Lennie Baker,  Donald 'Donny' York,  Screamin' Scott Simon,  Jocko Marcellino,  Frederick 'Denny’ Greene,  Dave 'Chico' Ryan,  Johnny Contardo,  Jon 'Bowzer' Bauman

The 1950’s is when I tuned into music for the first time —from its early pop days through Rock & Roll and Doo Wop. I was 18 when I graduated High School in 1960 living in Long Island. The music was no doubt influenced by those early street corner groups of Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. And we cant forget, just down the road, Philadelphia’s Bandstand and those South Philly pretty boys.

Rock proceeded down the highway to where it is (?) today. Doo Wop (Acapella) faded away by the mid 60’s but later resurrected by Sha Na Na which was a Doo-Wop revival group formed in 1969. The group performed a song-and-dance repertoire based on 1950s hit songs that both revived and parodied the music and the New York City street culture of the era.

As mentioned Sha Na Na is best described as a Doo-Wop revival group.  The name is taken from a part of the long series of nonsense syllables in the doo-wop hit song "Get a Job", originally recorded in 1957 by the Silhouettes.

Billing themselves as “From the Streets of New York" and outfitted in gold lamé, leather jackets, pompadour and ducktail hairdos, Sha Na Na performs a song-and-dance repertoire of classic fifties rock and roll, They hosted the Sha Na Na syndicated variety TV series that ran 4 seasons from 1977 to 1981. Unfortunately this was during the early days of video and surely not HiDef. We’ve selected a few of their best for quality and or popularity..

Special attention should go to Johnny Contardo the lead singer of Sha Na Na. He began his career with a roll in the Original "Hair" Musical in Boston prior to joining Sha Na Na before the television show of the same name aired from 1977 to 1981. Johnny also appeared with it in the movie Grease (as Johnny, of Johnny Casino and the Gamblers). In 1983 he played Miguel Echevierra in Scarface. His life time story is featured on his YouTube page.

Tech Info: The primary method of transfer for these episodes appears to be Original Broadcast to VHS: During the show’s original run (1977–1981) and reruns (through 1982–1983), fans recorded episodes off the air using consumer-grade VCRs. These recordings captured the syndicated broadcasts in their native analog format, typically in NTSC standard at 525 lines of resolution.  In more recent years, these VHS tapes have been digitized by enthusiasts. This process likely involved connecting a VCR to a computer via an analog-to-digital converter (e.g., a capture card or USB device), then encoding the video into a digital format such as MP4 or AVI. The files were subsequently uploaded to platforms like YouTube or the Internet Archive or burned onto DVDs for bootleg distribution. No evidence suggests that professional-grade transfers (e.g., from original master tapes held by Sony Pictures Television) have occurred for public release. All known transfers stem from consumer recordings, introducing limitations inherent to 1970s home video technology. The quality of the transferred episodes varies depending on the source material and the digitization process.