Throwback Press: Del Shannon in the Lansing State Journal (1957)
Plus Battle Creek Enquirer (1961) and Detroit Free Press (1962) clips
BY RICH TUPICA
Start peeling back the yellowed layers of Michigan’s old newspaper archives, and you’ll stumble on the kind of weird, wonderful nuggets only a local reporter would print. Case in point: a few scrappy local dailies were already giving ink to Del Shannon back when he was still known as Charles Westover, slinging guitar licks in smoky bars and VFW halls across the mitten.
This was long before Rolling Stone or CREEM existed—when rock 'n roll fans got their scraps of info from the entertainment pages of their hometown rags. A lot of it was fluff, but buried in those faded columns is a trail of breadcrumbs leading straight to the heart of Michigan rock ‘n’ roll lore.
Take this gem (shown below) from the Lansing State Journal, dated October 1957: a plug for Doug DeMott & His Moonlight Ramblers playing a Lansing gig, with a then-unknown Del Shannon on lead guitar. That’s four years before “Runaway” turned him into a household name, and a reminder that before the American Bandstand spots and world tours, Del was grinding it out in honky-tonks, probably playing to more barstools than people.
Scroll down and you’ll find a few more Del clippings from local papers that caught on early—hometown glimpses of a star on the rise. Here are a few receipts.
Lansing State Journal: Saturday, Oct. 19, 1957
That above venue, listed as 916 W. Saginaw St., Lansing, looks like this today:
Battle Creek Enquirer: Sunday, May 28, 1961_ … Del was starting to take off
Detroit Free Press: Sunday, Feb. 4, 1962 (by Earl Wilson)
The Ludington Daily News: Wednesday, May 1, 1963
