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Singer will mark milestone on home turf
Dominic Tocco’s music career has spanned 50 years
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
YOUNGSTOWN
Dominic Tocco has been intertwined with the Brier Hill Festival since it began 22 years ago.
But the singer has been part of the Brier Hill neighborhood his entire life, having grown up there during its heyday.
This week, the annual Brier Hill Festival will return to the North Side neighborhood once known as Youngstown’s Little Italy. And Tocco will be the man of the hour.
The singer is marking 50 years of making music this summer. To mark the milestone, and his long association with the neighborhood and the festival, Tocco has been named Man of the Year of the 2013 Brier Hill Fest.
Tocco and his band, the Brotherhood, have performed at every Brier Hill Festival. Their Sunday night set has become a tradition that brings the event to a close every year.
This year’s performance, which begins at 9:30 Aug. 18, will be extra special.
“It’s going to be a big party,” said Tocco, 65.
Tocco’s music career started in 1963, when he was in high school. He and his friends Tony DeNiro and Joe Nicoli formed a band called the Shy-Tones and the trio played its way through high school and college. The Shy-Tones specialized in the doo-wop sound of that era.
After attending Rayen and graduating from Woodrow Wilson high school in 1965, Tocco attended Youngstown State University.
Bill Modarelli and Mike Yeager would soon join the band, which toured throughout Canada in the summers and locally the rest of the year.
After a 14-month stint in Vietnam, Tocco returned and changed the name of the band to The Brotherhood, and it has remained so ever since. Members came and went, and today he band consists of Jerry Centifanti, guitar; Steve Lawrence, drums; and Peter Pylypiw, keyboards, with Tocco on lead vocals.
Tocco has performed countless gigs over the decades, sometimes six or seven nights a week in the ’70s. He has also played at hundreds of Italian festivals.
Looking back of his more memorable performances, Tocco cites singing at halftime of YSU football games and being chosen by Jimmy Hoffa to sing the national anthems of the United States and Canada at the Teamsters convention in front of 11,000. Tocco was an officer on the local, state and international levels of the labor union.
The Brier Hill neighborhood is now a shell of its former self, done in by the collapse of the steel industry, highway projects and the city’s decline. Most of its houses have been razed and its streets, once full of vibrance, have gone silent.
When Tocco returns, he always locates the empty lot where the house he grew up in once stood. “It’s gone and it’s a shame,” he said.
Still, the neighborhood remains a part of him and he remembers it well.
“My mom and dad were both from Italy, and in those days, that’s where [Italian immigrants] all ended up. We were like a big family. We never locked our doors. If someone put on a kettle of corn, when you walked in the house you grabbed one.
“Everyone watched out for each other and many of us were related,” he continued. “There could be 13 or 14 people living in the same house, including grandparents. ... Only families that lived on Brier Hill will ever experience the closeness we had for each other.”
Tocco and his wife, Maria, have two sons: Dominic III and Giovanni, and three grandchildren, with a fourth on the way.
Tocco said he has raised his family with the same Italian qualities and traditions instilled in him on Brier Hill. “I’m sure those traditions will carry on for generations,” he said.