Sha Na Na
American rock and roll cover band
Sha Na Na was an American rock and roll and doo-wop revival group formed in 1969. The group performed a song-and-dance repertoire based on 1950s hit songs that both revived and parodied the music and the New York City street culture of the 1950s. After gaining initial fame for their performance at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, made possible with help from their friend Jimi Hendrix, the group hosted Sha Na Na, a syndicated variety series that ran from 1977 to 1981.
Billing themselves as "from the Streets of New York", members were frequently outfitted in gold lamé or leather jackets and sported pompadour or ducktail hairdos. The group's name was taken from a series of nonsense syllables ("sha na na na, sha na na na na") in the song "Get a Job", originally recorded by the Silhouettes.
The final lineup featured original members Donny York and Jocko Marcellino, and longtime member Screamin' Scott Simon, who joined in 1970. Everyone else from the original band and TV show had since departed.
Sha Na Na released their last regular album in 2006, although they subsequently released compilation albums. As of December 5, 2022, they announced that they would no longer tour.
Career
Conceived by George Leonard, then a humanities graduate student, who also became the group's original choreographer, Sha Na Na began performing in 1969 at the height of the hippie counterculture.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2164074. VIAF identifies the subject as 153741030. The Library of Congress control number is n83046565. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1977, 1981 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sha Na Na” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.