Big Band Venues - The Valley Forge Music Fair

The name Shelly Gross didn’t resonate with the public during a week when the entertainment business lost so many talented people, but the Philadelphia impresario’s passing a few days ago was the coda to the story of yet another of the region’s now-gone music venues, the Valley Forge Music Fair.

Mean to Me by Rosemary Clooney

The Music Fair was a fixture of Philadelphia’s western suburbs for over 40 years. It got its start in 1954 when Gross, then a TV announcer, and two other friends, broadcaster Frank Ford and nightclub owner Lee Guber, went to see a musical presented in a tent. They were disappointed and complained among each other that they could do a better job. Their complaining finally got under the skin of Ford’s wife Lynne Abraham who told them to either stop complaining or go out and do it. She’s now Philadelphia’s DA, so I guess they were wise not to argue with her! Soon the three formed a partnership and set up their own tent on some open land just south of what was then Valley Forge State Park. Even though it was technically located in an area called Devon, they named it after the park on the theory that everyone recognized Valley Forge but Devon was only known for its once-a-year horse show. The first tent was a striped affair that looked like a circus tent, so for a while the Fair was also called the Music Circus. It was soon replaced with an equally-colorful but more functional tent that let the Fair stay open for more of the year, although it still had to close during the coldest winter months.

Gross, Ford and Guber did do a better job, because the Fair was immediately popular. For the first few years they concentrated exclusively on plays and musicals but soon branched out into other genres including singers, jazz, and of course Big Bands. By the late 1960s the tent format was no longer adequate for the diverse acts that appeared there. 1971 saw the opening of a new, permanent “theater in the round” structure that held larger audiences, had better facilities, and most importantly, could be used year-round.


The permanent building is the one I remember best. I was just out of college when it opened, and on those occasions when I had enough money to splurge on a concert I saw Benny Goodman and his “new sextet” featuring Peter Appleyard and Warren Vaché, Rosemary Clooney and the Artie Shaw Orchestra (see an earlier blog), Bobby Vinton, and some other lesser-known acts. There were other performances I missed because I was still the proverbial impoverished grad student so among my regrets are never seeing Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, or Perry Como when they came to Valley Forge.


The Music Fair continued to prosper but by the mid-1990s the surrounding area had morphed from farmlands to a mini-city with huge retail and office complexes. The land under the Music Fair was now more valuable than the Fair itself – at least according to the developers who coveted it. The Music Fair soon met the same fate as the Earle, the Erlanger, and so many other local musical destinations. Bulldozers moved in to construct the supermarket that was to generate so much more revenue for the township. The Music Fair had lasted 43 years. Sixteen months later, the “new, modern, money-making” supermarket went bankrupt.

Jeff Karpinski
King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
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