Always a country music fan, Tommy Sands' mother gave him a guitar for Christmas when he was seven. He taught himself to play, and at age eight got a job at radio station KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana, performing twice a week. Later he and his mother moved to Houston, where in 1951 he cut his first record for Freedom Records. By 1952, Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's manager, signed Sands with RCA Records, where he recorded seven forgettable songs between 1953 and 1955. In January of 1957 he landed the lead in "The Singing Idol", an episode of "Kraft Television Theatre" (1947). A song he sang in that production, "Teenage Crush", shot to #3 on the Billboard and Cashbox charts, and Sands' career as a teen idol was off and running. He sang the Oscar-nominted song "Friendly Persuasion" at the 1957 Academy Award ceremonies, and the next year played the lead in a thinly disguised biograpy of his career, _Sing, Boy, Sing (1958)_ . Several years later he appeared with his former father-in-law Frank Sinatra (he had married Sinatra's daughter Nancy Sinatra) in None But the Brave (1965). Sands later moved to Hawaii, where he had a nightclub and a clothing business. He sang in a rock festival in England in 1990.
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