The Guitar Sheik

Get a load of this fantastic 1955 photo borrowed from the pages of Jet magazine.  Bobby Walker, in full sheik regalia, strolls the streets of Philadelphia serenading the lucky citizens with his guitar.  Photo by Gaston DeVigne.

WIBG TOP 99 For The Week of November 4, 1963

This post is going up 48 years and 4 days late, but close enough, right? Looking over this, I believe I own 39 of these on 45. Here's #51 for your listening pleasure.

    This one presumably got a few spins over in Merrie Olde Englande, because the next year, Pep-pill popping P.R. Man Peter Meaden (1941-1978) shamelessly rewrote it with new "mod" lyrics for the first single from a band he was then managing called the High Numbers. The single flopped, Meaden was dismissed, and the band presumably vanished into obscurity.
   I'm certainly not going to post every song here for you, but here's #76 and the flip side of #92 (the A-side's fine, but the backside is more appropriate for this venue).
  If you want to hear what the kids in Philadelphia were listening to a few years earlier, Joe Niagara recreated a bit of his show on Cruisin' 1957, which shouldn't be too hard to track down. And while he checked out of this world in 2007, Hy Lit can still be heard deejaying from beyond the grave on www.hylitradio.com (I assume... I had trouble making it load, but it may be a Mac/PC thing).