"Runaway": A Coopersville Carpet Salesman's Worldwide #1

The world remembers Del Shannon for one song, but he was anything but minor — and he came from a tiny farm town in west Michigan.

His name was Charles Westover, born in 1934 and raised in Coopersville, near Grand Rapids. He learned ukulele as a boy, taught himself guitar partly by watching country players in local bars, and after an Army stint settled in Battle Creek, where he sold carpet and drove a truck by day and played a club called the Hi-Lo by night. There he teamed up with a keyboard wizard named Max Crook, who had built his own electronic instrument — the “Musitron,” an early cousin of the synthesizer with a strange, spacey wail.

Westover took the stage name Del Shannon, and in January 1961 he and Crook recorded a song called “Runaway.” Powered by Shannon’s soaring falsetto and Crook’s otherworldly Musitron solo, it shot to number one in both the United States and the United Kingdom. It still turns up on lists of the greatest songs ever recorded.

Here’s the kicker that says everything about how big he got: when Del Shannon toured England, one of his opening acts was a group called the Beatles, who started out as his fans. He went on to write much of his own material — rare for the era — and was later inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Not bad for a kid from Coopersville.