Influential Radio Legend Rosalie Trombley Dead At 82

Rosalie Trombley (1938-2021)

Legendary CKLW 800 AM music director Rosalie Trombley, the “girl with the golden ears” whom Bob Seger immortalized in song as one of the few female record executives in the 1960s, died Tuesday, her family announced in a release.

The Detroit News reports no cause of death was released, but Trombley, 82, had been ailing from dementia and out of the public eye for some time.

“She was absolutely the most important person in Detroit in the music business, in that time,” said Tom Weschler, a former road manager for Seger and concert photographer. “J. P. McCarthy was big, Purtan was big, but in terms of getting music played, Rosalie was bigger.”

Born in Leamington, Ontario, in 1938, she grew up listening to the first generation of rock ‘n’ roll on CKLW.

In 1963, she got a job working the switchboard at the Windsor radio station, typical of the kind of jobs women had to take in the 1960’s.

 By 1968, Rosalie, a single mother of three, was CKLW’s music librarian. In that job she was responsible for reading the trades and researching to see what the station might want to play. She was so adept at it, she was almost immediately promoted to her boss’ job as music director.

Rosalie never took credit personally, but acts who give her credit for breaking them include Bob Seger, Alice Cooper, Gordon Lightfoot, Aerosmith, the Guess Who (and later, Bachman-Turner-Overdrive). Elton John credits her for forcing his record company to release “Benny and the Jets” as a single.

Her most important research tool was the phone. She had a posse of Detroit R&B disc jockeys and music directors on speed dial, and also kept up with what was being played in the Detroit clubs.

She had such a good ear for what Detroit R&B stations were playing, that acts such as the Parliaments (later, Parliament-Funkadelic) and the Detroit Emeralds hit bigger than they would have, once CKLW was beaming their records out on its enormous 50,000 watt signal, heard in some 38 states, with a weekly cumulative audience in North America of over 3 million listeners.

“She could hear a hit a mile away,” said her son, Tim Trombley, when he accepted the Walt Grealis Achievement Award on her behalf at Canada’s 2016 Juno Awards. He continued: “Most major market stations played it safe and only played the proven national hits. Mom was different. She used her golden ears and instincts to identify, take chances and lead the way for an array of then-unproven artists.”

Producer Bob Ezrin always credited Trombley for hearing “I’m Eighteen” by Alice Cooper as a hit, and playing it before anyone did. It was Cooper’s breakthrough hit.

Rosalie Trombley was the most influential radio station music director of all time. Here's a look at her legacy and some of the songs she helped discover. https://t.co/6G48tABZQp

— Sean Ross (@RossOnRadio) November 24, 2021

Not all the records Trombley helped break would be considered cool today. “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” by Wayne Newton and “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone also hit big thanks in part to heavy CKLW airplay. But at the end of the day, all Trombley cared about was, did the listening audience like it and want to hear it?

📻Click Here To Read More About Rosalie Trombley.

As television's popularity boomed, CKLW, like many other stations, coped with the changes by replacing the dying network radio fare with locally-based disc-jockey shows. Throughout most of the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, CKLW was basically a "variety" radio station which filled in the cracks between full-service features with pop music played by announcers like Bud Davies, Ron Knowles (who had a rock-and-roll show on AM 800 as early as 1957), and Joe Van. For a few years in the early 1960s, CKLW also featured a country music program in the evenings called Sounds Like Nashville. This ended in 1963 when WEXL 1340 became Detroit's first 24-hour country station.

After RKO General took over the station and its FM sister in 1963, CKLW began to shed the variety-format approach and, as "Radio Eight-Oh", began focusing more aggressively on playing contemporary hits and issuing a record survey. Davies, Knowles, Dave Shafer, Tom Clay, Tom Shannon, Larry Morrow (as "Duke Windsor"), Terry Knight, and Don Zee were among the "Radio Eight-Oh" personalities during this time. The station did well thanks to its huge signal, and beat the local competition in Cleveland, Ohio, though in the local Detroit ratings CKLW still lagged well behind competing hit outlet WKNR.

However, on April 4, 1967, CKLW got a drastic makeover with Bill Drake's "Boss Radio" format, programmed locally by Paul Drew. Initially known as "Radio 8" with PAMS jingles, within a few months the station's final transformation into "The Big 8," with new jingles sung by the Johnny Mann Singers, was complete, and the station was on a rapid ratings upswing. In July 1967, CKLW claimed the number one spot in the Detroit ratings for the first time, and WKNR was left in the dust.