Missing While Surfin'

Tommy Dee

Missing While Surfin'

Little Bill Music BMI

Sims 260

1965

Tommy Dee, American DJ and country music producer and promoter, born Thomas M. Donaldson in Vicker, Virginia, died in 2007 in Nashville, Tennessee, around the age of 69-74. His birthday is variously stated as 7 July 1937, 15 July 1936, 1934 or 1933.

While his birth date is not certain, one thing is sure, he was not much a singer, but rather a narrator, specializing in tributes to dead people, preferably the one who made the page one of your newspapers  :

• Three Stars (Crest Records, 1959)  : Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens plane crash
•  Halfway To Hell (Pike 5906, 1961) : Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and Cowboy Copas in another plane crash
• An Open Letter (To Caroline and John-John) (Three Star, 1963) : John F. Kennedy
•  Roger, Ed And Gus (America's Astronaut Heroes (Starday 802, 1967) :  Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee killed during a pre-launch test for the Apollo 1 mission at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (then known as Cape Kennedy), Florida.

Although Tommy Dee never considered himself a singer, he appeared on Dick Clark’s “American Band­stand” three times and toured with Cochran and Conway ‘Twitty; accompaniment was often  provided by Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps and sometimes by (mysterious Columbia Recording artists) the Big Beats.    Said Dee, “My record was in the true sense of the word, a novelty record.   I was in the right place at,the right time.   Everything fell in place."

More info

Trivia :  I've found an early copyright for a song he wrote in 1952, "Red River Shore" which was probably recorded by Sterling Records, a song poem label owned by Louis (Lew) Tobin, out of Boston, Mass, where he grew up.