Song Showcase - Walk Away by Del Shannon

To say Del Shannon was underrated is like saying The Beatles had a few good songs. It doesn't even begin to cover it. Shannon had one of the greatest voices in popular music, right up there with Freddie Mercury and Roy Orbison. But he had a bigger range than either of them. Although he was strongest in a falsetto, he could go quite a bit deeper as well, and fairly effectively, which is rare for a singer.

It's also worth noting that Shannon was apparently a big deal in Liverpool during the early days of the Merseybeat movement that gave us The Beatles, who he was a fairly big influence on. He was also the first American to cover a Beatles song - From Me to You, making it the first time a Lennon/McCartney song charted in the US, although it only went to #77.

And yet, to most people, he's just the guy that sang Little Runaway. His career went in the toilet during the mid sixties, and it never really recovered. His recordings after that were fairly few and far between, but they were generally of a very high quality. He tagged for replacing Roy Orbison in the Travelling Willburies before he committed suicide in 1990. His posthumous album, Rock On, had all the elements of Orbison's Mystery Girl, which introduced him to a new generation. It was produced by Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty's Heartbreakers were more or less his backing band on the album, and it had some of the strongest material of his career, and then of course, there's the fact that he died around the time of it's release. And yet, it went nowhere.

Anyway, here's one of the better songs off of that album, Walk Away, which was also one of the album's hits. It went to #99 in Australia and nowhere else. It's like the last depressing footnote of the sad life and career of a great, underappreciated talent.