Influence
Her career with the station began as a part-time switchboard operator on Labour Day weekend of 1963, before she was offered a full-time position in the station's music library a few years later. As CKLW's popularity boomed and Rosalie became more and more influential, her job title became "Music Director". Trombley served as Music Director from 1968 through 1984, at which time the station changed formats to classic Big Band Jazz.
The term "crossover hit" owes much of its definition to Rosalie's ability to pick artists from urban and rock playlists and cross them over to CKLW and their CHR Top 40 format, which in that era of radio, was the most listened-to format as defined by cumulative audience listenership and reach.
Trombley is legendary in the history of AM Top 40 radio and was known for her ability to pick future hits. Artists that have acknowledged her pivotal role in their success through early belief and airplay include Elton John, Bob Seger, Alice Cooper, Earth, Wind & Fire, Anne Murray, Tony Orlando and Dawn, The Guess Who, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Chicago, Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes, Gordon Lightfoot, The Stylistics, Parliament/Funkadelic, and Aerosmith.
A 1973 Billboard article notes her role in promoting the Skylark song "Wildflower", playing it for over three months as an album cut before its release as a single.
Seger immortalized her in his 1972 song "Rosalie" from his Back in '72 album. "She's got the tower, She's got the power / Rosalie, Rosalie Trombley" are two lines from the lyrics of that song. The song has been covered by the band Thin Lizzy, on their 1975 album Fighting. Trombley reportedly refused to allow the station to air the song, threatening to quit if the station added it to its playlist; thus, CKLW never played it, although the song did receive airplay on other Detroit stations.
Read more about this topic: Rosalie Trombley
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has “never had a chance, poor devil,” you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.”
—Margot Asquith (1864–1945)
“Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being? There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race. And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there are men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw material and elemental powers, and, where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)