Tommy Sands(I)
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Always a country music fan, Tommy Sands' mother gave him a guitar for
Christmas when he was seven. He taught himself to play and, at age
eight, got a job at radio station KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana,
performing twice a week. Later, he and his mother moved to Houston
where, in 1951, he cut his first record for Freedom Records. By 1952,
Tom Parker,
Elvis Presley's manager, signed Sands with
RCA Records, where he recorded seven forgettable songs between 1953 and
1955. In January of 1957, he landed the lead in
The Singin' Idol (1957),
an episode of
Kraft Television Theatre (1947).
A song he sang in that production, "Teenage Crush", shot to #3 on the
Billboard and Cashbox charts, and Sands' career as a teen idol was off
and running. He sang the Oscar-nominated song, "Friendly Persuasion",
at the 1957 Academy Award ceremonies and, the next year, played the
lead in a thinly-disguised biography of his career,
L'idole qui chante (1958). Several years
later, he appeared with his former father-in-law,
Frank Sinatra (he had married Sinatra's
daughter Nancy Sinatra), in
L'île des braves (1965).
Sands later moved to Hawaii, where he had a nightclub and a clothing
business. He sang in a rock festival in England in 1990.
