****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
After serving as a Navy fighter pilot during WW II, Phil McLean (born in Detroit on May 4, 1923) went on to become one of the best-known DJs in the U.S. from the 1950s through to the 1970s, starting in 1951 at Cleveland's WERE-AM 1300 where he and his on-air partner Bill Randle were hugely popular with teen-age listeners throughout the region. When the station went to a new format sometime in 1961, he relocated to New York where, for the better part of the next decade, he hosted an all-night show, before turning to Cleveland in 1971 for a job at WHK-AM 1420.While in New York he recorded a parody of the late 1961 Jimmy Dean smash hit Big Bad John, which Dean had written with Country legend Roy Acuff, and by the end of the year Small Sad Sam, written by Sunny Skylar and E.V. Deane, was on its way to # 6 Adult Contemporary and # 21 Billboard Pop Hot 100 on the small label Versatile 107 b/w Chicken. That’s the 45-rpm you see covered here.His only other record, the follow-up and similar-sounding Big Mouth Bill failed to chart early in 1962 as Versatile 108 b/w Come With Us. Those sides and Chicken are impossible to find in a quality CD setting, but you can get a decent copy of Small Sad Sam in Volume 3 of the Mavis series Hey! Look What I Found!After later working at WWWE-AM 1100 in Cleveland and Hilton Head, North Carolina's WHHR, Phil McLean passed away at age 70 on May 28, 1993.
