Tommy Roe

• 1. Introduction

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  Tommy Roe was still soldering wires at a General Electric plant in Atlanta when a phone call changed everything. His song "Sheila" had just reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and ABC-Paramount wanted him on tour. He was reluctant to leave a steady job. The label advanced him $5,000. He packed his bags.

  Born Thomas David Roe on the 9th of May, 1942, in Atlanta, Georgia, Roe grew up in a city far from the music industry centers of Nashville and New York. He attended Brown High School, wrote a poem for a girl he had a crush on, and turned that poem into a song that would eventually sell enough copies to earn him a gold record. That same song charted three times in different forms across a decade. It even showed up in a Beatles bootleg recording from Hamburg.

  Who was Tommy Roe, beyond the bubblegum hits? A writer who once worried he was sponging off a dead idol. A performer who moved to England to chase success and recorded a song about a girl at an EMI office. A pop craftsman who kept writing, kept performing, and came out of retirement at eighty years old. The full arc of that career, from Atlanta to the UK charts to a quiet Facebook post announcing retirement, is stranger and richer than a string of three-minute singles suggests.

• 2. Sheila and the Buddy Holly Blueprint

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  "I wrote this poem for a girl I had a crush on in high school, and her name was Freda," Roe recalled in 2015. The title changed because his Aunt Sheila happened to be visiting the weekend Jud Phillips sent him home to fix it. That small domestic accident produced one of the more durable song titles of the early 1960s.

  The first version of "Sheila," recorded in 1960 for Phillips's Judd label, was credited to "Tommy Roe and the Satins" and misspelled "Shelia" on the sleeve. It was a regional hit, simpler in arrangement than what followed, and never broke nationally.

  When ABC-Paramount re-recorded the song in 1962, producer Felton Jarvis saw an opening. Buddy Holly had died in 1959, and Jarvis believed a vacuum existed in the market for Holly-style rock and roll. He told Roe directly: "We're gonna do it different. You know there's a vacuum left of Buddy Holly. There are still a lot of Buddy Holly fans out there so we need to draw attention to you, so I'm gonna put Buddy Holly drums on 'Sheila.'" The new arrangement used an insistent drum paradiddle modeled on Holly's 1957 hit "Peggy Sue."

  Roe was uncomfortable with this strategy. He was a genuine Buddy Holly fan and felt, as he put it, like he was "sponging off of him and his whole sound." Despite those reservations, the record went to number 1 in both the United States and Australia. Global sales accumulated slowly enough that the Recording Industry Association of America did not present the gold record until 1969, seven years after the song charted.

• 3. The British Chapter

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  In March 1963, the UK music magazine NME documented a humbling experience: on a 21-day UK tour, both Roe and Chris Montez had been upstaged by the Beatles and their fans. It was the kind of moment that might have pushed a performer back toward Georgia permanently.

  Instead, Roe kept returning to Britain. After watching his friend Roy Orbison tour the United Kingdom more successfully, Roe went back and eventually moved to England, living there for several years. The connection ran deeper than chart strategy.

  In 1964, Roe recorded "Diane From Manchester Square," written by Buzz Cason. The song was about a specific girl who worked at EMI House when the company was based in London's Manchester Square. Sales were poor and it never charted in the UK, but the fact that Roe was writing songs rooted in London geography says something about how seriously he had planted himself there.

  Late 1963 had given him momentum to build on: "Everybody" reached number 3 in the United States and number 9 in the United Kingdom, and "The Folk Singer," written by Merle Kilgore, reached number 4 in the UK. Those results, modest by the standards of what came later, were enough to keep him working both sides of the Atlantic for years.

• 4. Dizzy and the Peak

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  "Dizzy" arrived in 1969 and did something neither "Sheila" nor any of the intervening singles had managed: it went to number 1 simultaneously in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. By mid-April of that year, it had sold two million copies. That made it Roe's third gold disc.

  The run-up to "Dizzy" had been consistent if not spectacular. "Sweet Pea" in 1966 reached number 8 in the United States and number 1 in Canada. "Hooray for Hazel" that same year hit number 6 in the United States and number 2 in Canada. Roe was charting reliably on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the decade, which is a harder thing to sustain than a single breakthrough suggests.

  AllMusic journalist Bill Dahl later wrote that Roe was "widely perceived as one of the archetypal bubblegum artists of the late 1960s, but cut some pretty decent rockers along the way, especially early in his career." The bubblegum label stuck partly because of how the music sounded and partly because of timing: the late 1960s pop landscape was in the middle of sorting artists into serious and non-serious categories, and bright, radio-friendly singles like "Dizzy" landed on the wrong side of that divide for critics who took rock seriously.

  That November, Roe guest-starred in an episode of the American sitcom Green Acres, titled "The Four of Spades," airing on the 8th of November, 1969.

• 5. After the Charts

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  "Jam Up and Jelly Tight," co-written with Freddy Weller, became Roe's fourth gold record and his final Top 10 single. It peaked at number 8 in the United States and number 5 in Canada in 1970. After that, the pop market shifted and Roe's style of music lost its hold on the mainstream.

  He adapted rather than stopped. Through the late 1970s and 1980s, he recorded singles aimed at the country music market. He continued performing live, sometimes sharing stages with 1960s nostalgia acts including Freddy Cannon and Bobby Vee. In 1986, the Georgia Music Hall of Fame inducted him, and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame has also recognized his contribution to the genre.

  Roe published his autobiography in 2016, co-written with Michael Robert Krikorian, under the title From Cabbagetown to Tinseltown and places in between. The title traces the geography of his life from a working-class Atlanta neighborhood to the entertainment industry.

  On the 7th of February, 2018, Roe posted a formal retirement statement on his Facebook page. He counted exactly fifty-five years of performing and thanked fans for their support. "I will stay in touch through our Facebook page," he wrote. "But for now I am stepping out of the spotlight from scheduled concerts and interviews."

• 6. The Return

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  On the 2nd of May, 2022, Roe released a single titled "80" to mark his eightieth birthday. The retirement announcement had lasted roughly four years.

  In February 2023, a Goldmine interview gave him a chance to explain the return in his own words. "Yes, I'm still at it," he said. "It is something that I love doing and it is part of my DNA. I have to do it. I guess I will carry on until I can't do it anymore." On the 5th of January, 2023, he released a full album, From Here to Here, on the independent label Solar Music.

  By April 2023, he had announced live concert dates. Nashville was scheduled for the 9th of May, Holmdel for the 8th of June. Those shows were his first live performances since the 2018 retirement announcement. In 2022 and 2023, he also appeared on several oldies-oriented podcasts to discuss his career.

  The legacy he returned to is a patchwork. In 1991, The Wonder Stuff and Vic Reeves covered "Dizzy" and took it to number 1 on the UK Singles Chart, decades after Roe first recorded it. "Sweet Pea" was sampled on "Lyte As A Rock," from MC Lyte's 1988 album of the same name. And the Beatles' bootleg recording Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962 includes their version of "Sheila," captured in low fidelity before they became an international phenomenon. The boy from Atlanta who once worried he was sponging off Buddy Holly ended up in a Beatles bootleg.