Mickey Baker was a music instructor and Sylvia Vanderpool one of his pupils when Baker was inspired to form the group by the success of…
Browsing: Music – 1950s
Originally formed in Louisville, Kentucky as The Crazy Sounds, the group moved to Cleveland where disc jockey Alan Freed renamed them The Moonglows (after his own nickname…
The Mudlarks were a family group from Luton, Bedfordshire, originally comprising Jeff Mudd, Fred Mudd and Mary Mudd. They all had jobs at the Vauxhall motor…
In the beginning was the word. And the word was A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom! When Rock & Roll exploded on the world in the mid-Fifties with the successive…
Napoleon Brown Goodson Culp was born on 12 October 1929 in Charlotte, North Carolina. He began his career singing gospel music before switching to R&B,…
Learning to play the piano at an early age, Nathaniel Adams Coles secured a residency at Chicago’s Panama Club with his brother Eddie while still…
Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Alabama (USA) in 1930 and moved with her family to Los Angeles at the age of six. When her…
The Olympics began life in 1954 as The Challengers while still at high school in Compton, California. Their debut single, Western Movies (1958), reached #8 in the…
Pat Boone was born Charles Eugene Boone – the great-great-great-great-grandson of pioneer Daniel Boone – in Jacksonville, Florida, on 1 June 1934 and started singing in…
Patsy Cline (born Virginia Patterson-Hensley) had her breakthrough hit in 1957 – at the age of 24 – with Walkin’ After Midnight and became a mainstay at…
Paul Anka was born in Ottawa, Canada, on 30 July 1941, and started singing professionally at the age of 12 with two friends. The trio…
Curtis Williams was a member of vocal group The Hollywood Flames formed in Watts, Los Angeles in 1949. However, in late 1953 he decided to…
Perry Como was born in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and worked as a barber before he embarked on a career in show business in the 1930s. His…
Born on 3 May 1919, and immersed in music by his parents – Charles Seeger, a musicologist, and Constance de Clyver Edson Seeger, a concert violinist…
Formed in Los Angeles in 1953, The Platters were one of the very first black vocal harmony groups to reach a mass white audience. They…
At the height of the British Skiffle craze, John Lennon and some enthusiastic but musically limited school friends from Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool…
Ray Charles started out smooth – A substandard Nat King Cole – but after signing to Atlantic, his gospel background kicked in, and he effectively invented Soul. As…
There were a number of American vocal groups called The Reflections but the best known were a blue-eyed soul/doo-wop group from Detroit, Michigan. They had…
Ricky Nelson first found fame in the 1950s during his stint on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, the popular American sitcom that starred him and…
Ritchie Valens (real name Richard Valenzuela) was born in California on 13 May 1941. As a youngster he sang and played the guitar at school…