The amateur musician Donald “Gus” Backus was stationed with the United States Army in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the mid-1950s. There he joined the doo-wop group The Del-Vikings, who had two top ten hits on the US charts in 1957 with the tracks “Come Go With Me” and “Whispering Bells”. That same year, on July 28, 1957, Backus was assigned to Wiesbaden, Germany. He founded the vocal group “Vidells” there and recorded two of his own songs during a home leave in Chicago a year later. On the advice of his brother-in-law, Backus applied in writing to the record company Polydor in 1959, whose producer Gerhard Mendelson offered the GI test recordings and finally a contract. This was followed by a few singles, which mainly contained German-language cover versions of American and British hits, including Elvis Presley, Paul Anka and Conway Twitty.

Backus made his breakthrough in 1960 with the titles “Brown Bear and White Dove” and “There Spoke the Old Chief”. In the first half of the 1960s, more successful singles and countless appearances in music programs and films followed, with which Backus became a popular entertainer in German-speaking countries. Although he recorded a hillbilly LP in German and English for Polydor in Nashville in 1964, Backus' repertoire was increasingly characterized by mood, drinking and carnival songs. In 1965 Backus landed another big success with the title “Beans in the Ears”. In addition, German-language music increasingly had to assert itself against the rising beat wave in the second half of the 1960s.

In 1973 Backus turned his back on show business and returned to the USA, where he worked, among other things, as a foreman on oil fields in Texas, while in Germany he was temporarily considered missing and was even declared dead. In the 1980s, Backus returned to Germany, where he tried in vain to participate in the success of the oldie wave with new and old music titles. Backus, married, father of five children and multiple grandfather, lived near Munich until his death in 2019.