About the author...

    At 25 years old, I may seem like a pretty young person to have a Web page devoted to the girl groups and girl singers of the 1950s-1970s; but when it comes to the sweet sound of the 60s, I'm an old pro. I first fell in love with early 60s pop music at age 12, when my parents bought our first CD player. The compact disc I convinced my father to buy me was Billboard's Top hits of 1963 - something that had been thrown in the bargain bin.  I wanted to hear a song by a group called the Chiffons on the compilation called "He's So Fine." Several years earlier I while I was listening to CBC, Canada's public radio broadcaster, I heard heard about the group from an oldies music collector who was talking about their larger-than-life hair and their love of the nonsensical lyric. For some reason, the show stuck in my head, and I remembered to look for music by the group soon afterwards.

    Not being a huge music fan before my foray into 60s music, I was excited to here the album, and very impressed with all the songs I heard - especially the offerings from the likes of the Chiffons, the Angels, Lesley Gore, and the Essex. These groups, sang upbeat songs that I could relate to - puppy love, parties, fun - and they were close to my age when they recorded them to boot! But what really struck me was the great harmony and passion that came from the girl groups, and the tremendous songwriting talent behind them.

    My accidental discovery of the sweet sounds of my parents generation soon resulted in an obsession. I quickly bought up all the oldies related material in my hometown's record stores in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada - a medium-sized city in the north of the province which had very little music from the genre. Then I became making trips to the big city in my neck of the woods, Toronto, where I looked more and more for obscure sounds and rare girl group recordings. Soon I had hundreds of songs and dozens of CDs, tapes, and some records to fill the musical void in my life.

    In high school I hosted a show called the Girl Group Chronicles on our community radio station for a year before heading off to university. For two and half hours every Saturday morning I would play obscure oldies the other stations in Sudbury had probably never even heard before, and I developed a very small, but loyal, following of fans newly introduced to the music we all love.

    A graduate of the journalism program at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, I'm now in the process of finishing a Masters in Canadian history. Unfortunate, I'm too busy to keep up my hobby as vigorously as I have in the past, but I hope this Web site will slowly showcase much of the information I've discovered through my years of collecting. I hope you enjoy it, (please forgive the spelling and grammar on these pages - so much was written quickly and poorly by a teenager) and I hope you find at least one or two things you might not have known about the young women who provided the soundtrack to my adolescence - about 30 years too early! With the great recordings they've left behind, hopefully they'll continue to inspire new generations of music fans as they have inspired me.

Email Will at wstos@tyenet.com