Bobby Vinton broke through 60 years ago with ‘Roses are Red’
A publicity photo of Bobby Vinton from the 1960s
Brad Hundt/Observer-Reporter
Bobby Vinton Drive in Canonsburg commemorates one of the borough’s successful native sons.
The single “Roses are Red (My Love),” released in April 1962, launched Bobby Vinton’s successful musical career.
In April 1962, American steelworkers announced a price increase that riled the White House, the Houston Colt .45s, later to be renamed the Houston Astros, played their first game, “Casablanca” director Michael Curtiz died, Walter Cronkite made his debut in the anchor chair on “The CBS Evening News,” and Bob Dylan unveiled “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
And Epic Records released a single by a crooner from Canonsburg who was born Stanley Robert Vinton in 1935. There was no guarantee it would be a success – Vinton had already released seven singles in the four years prior as a bandleader, and none had managed to crack the Billboard Hot 100. This time around, he tried his luck with “Roses are Red (My Love),” a sweet ballad about lost high school love by the composers Al Byron and Paul Evans. He was a vocalist on this outing, and the performer who was going by the name Bobby Vinton struck a chord with the public. It started to steadily ascend the Billboard chart, making it to No. 1 in July and staying there for four weeks, displacing the bawdy instrumental “The Stripper.”
In a 2013 interview with the website Broadway World, Vinton recalled those heady days 60 years ago: “I remember one time when ‘Roses are Red’ was popular and I was touring in the Midwest, when you could pick up stations from all over, and I could go down the knob and hear one of my songs on every station all the time. And that was unbelievable.”
“Roses are Red” started an estimable run of success for Vinton, whose musical chops were refined playing in the orchestra run by his father, Stan Vinton. He scored a No. 1 single the following year with another ballad, “Blue Velvet,” and two in 1964 with “There! I’ve Said It Again” and “Mr. Lonely.” In a harbinger of tectonic shifts that were to come in the musical landscape, “There! I’ve Said It Again” was toppled from the top spot by the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Vinton was also the second Canonsburg singer to find success, coming two decades after Perry Como hit pay dirt.
“Como’s emergence was more predictable, as he had a perfect crooner voice; sooner or later, he would have been discovered by someone,” according to Terry Hazlett, the former borough manager of Canonsburg and now a host on the Washington radio station WJPA. “But Vinton’s success was more hard-fought.”
Aside from working in his father’s band, Vinton had also been a band director for Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars, a touring company that had included acts like Johnny Tilotson, Paul Anka, the Drifters and Bobby Vee. But he really wanted to follow in Como’s footsteps and be a singer, “and went after it, more or less oblivious to the difficulty of getting into the music business. The fact that Epic Records signed him as a bandleader when big bands were becoming passe is amazing in itself,” Hazlett said.
From the vantage point of six decades and all the changes in music that have occurred over that span, Vinton hits like “Roses are Red” and “Blue on Blue” can seem a little syrupy. They were part of a musical environment that many observers over the years have pegged as straight-laced and risk-averse – a valley between the peaks of Elvis Presley and the Beatles. But Al Sussman, the Bethel Park-based author of the book “Changin’ Times: 101 Days That Shaped a Generation,” believes this overlooks creative undercurrents that were happening in pop music before the Beatles’ arrival.
Songs like “Blue Velvet” and “There! I’ve Said It Again,” “were remakes of hits from the 1940s and pre-rock 1950s, so they just represent the musical democracy of the charts and Top 40 radio in that era,” Sussman said. As for “Roses are Red,” he explained, it is “really closer to the country music ballads of the day but, like that other singer from Canonsburg, Bobby could pull off a country ballad without singing with a twang.”
“Roses are Red” also had the advantage in 1962 of being a song that could appeal to both teenage girls and their mothers, “which was exactly what radio wanted,” Hazlett said.
“So while Vinton and his persona would appeal to fans of Fabian, Frankie Avalon, and Bobby Rydell, the song choices – primarily remakes of pop standards – captured the adult audience as well,” he explained. “And had the musical arrangements been separated from the vocals, Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby could easily have recorded those songs.”
While Vinton never quite reached the same pinnacle of success as he did in the two years that followed “Roses are Red,” he sold enough records to make him one of the 50 best-selling artists in history, according to a 2007 tally from Billboard. He had 13 Top 40 singles between 1965 and 1970, and made it to No. 3 on the Billboard chart in 1974 with the polka-tinged “My Melody of Love.” Vinton had a television variety show in the 1970s, later established a theater in Branson, Mo., and was a reliable draw on the oldies circuit before retiring from live shows in 2014. He is now 87 and lives in Florida.
Performers like Vinton “were really incredible singers that we almost take somewhat for granted,” according to David “Ghosty” Willis, the host of the radio program “The Vintage Rock and Pop Shop” on WFDU, the radio station of Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, N.J. “And Bobby Vinton is an incredble singer.”