Some celebrities are eternally associated with one sport, movie or art form. In the case of Chuck Woolery, who died on Saturday at the age of 83, it’s less that he had one signature gig and more that evolution of his career feels like a strange roadmap for decades’ worth of American popular culture. That career arguably began with his work in the late-1960s psychedelic rock band The Avant-Garde, who charted with the single “Naturally Stoned” in 1968.
Woolery’s music career continued for several years after that, along with several acting roles. In 1975, he began working as the host of the game show Wheel of Fortune; his work as a television host would continue in the decades that followed, including a decade at the helm of Love Connection beginning in 1983.
While this was far from the first televised dating show — as viewers of the recent film Woman of the Hour can attest — it’s not off-base to draw a connection between Woolery’s work in the 1980s and 1990s with the current dating show landscape. Of Love Connection, journalist Luke Bradshaw Lee observed that the show’s “gossipy post-mortem (some couples had nothing but positive things to say about one another, while others insulted everything from their match’s looks to their personality) led to shows like ‘The Bachelor.’”
Woolery continued hosting a number of programs — game shows and others — in the years that followed, but also branched out into podcasting. As the Associated Press’s Mark Kennedy noted, Woolery’s work as a podcaster ventured into conserative politics and conspiracy theories. Kennedy wrote that, in the early days of the pandemic, Woolery “initially accused medical professionals and Democrats of lying about the virus in an effort to hurt the economy and [Donald] Trump’s chances for reelection to the presidency.”
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An industry insider explains how the genre has always been ahead of the curveAs Brooks Barnes of the New York Times phrased it in a 2017 article, Woolery “[described] himself as a conservative libertarian and constitutionalist.” That might not be the place you’d expect the double bass-playing songwriter behind “Naturally Stoned” to end up — but it’s nonetheless the legacy Woolery leaves behind.
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