Thomas David "Tommy" Roe (born May 9, 1942) is a retired American rock and pop singer-songwriter. Best-remembered for his hits "Sheila" (1962) and "Dizzy" (1969), Roe was "widely perceived as one of the archetypal bubblegum artists of the late 1960s, but cut some pretty decent rockers along the way, especially early in his career," wrote the AllMusic journalist Bill Dahl. Biography Roe was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, where he attended Brown High School. After graduating, he landed a job at General Electric soldering wires. Tommy Roe first recorded his original song "Sheila" in 1960 for Jud Phillips's Judd label. "I wrote this poem for a girl I had a crush on in high school, and her name was Freda," recalled Roe in 2015. "[Jud Phillips said,] 'Son, I like that song but we gotta do somethin' about that title.' So he sent me home and Aunt Sheila was visiting that weekend. The rest is history!" The Judd single, misspelled "Shelia" and credited to "Tommy Roe and the Satins," is simpler than the more famous hit, with a standard vocal, rhythm combo, and backing chorus. It was a regional hit but did not chart nationally. Roe re-recorded the song for ABC-Paramount in 1962, with a new hook: an insistent drum paradiddle modeled on the 1957 hit "Peggy Sue." Roe's slight Southern accent and his interpolation of a hiccup in the vocal invited comparisons with Buddy Holly. This was deliberate, according to Roe: "Felton [producer Felton Jarvis] said, 'We're gonna do it different. You know there's a vacuum left of Buddy Holly. There are still a lot of Buddy Holly fans out there so we need to draw attention to you, so I'm gonna put Buddy Holly drums on "Sheila."' I wasn't really crazy about that whole idea because I was a big fan of Buddy Holly's and I felt like we were sponging off of him and his whole sound." The new arrangement of "Sheila" became a Billboard number 1 hit in the U.S. and Australia in 1962. A buildup of global sales of "Sheila" meant that the Recording Industry Association of America did not present the gold record until 1969. When "Sheila" became a hit in 1962, ABC-Paramount asked him to go on tour to promote the hit. He was reluctant to give up his secure job at GE until ABC-Paramount advanced him $5,000. However, in