The answer turned out to be that my version of Angular was 1.0. I was using the angular from the tutorial. I downloaded the working tutorial from the Git repository here: https://github.com/angular/angular-phonecat
and compared all of my files to that side by side. As soon as I upgraded my version to Angular 1.2 used in that demo it worked. There were some other changes I needed to make for the new version (like putting controller names in quotes), but now everything is working. Hope this helps someone else.