Pop/country singer Johnny Tillotson, 86, died of Parkinson’s on April 1. He recorded such top-10 hits as "Poetry in Motion," "It Keeps Right On a-Hurtin’,” "Without You,” "Talk Back Trembling Lips," and "You Can Never Stop Me Loving You.” As a teenager, he became a hit on local (Florida) radio and TV, and, by 1957, the Grand Old Opry. Tillotson signed his first record contract in ’59, and enjoyed almost immediate success. He sang the theme song to TV’s Gidget, and appeared in the Jayne Mansfield movie The Fat Spy, and the 1976 TV-movie Call of the Wild. He continued recording and performing through 2010, though The British Invasion put an end to the teen bubblegum pop records he specialized in. "You can't fake country," Tillotson told Michael R. Fitzgerald in 2005. "You have to really understand it and love it . . . All I wanted to do was be a country star on the Grand Old Opry, like Hank Williams. The key for me is variety: I play Vegas, county fairs, corporate functions, rock n' roll package shows - so I never get burned out."
Johnny sings “Poetry in Motion” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgAwlH74i2Q (that is not 1960, by the way—look at those groovy minis!)
I remember walking to the Post Office in the Bronx in order to pick up my copy of his 45, "Poetry in Motion", since the mailboxes in the apartment house were too small to fit anything larger than a business envelope in them. (This occurred some years after he had the hit.) The Post Office was about a half hour walk away, across from St. James Park, which my mom and I used to cut through to go to Alexander's Department Store on Fordham Road and the Concourse. I will always remember that when I picked up the record at the Post Office, I heard on an overhead radio station that Pete Deuel ("Love on a Rooftop" and "Alias Smith and Jones") had committed suicide. It's amazing how, even after 54 years, oddities like this stay in one's mind and how I connect the two events.