Apr 27, 2015 5 min read

While it may be unusual for artists from a town as small as Canonsburg to produce nearly 200 national hit records, one suspects it would not be rare for an area as large as Western Pennsylvania to be home to several well-known rock ‘n’ roll acts over a half century’s time.

Ed Salamon would beg to differ.

Not only does his new book, “Pittsburgh’s Golden Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” define the area’s enormous impact on the national music scene, it also makes a convincing case that rock ‘n’ roll had its start in Pittsburgh.

Salamon ventures from the national acts – The Skyliners, Bobby Vinton, Lou Christie, the Jaggerz, Donnie Iris and George Benson among them – to local acts that may or may not have deserved a larger stage. He also chronicles more than a dozen individuals who progressed from garage bands to national stardom.

To back his belief that Pittsburgh may have been rock ‘n’ roll’s birthplace, Salamon opens his book by noting that rock ‘n’ roll is a combination of rhythm and blues, country and sometimes jazz and gospel.

“Pittsburgh in the late ’40s and early ’50s certainly had an abundance of all of those styles of music and a highly collaborative music community,” Salamon said. “More importantly, Pittsburgh had Porky Chedwick, a disc jockey who sought out this obscure and as yet uncategorized style of music, and played a critical role by presenting it to a racially diverse audience.”

Indeed, in his round of interviews to promote his recent Wheeling concert, Chubby Checker credited his career to Chedwick’s involvement.

Salamon said the consensus of dozens of local acts he interviewed was that they were most influenced by Chedwick and the Skyliners.

“People who aren’t of a certain age may not realize how much the Skyliners changed music with ‘Since I Don’t Have You,'” Salamon said during a telephone interview. Jimmy Beaumont’s blue-eyed soul added a whole new dimension to the music of the time.”

“Since I Don’t Have You” became the first record by a white group to top the R&B charts, and is also credited as the first to be produced with string accompaniment.

Salamon added that growing up in Pittsburgh, he wasn’t aware of how many songs that he heard on the radio were homegrown.

“The disc jockeys of the time didn’t necessarily point out that the songs were by local artists. So you heard the Fenways, Ward Darby and Chuck Osborne right alongside the songs by Elvis, the Beatles and the other national acts,” Salamon said. “And, of course, Clark Race, Terry Lee, Chuck Brinkman and others would feature those local acts on their TV dance shows, so I think we perceived them as being big stars. I don’t think most of us realized until much later how many of them were local singers.”

Salamon said that if there’s one local act that should have made it nationally, it was the Fenways/Racket Squad.

“They were extremely talented, and they changed with the times,” he said. “They started as a doo-wop band, then when the Beatles became popular, they adapted to that sound. In fact, one of the national trade magazines called them Pittsburgh’s Beatles.

“And when the sound became more psychedelic, the Fenways became the Racket Squad and again changed their sound for the times. I think their songs like ‘Walk,’ ‘Be Careful Little Girl’ and ‘Hung Up’ were worthy of national airplay.”

Shortly after the Jaggerz topped the Cashbox charts with “The Rapper” in 1970, it became much more difficult for local acts to be heard on local radio.

“One of the issues was that the people running radio changed in the ’70s,” Salamon said. “They didn’t recognize all those local songs in the music libraries, so they dropped them in favor of national hits. And local acts couldn’t just walk in to a Pittsburgh radio station and expect their song to be on the air anymore.”

However, Salamon, who was music director at KDKA radio in the early ’70s, says in the book he was able to revive that effort and even get “Walk” back on the oldies playlist.

In addition to radio’s open-door policy for local acts in the ’50s and ’60s, Salamon said local disc jockeys were extremely supportive of Western Pennsylvania acts, and that it didn’t hurt that Pittsburgh had some quality record labels and production companies.

Among more than 100 area performers profiled in the book are Canonsburg’s Chuck Edwards, Four Coins, Four Townsmen, Five Crowns, Donnybrooks and Q; Washington High School’s Windsors and Joey Powers; Washington’s Ronnie King and the Passions; Monessen’s Mon-Vales; and Burgettstown’s Buddy Sharp. Waynesburg’s Gary Van Scyoc gets special mention as a member of Elephant’s Memory, which John Lennon asked to join. Eventually, they recorded three albums together, including “Sometime in New York City.”

There’s even a nod to Charleroi’s Shirley Jones, who, of course, sang with the Partridge Family.

More than half of Salamon’s 250-page book is photos – some never before in print. It also is chock full of “clarifications” – especially in the case of the Shondells, who famously were brought in to back Tommy James after Pittsburgh radio stations created a national hit with “Hanky Panky,” after Tommy Jackson and his group had moved on to other projects.

While many Pittsburgh area musicians from the ’60s claim to have been Shondells at one time or another, Salamon has the photos to prove who was in the various incarnations of the band – and points out that it was a local musician, Mike Vale, who wrote “Ball of Fire” and the enduring “Crystal Blue Persuasion.”