Lou Christie (82) was born Lugee Alfredo Giovanni Sacco on February 19, 1943, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He won a scholarship to the Moon Area High School, he studied music and voice, served as student conductor of the choir and sang solos at holiday concerts. His teacher, Frank Cummings, wanted him to pursue a career in classical music, but Sacco wanted to cut a record to get on American Bandstand. At age 15 he met and befriended Twyla Herbert, a classically trained musician 20 years his senior, who became his regular songwriting partner and wrote hundreds of songs with him over the next 40 years until her death in 2009. In 1962 they penned “The Gypsy Cried,” which he recorded on a two-track recorder in his garage. The single became a local phenomenon, and was eventually licensed for national release by the Roulette label, peaking at number 24 on the pop charts in 1963.
“I never worked with anyone else who was that talented, that original, that exciting,” Christie told Goldmine magazine in 2005. “She was just bizarre, and I was twice as bizarre as her.”
Still as Sacco he performed with several vocal groups and between 1959 and 1962 released several records on small Pittsburgh labels, achieving a local hit with “The Jury” by Lugee & The Lions (a group consisting of Sacco, Twyla Herbert’s daughter Shirley, and two others) released on the Robbee label. After graduating from high school in 1961, Sacco relocated to New York City and worked as a session vocalist.
He was given his stage Lou Christie name by Pittsburgh music exec Nick Cenci, who produced “The Gypsy Cried.” That song made it to No. 24 on the Hot 100 in March 1963, and the next hit “Two Faces Have I” peaked at No. 6 three months later. Christie’s success got him a coveted place on one of Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars tours alongside Diana Ross and others — he did 32 one-nighters in a row, often sleeping on the bus — but then spent two years in the U.S. Army.
He returned to music action in 1966, picking up right where he left off with his biggest hit yet — the lush, chart-topping “Lightnin’ Strikes.” “Lightnin’ Strikes,” arranged, conducted and produced by Charles Calello and featuring backing vocals from Bernadette Carroll, Peggy Santiglia and Denise Ferri of The Delicates, was released on MGM Records in December 1965 and made it to No. 1 two months later on Christie’s 23rd birthday.
When he and Herbert presented MGM Records with “Lightnin’ Strikes,” label head Lenny Shear “threw it in the wastebasket and said it was a piece of crap!” he recalled. “So we put up our own money to get it played around the country, and it started taking off once it got played.”
Christie followed in spring 1966 with “Rhapsody in the Rain,” about a teenager having sex in the backseat of a car during a rainstorm with the windshield wipers going. That one jumped to No. 16 on the Hot 100, even though many radio stations banned it because of the line “our love went much too far.” (A “cleaner” version would follow.)
With backing vocals by Lesley Gore and others, Christie scored again at No. 10 in October 1969 with “I’m Gonna Make You Mine,” and he had yet another hit in 1974 with a version of “Beyond the Blue Horizon” after going country.
Christie split time between New York and London during the early 1970s, and he released the concept album Paint America Love in 1971, followed by a self-titled country album in 1974. By the 1980s, he was appearing on oldies package tours, and in 1997 issued Pledging My Love, his first new material in over a quarter-century. It was worth the wait, as Christie didn’t opt for the obvious and do a lame album of oldie covers, or worse yet, update recuts of his oldies but goodies. Instead, we were treated to an album of new material, most of it penned by Christie himself, presented in a contemporary manner without being buried in maddening dance-mix sludge. Songs like “What Happened to the Nights,” “Techno Pop” (despite the title, an excellent diatribe about the loss of communication in our lives), and “I Sure Fell in Love” were as strong as anything he’s ever recorded, and his well-chosen covers of the Critters’ “Mr. Dieingly Sad” and Johnny Ace’s title tune are equally as fine
.On October 21, 2003, Christie appeared at the Bottom Line in New York City, with performances from the show (one of the last to be held at the longstanding venue) heard on Greatest Hits Live at the Bottom Line, released by Varèse Sarabande the following year).
Christie, whose résumé also included “Outside the Gates of Heaven,” “Are You Getting Any Sunshine?,” “Big Time” and “She Sold Me Magic,” recorded his last album in 2004 and more succeeded Bobby Rydell as a member of the supergroup Dick Fox’s Golden Boys (also featuring 1950s teen idols Frankie Avalon and Fabian) after Rydell’s death in 2022. Christie maintained the ability to sing falsetto well into his 70s, which made him a popular act on the oldies circuit.
Christie died from cancer in Pittsburgh, on June 18, 2025, at the age of 82.
Lou Christie: never quite in step with the trends, not nearly as appreciated as he should be, but for a couple of years there in the sixties his falsetto was more precise, but less known than Frankie Vally and his Four Seasons.
