George Tompkins Found His Harmony With Vocal Groups
One of the first rules pounded into any person who expresses interest in being on the radio goes like this: Fine, but do not expect this is a way for you to just play your own favorite records.
Fortunately, rules are made to be broken, and for George Tompkins, that worked out fine.
Tompkins, who died Monday at the age of 76, spent a good chunk of 14 years playing his own favorite records over WFUV (90.7 FM), a 50,000-watt public radio station in New York.
For any young folks who think “radio” is just one more thing coming over the Internet, a show like that was a big deal.
The show was called the Group Harmony Review and logically enough it focused on vocal group harmony music, specifically from the 1950s, created by a spectrum of mostly black artists like the Orioles, Moonglows, Flamingos, Heartbeats, Chantels, Swallows, Teenagers, Platters, Penguins, Del Vikings, Ravens and several hundred ensembles whose names began with “The Four” or “The Five.”
It’s sometimes called doo-wop music, a term George Tompkins used though it conjures mixed feelings among fans. Some feel it trivializes the music, making it sound like a novelty, and while it did have an element of good silly fun, it also produced thousands of lovely musical performances and recordings that paved a good part of the road to the likes of the Shirelles, the Temptations, Michael Jackson and Motown.
Popular music evolved out of the 1950s vocal group style, as it evolves out of everything. But what also happens in these evolutions is that a core of fans remains behind and makes it part of their life’s music.
In the case of 1950s vocal group harmony music, that core included George Tompkins. He became a major collector, tracking down and acquiring some of the rarest records around. He eventually transferred everything to CDs and sold his collection, but only after gifting numerous originals to the artists themselves, who often didn’t have copies of all their own recordings.
Like fans of any musical genre, vocal group harmony fans found places to congregate, like Times Square Records in New York and radio programs that prominently included the Time Capsule Show, launched on WFUV in March 1963 by Fordham University students Joe Marchesani and Tom Luciani.
Tompkins became a devoted fan and eventually a close personal friend. He had an interest in radio himself, but mostly on the technical side, working for years with the NYPD 911 system.
Then in 1978, Luciani and Marchesani, who had moved into their adult and family lives, ended the Time Capsule Show.
“I was stunned,” Tompkins said, describing how even as he was listening to the last notes of the last TCS record — “September Song” by the Ravens — he was plotting out “a personal crusade to get them out of retirement.”
It didn’t work. What did happen was that two years later, in 1980, Tompkins became the unlikely cohost of a new vocal group harmony show on WFUV, renamed the Group Harmony Review.
Over the years the show would have multiple cohosts, some in mix-and-match configurations. They included Neil Hirsch, Sal Mondrone, Bill Shibilski, Bob Galgano and Dan Romanello.
From 1980 to 1994, when Tompkins did his last show, one of the most frequent combos was Tompkins with Mondrone. Mondrone, who died in 2019, was one of the great characters of vocal group collecting — a Brooklyn bus driver with a rich baritone voice and a singular style. Tompkins loved telling the story of Mondrone selling $30,000 worth of records to fellow collector Val Shively in Philadelphia and taking the train back to New York with the 30 large in a brown paper bag. Upon his return, as Tompkins told it, Mondrone headed for the local Cadillac dealer and bought a Coupe De Ville convertible for cash.
Mondrone also sang “From This Day On” at Tompkins’s wedding. But most of the collecting world knew the pair from their radio show, where they came across as a couple of passionate fans getting together to — well, play their favorite records.
Neither was a trained radio professional, which worked out fine, because they didn’t treat it as a radio show. It was a get-together, with obscure factoids about records, reminiscences of record collecting adventures and good-natured joking about whatever came to mind.
At the same time, they never let anything diminish the music, for which their appreciation often bordered on reverence. The show over the years brought in dozens of vintage performers like the Wrens and the Mellows, giving artists a chance to appreciate how their music continued to resonate with listeners who were barely born when it was recorded.
George Tompkins had a full life outside music, from two tours as a lieutenant in Vietnam to a long second career as an EMT and then a paramedic in the years after 9/11. But hosting and cohosting the Group Harmony Review, he said, “was my Field of Dreams.
“Just imagine growing up listening to the likes of Alan Freed, Jocko, Alan Fredericks, Tommy Smalls etc., as well as Tom and Joe, and being able to do that myself one day. It was beyond anything I could have ever imagined.”
The late Dan Daniel, a major name in New York radio for decades on WMCA, WYNY, WCBS-FM and elsewhere, said when he retired from his last WCBS-FM gig that he had only one regret about his career.
“I would like to have done one show,” he said, “one shift, maybe two hours, where I just played records I personally love. Maybe on a station like WFUV.”
George Tompkins did that on WFUV. He said it was as good as it sounds.
(WFUV eventually moved the Group Harmony Review from Saturday afternoon to midnight, at which time Romanello became the solo host and kept it on the air until 2018. 1980–1994 shows featuring George Tompkins, Sal Mondrone and various cohosts are available at www.vocalgroupharmony.com.)
