television history for you. We’d like you to meet him now – Elvis Presley.” And with that, American television viewers had their first glimpse of Elvis, in this case him performing a medley of “Shake, Rattle & Roll” and “Flip, Flop & Fly,” and a rendition of “I Got a Woman.” It mattered little that twice as many people were watching “The Perry Como Show” on NBC.

In 1957, he produced bluesman Big Bill Broonzy’s final recording, the five-LP set “The Bill Broonzy Story,” and it was nominated for a Grammy. The day after recording ended, Broonzy underwent an operation for lung cancer. He was dead within a year.

With a developing interest in roots recordings, Randle went on to record Shaker music in New England and snake handlers at revivals in the South. Eventually, he donated recordings and other materials to the Library of Popular Culture at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University. Randle requested that his prized National Cash Register be displayed outside the library.

“Popular culture is totally commodity. The whole symbol is the cash register that you plunk down your money and you pay for it,” he told NPR in a 1993 interview. “At least, it’s a more honest reflection of the validity of the culture than high culture which is subsidized.”

Although he was a high school dropout, Randle returned to school in the early 1960s and eventually earned an undergraduate degree, master’s degrees in sociology, journalism, and education, and a Ph.D. in American studies. He held teaching posts at Kent State, Case Western Reserve, and the University of Cincinnati.

In 1987, he passed the bar and opened a bankruptcy practice in a Cleveland suburb, continuing to practice until recently. He raced cars, flew airplanes, and on occasion jumped out of them. He collected Eames chairs and cartoons by R. Crumb.

Research had always been a key part of his work ethic, and he stayed up with the latest developments in music all his life by reading the trades. In the 1950s, he would pay jukebox technicians to tell him which songs were garnering the most play. In a 2002 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, he spoke of the Grateful Dead, Al Jolson, Dave Matthews, and Eminem, whom Randle called “an incredible cultural phenomenon.”

William McKinley Randle Jr.

Born March 14, 1923, in Detroit; died July 9 of cancer in a Cleveland hospital; survived by his daughter, Pat, and his sister, Ruth Edwards; his wife of 51 years, Annalee, died in 2000.