Charles Westover was born in 1934 in Coopersville, Michigan, and grew up on the country songs of Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell. Drafted in 1954, he played guitar in an Army band called the Cool Flames in Germany, then drove a furniture truck and sold carpet in Battle Creek while playing rhythm guitar at the Hi-Lo Club. When singer Doug DeMott was fired for drinking in 1958, Westover took over as Charlie Johnson and the Big Little Show Band, and in 1959 he added keyboardist Max Crook and his modified clavioline, the Musitron. A Big Top Records deal in July 1960 brought a new name built from a Cadillac Coupe de Ville and a local wrestler: Del Shannon.
After failed New York sessions, DJ Ollie McLaughlin sent them back to rework Little Runaway with the Musitron as the lead solo. Recorded in January 1961 on the same day as Hats Off to Larry, Runaway hit number one by April. Shannon split from his managers in 1963 and founded Berlee Records, named for his parents, cut a Hank Williams tribute album in 1964, and paid for Bob Seger’s first demo, which he handed to Dick Clark. After the 1967 album The Further Adventures of Charles Westover flopped, he fought alcoholism, co-founded Bug Music in 1975 to track his royalties, and got sober in 1978.
- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers backed Shannon on the 1982 comeback album Drop Down and Get Me.
- A reworked Runaway became the theme for the television series Crime Story.
- He worked with the Smithereens and Jeff Lynne and was rumored as Roy Orbison’s replacement in the Traveling Wilburys.
- His widow testified that Prozac, begun January 24, 1990, caused insomnia and a racing pulse before his death on February 8.
- Coopersville holds a memorial scholarship and an annual car show in his name, and he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.
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