Your father and his record collection were a huge
influence on the fledgling Tommy Good weren't they?

My dad, he worked on the railroad, he would sing all the time. He had a great voice. He fuelled my interest in music. He had albums by loads of great singers, he loved the beautiful standard ballads, songs like The Way You Look Tonight, If I Loved You, but he also loved Mahalia Jackson and the blues. I'd listen and unbeknown to me at the time I'd be training my ear and picking up a lot of good singing points. You had to get the breath right to copy those records. They also trained your ear for pitch. Because of that training I can hear a song one time through and sing it straight off. For me it was just the performing in front of people that was the hard part!

And again your dad had a hand in that too.

That's right. I grew up in Detroit, there were four of us, my two younger brothers and my younger sister and then my mum who was taking care of us all. Well my dad took us to a really good Italian restaurant in Detroit. I was 10 and I knew a couple of tunes the band were doing and my dad encouraged me to go up and sing with them and I sung Don't Fence Me In. I was hooked on performance from then on. It was such a pleasurable experience. Then I started listening to doo wop groups like the Crows and Nolan Strong and the Diablos' The Wind, that's such a great ballad. And there was a southern musical influence in Detroit too due to the draw there for work so I'd hear hillbilly tunes, songs by Hank Williams, and I'd be singing all of this stuff. To have been born at that time was really incredible as all sorts of music was merging together to create rock'n'roll, rhythm and blues and rockabilly.