Thomas Wayne Perkins (July 22, 1940, Batesville, Mississippi – August 15, 1971, Memphis, Tennessee) was an American singer. He is best remembered as a

one-hit wonder A one-hit wonder or viral hit is any entity that achieves mainstream popularity, often for only one piece of work, and becomes known among the general public solely for that momentary success. The term is most commonly used in regard to music p ...

for " Tragedy".

Career

Wayne was the brother of

Johnny Cash John R. Cash (born J. R. Cash; February 26, 1932 – September 12, 2003) was an American country singer-songwriter. Much of Cash's music contained themes of sorrow, moral tribulation, and redemption, especially in the later stages of his ca ...

's guitarist, Luther Perkins. He released several singles between 1958 and 1964, primarily on the labels Fernwood and

Mercury Mercury commonly refers to: * Mercury (planet), the nearest planet to the Sun * Mercury (element), a metallic chemical element with the symbol Hg * Mercury (mythology), a Roman god Mercury or The Mercury may also refer to: Companies * Merc ...

, including " This Time", which would later become a hit for

Troy Shondell Gary Wayne Schelton (May 14, 1939 – January 7, 2016), also known as Troy Shondell, was an American vocalist, who achieved fame in the early 1960s. He became a transatlantic one-hit wonder, by releasing a single that made the record charts ...

. He scored a major U.S. hit with the song "Tragedy" (credited to Thomas Wayne with the DeLons), which peaked at #20 on the R&B Singles

chart A chart (sometimes known as a graph) is a graphical representation for data visualization, in which "the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart". A chart can represent tabu ...

and #5 on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100 in 1959.

Billboard A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertise ...

Allmusic It sold over one million copies, earning gold disc status. The song proved to be his only hit, however. Later, Wayne worked as a sound engineer, before he died in a car accident, at the age of 31, in Memphis in 1971.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wayne, Thomas 1940 births 1971 deaths People from Batesville, Mississippi Singers from Mississippi Phillips International Records artists Road incident deaths in Tennessee 20th-century American singers 20th-century American male singers