The picture that leads this blog post was taken in the third month of what would prove to be a very turbulent decade. Within ten years we would become familiar with assassinations, wars and riots. We’d witness the British Invasion and the Hippie movement. But in March 1960, teenagers in Wilkinsburg were still wearing bobby socks, putting grease in their hair and acting like the 50s would never end.
Like wow, daddy-o.
And the music? The kids were bopping to the Bobby Vinton Orchestra. That’s right. Vinton and his crew can be seen in the back of the image, behind the shy boys watching everybody else have all the fun.
Vinton at the time was 24 and two years away from his first hit single, “Roses are Red.” When that record was released in 1962, Vinton bought 1,000 copies and got a young woman to deliver a disc and a dozen roses to every record spinner in town. By July of ‘62, “Roses are Red” topped the charts. The “Polish Prince” had arrived.
A year later came Vinton’s most famous song, “Blue Velvet,” which topped the charts in September 1963. It was still popular on the airwaves when news of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was broadcast in November of that year.
Beatlemania came to America in 1964. Then came Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, and countless other British bands. Many of Vinton’s contemporaries — Connie Francis, for example, and Ricky Nelson — fell from the charts. Vinton, though, continued to produce hits like “Please Love Me Forever” (1967) and “I Love How You Love Me” (1968).
But before all of that, before the hits and the fame, Vinton was a kid from Canonsburg, the son of band leader Stan Vinton and his wife Dorothy Studzinski Vinton. Vinton was the kid who formed a band at age 15 and went on to play gigs around town to help finance his education at Duquesne University. And he was the band leader who provided the musical backdrop to bunch of teenagers from Wilkinsburg who simply wanted to dance on a March evening in 1960.
