After being drafted in 1956, Shannon entertained troops in the Special Services, eventually winning the 7th Army amateur talent contest and earning a spot on the “Get Up and Go ” radio show in Germany.Īfter returning from the military in 1959, Shannon joined the house band at the HiLo Club in Grand Rapids, Michigan. ” Since its initial release in 1961, “Runaway ” has been covered by artists as diverse as “champagne ” bandleader Lawrence Welk and blues guitarist-chanteuse Bonnie Raitt.īorn Charles Weedon Westover in Coopersville, Michigan, Shannon began playing guitar and performing while in high school. According to the Rolling Stone Album Guide, Shannon produced “quintessential American pop-rock, ” with songs that “evoked the spirit of their times without sounding like period pieces. Musically, Shannon used minor-to-major key modulations, a technique he learned from listening to country great Hank Williams.
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His first and biggest hit, “Runaway, ” was the musical and emotional model for much of his later work fully voiced expressions of teen angst would climb Shannon ’s vocal register until his voice cracked into a paper-thin falsetto, spilling out tortured vignettes of loneliness and romantic loss. Shannon also predated the Beatles in another sense: He was a successful rock performer who wrote the majority of his material. Shannon was, in fact, the first American artist ever to record a John Lennon- Paul McCartney composition, releasing “From Me to You ” in 1963 -well ahead of the so-called British Invasion.
An underrated songwriter and brilliant singer, Del Shannon provided the connection between 1950s rock primitivism and the relative melodic sophistication of the Beatles.
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