Cleveland was briefly the epicenter of rock'n'roll, largely through the role of pathfinding disc jockey Alan Freed. But there were other prominent DJs in the city in those days. Among them, Tommy Edwards, who unlike Freed was never the subject of a Hollywood movie or a Congressional investigation, but left behind a trove of color photographs documenting the performers who visited his show. Selections from his long misplaced archive are collected in a coffee table book, the oddly titled 1950s Color Radio: The Lost Photographs of Deejay Tommy Edwards (Kent State University Press).
The text, by musician Christopher Kennedy, sets up the collection as a “visually thrilling account of the five years that encompass the rise, reign, and fall of rock'n'roll's first wave.” The chronology is correct, but the definition is too narrow for the pictures at the heart of Color Radio. A Milwaukeean who spun records at WOKY before moving to Cleveland in 1951, Edwards photographed the gamut of entertainers who passed through his adopted hometown. Color Radio includes shots of Rock Hudson on a promotional tour for Pillow Talk, novelty act Bob McFadden pushing a platter called “The Beat Generation,” Italian-American swinger Al Martino, anti-rock producer Mitch Miller, an aged Clark Gable and a very young Tina Louise six years before her three-hour cruise aboard the Minnow. But yes, there is also Elvis on his first show north of the Mason-Dixon along with Johnny Cash, Eddie Cochran, the Everly Brothers, Link Wray, Wanda Jackson and a slew of intriguing but forgotten rockabillies and girl groups
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As Kennedy explains, he was in search of a lost concert movie, The Pied Piper of Cleveland, documenting a 1955 show in a suburban Cleveland high school headlined by Pat Boone but more interesting for including what might be some of the earliest Elvis footage. Kennedy never found the movie, but in hunting for clues contacted Edwards' nephew, Keith Winters, a Milwaukeean. Their communication triggered the discovery of 1,700 color slides shot by Edwards during his time as one of Cleveland's top jocks in the '50s, stashed in cardboard boxes under the work bench in Winters' basement. The cache formed the basis for Color Radio.
Although Kennedy wants to lump Edwards' career under the rock'n'roll heading, the photographs as well as the bits and pieces reproduced from the radio station newsletter the DJ published from 1953-1960 show he didn't conceive of himself in that way—at least without the benefit of hindsight. Edwards was happy to play across the spectrum of pop and country and seemed to make little distinction between Elvis, Mitch Miller, the Four Lads or Tony Bennett. Playing all kinds of music was a job he clearly enjoyed. Edwards' photographs are a record of an eclectic period in pop culture where the future of music was uncertain and rock'n'roll could easily have joined mambo and calypso among the half-forgotten artifacts of the era.
