Tommy Steele

You'd never know it to look at film of him today, but during the summer of 1956, Tommy Steele became England's first home-grown rock & roller. Or he wasn't a rock & roller at all. Some 43 years after he first charted a record, many pop music scholars still question whether Tommy Steele belongs on a list of rock & roll performers. But whatever he was, in 1956, England had never seen anything quite like him. He was born Tommy Hicks on December 17, 1936, in Bermondsey, South London, to a working-class family. In 1952, at age 15, he joined the merchant navy, and for the next four ...