New York musician Christopher Kennedy was searching for the holy grail of rock‘n’roll films The Pied Piper Of Cleveland when he came across another spectacular find – the never before published colour photo collection of popular 1950s Cleveland
New York musician Christopher Kennedy was searching for the holy grail of rock‘n’roll films The Pied Piper Of Cleveland when he came across another spectacular find – the never before published colour photo collection of popular 1950s Cleveland radio deejay Tommy Edwards. The collection consists of over 1,700 Ektachrome slides of practically everyone who passed through his radio station from 1955 to 1960 – Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Doris Day are just a handful of the legends to be found among myriad shots of hopeful unknowns. Edwards was a deejay at Cleveland's most popular station WERE-AM, from 1951 to 1959 and was responsible for booking Elvis at his first concert north of the Mason Dixon line, in February 1955. He was also one of the first ever northern US deejays to play Elvis records.
“I located Tommy's nephew in Wisconsin, who thought he only had a handful of 35mm Ektachrome slides his uncle had taken. He called me one night to say he found nearly 1,800 more stashed away in some boxes, he forgot he had them. I went to Wisconsin, saw the collection, thought the photographs were important and beautiful, and decided to do a book. I'm still looking for the Pied Piper.
When I saw the slides projected onto Tommy's nephew's basement wall, I knew they were amazing. They're so candid and timeless, as well as dripping with beautiful Ektachrome colour. I also found the only existing copies of Tommy's radio industry newsletters, called the "T.E. Newsletter." Every week in the 1950s, he typed out a two-page newsletter about all the radio goings on in Cleveland and around the country. The wealth of information in the newsletters is mind-blowing. The newsletters are the photograph collection's indispensable companion piece. My book gives Tommy Edwards his due recognition as the deejay responsible for perhaps the most important photographic and written documentation of twentieth-century popular music ever produced.”
The book featuring Tommy Edwards’s lost photographs, along with essays from Kennedy, 1950s Radio in Color: The Lost Photographs of Deejay Tommy Edwards is available now.
Text by Laura Havlin
