Listen To The Music, See The Images.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Mar 23, 1969:
Jim Morrison prompts a "Rally for Decency"

"Dear Mike," wrote the recently inaugurated President Nixon to Miami-area teenager Mike Levesque in a letter dated March 26, 1969, "I was extremely interested to learn about the admirable initiative undertaken by you and 30,000 other young people at the Miami Teen-age Rally for Decency held last Sunday." The event of which Nixon spoke was organized in response to an incident at a Doors concert some three weeks earlier, when a drunk, combative and sometimes barely coherent Jim Morrison allegedly exposed himself to the crowd at Miami's Dinner Key Auditorium. The alleged exposure, whether it took place or not, created serious legal problems for Morrison. It also created an opportunity for socially conservative Floridians and their celebrity supporters to speak out against the counterculture at the massive "Rally for Decency" held at Miami's Orange Bowl on March 23, 1969.

The Associated Press described the event as being part of "a teen-age crusade for decency in entertainment." On hand to support that crusade was a handful of celebrities not normally associated with the youth market: Kate Smith, Jackie Gleason, The Lettermen and Anita Bryant, spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission. Ms. Bryant, who would later become an outspoken opponent of gay rights, was not the only grownup to make political hay out of what began as a sincere event organized by the teenage members of a Roman Catholic youth group. On March 24, the day after the rally, President Nixon's daily news summary included a mention of the event along with a handwritten note from a young aide named Pat Buchanan: "The pollution of young minds...an extremely popular issue; one on which we can probably get a tremendous majority of Americans." Eight months later, Nixon would give his famous "Silent Majority" speech, and 23 years later, Buchanan would make a serious bid for the Republican presidential nomination running as a veteran of the so-called "Culture Wars."

As for Jim Morrison, the incident that sparked the Rally for Decency led to his conviction seven months later on charges of profanity and indecent exposure. Sentenced to six months' hard labor in a Florida prison, Morrison left the United States for France while his conviction was under appeal. He died in Paris in July 1971.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Mar 24, 1958:
Elvis Presley is inducted into the U.S. Army

When Elvis Presley turned 18 on January 8, 1953, he fulfilled his patriotic duty and legal obligation to register his name with the Selective Service System, thereby making himself eligible for the draft. The Korean War was still underway at the time, but as a student in good standing at L.C. Humes High School in Memphis, Elvis received a student deferment that kept him from facing conscription during that conflict's final months. Elvis would receive another deferment four years later when his draft number finally came up, but this time for a very different reason: to complete the filming of his third Hollywood movie, King Creole. With that obligation fulfilled, Uncle Sam would wait no longer. On March 24, 1958, Elvis Presley was finally inducted, starting his day as the King of Rock and Roll, but ending it as a lowly buck private in the United States Army.

Elvis's manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker, made sure to have a photographer on hand to document every moment of the big day, which began at Graceland before six that morning. The photos show Elvis in dark slacks, an opened-collar shirt and a tasteful plaid sports coat, preparing to depart the house with his similarly well-dressed mom and dad for the short ride to the induction center in downtown Memphis. The 23-year-old Elvis looked fantastic, of course, and his face betrayed no hint of nervousness or regret. The flat expression on Gladys Presley's face, however, and the dark circles under her eyes, hint at the emotional impact of preparing to send her only child off on a two-year stint away from home—far longer than she and Elvis had ever before been separated. This would be the last time that Elvis would see his mother in good health, as she was diagnosed with hepatitis and hospitalized later that spring during Elvis's first weekend leave. Elvis would be granted leave once again in August to attend to his mother on her death bed. Gladys Presley passed away on August 16, 1958, and four weeks later, Elvis shipped out to Germany.

There would be other huge changes in Elvis's life during his two years in the Army. He would meet a 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu while in Germany, and he would watch while a new crop of teen idols took over the limelight on the U.S. pop scene. In the spring of 1960, Elvis would return to his rightful throne, but his Army years mark a clear line of separation between the Old Elvis and the New. Behind Elvis Presley lay records like "That's All Right (Mama)" and "Jailhouse Rock." Ahead of lay songs like "Aloha Oe" and "Pocketful of Rainbows," and films like Harum Scarum and Clambake.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Mar 25, 1983:
The Motown "family" stages a bittersweet reunion performance

Technically, the 25th anniversary of Motown Records should have been celebrated nine months later, in January 1984, but that was only one of several details glossed over in staging the landmark television special Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever. Filmed before a rapturous live audience on March 25, 1983, the Motown 25 special is perhaps best remembered for Michael Jackson's performance of "Billie Jean," which brought the house down and introduced much of the world to the "moonwalk." There were other great performances that night, too, but there were also moments that revealed cracks in the joyous-reunion image that Motown chief Berry Gordy sought to portray.

The most glaring breakdown in decorum came during what could have been the evening's greatest triumph: the reunion of Diana Ross and the Supremes. When Ross, Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong performed together that night for the first time in 13 years, they took to the stage with something closer to 20 years' worth of unresolved resentment among them. Early in their performance of "Someday We'll Be Together," as Diana slowly moved upstage, Mary and Cindy had the audacity to keep stride alongside her. Diana turned around and angrily pushed Mary back—a move that was carefully edited out of the later broadcast but which prompted Smokey Robinson and others to take the stage and form an impromptu chorus/demilitarized zone between the warring Supremes.

The "Battle of the Bands" medley between the Temptations and the Four Tops was a much bigger creative success, though the biggest individual names in the Temptations—Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin—were absent due to squabbling within the group, leaving Melvin Franklin and Otis Williams as the only original Temptations on stage that night. Also missing from the stage that night was a man whose name was then unfamiliar to all but the most obsessive Motown fans, but whose contribution to the label's success was monumental. The late James Jamerson, whose bass guitar formed the foundation of almost every great Motown record of the 1960s, was in the building that night, but as a paying member of the audience seated in the back rows. His own troubles with alcohol abuse played a part in his estrangement from the Motown "family," but so did a decades-long history of what he and fellow members of the Funk Brothers—the Motown backing band—felt was a lack of appreciation and respect for their role in creating the famous Motown sound.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Mar 26, 1955:
"Black" music gets whitewashed, as Georgia Gibbs hits the pop charts with "The Wallflower (Dance With Me, Henry)"

For its time, the mid-1950s, the lyrical phrase "You got to roll with me, Henry" was considered risqué just as the very label "rock and roll" was understood to have a sexual connotation. The line comes from an Etta James record originally called "Roll With Me Henry" and later renamed "The Wallflower." Already a smash hit on the Billboard Rhythm and Blues chart, it went on to become a pop hit in the spring of 1955, but not for Etta James. Re-recorded with "toned-down" lyrics by the white pop singer Georgia Gibbs, "Dance With Me Henry (Wallflower)" entered the pop charts on March 26, 1955, setting off a dubious trend known as "whitewashing."

In addition to replacing "Roll" with "Dance," the lyrics of the Georgia Gibbs version omitted lines like "If you want romancin'/You better learn some dancin,'" but its most important change was more subtle. Even in an era when radio audiences rarely saw the faces of the singers they listened to, the rhythmic and vocal style of the Georgia Gibbs record made it as obviously white as the Etta James record was black. And while many Americans might have preferred the Etta James version to the Georgia Gibbs cover had they heard the two in succession, they would rarely have the opportunity to do so. Pop radio was almost exclusively white radio in 1955 America, and middle-of-the-road artists like Nat "King" Cole and the Ink Spots were rare exceptions to this rule.

The argument sometimes put forth in defense of whitewashing—that it brought exposure and writer's royalties to black artists whose songs might never have reached white audiences otherwise—makes a certain amount of coldhearted sense. It fell on deaf ears, however, for another originator of a whitewash hit: the R&B legend Lavern Baker. When the very same Georgia Gibbs scored a pop hit with Baker's "Tweedle Dee" in 1955, Baker petitioned Congress to declare note-for-note covers to be copyright violations. The proposal went nowhere, and Lavern Baker went on to become a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but she never dropped her grudge against Gibbs. A widely told story—possibly apocryphal—has Baker taking out a life-insurance policy on herself in advance of a flight to Australia and naming Georgia Gibbs as the beneficiary. "You need this more than I do," Baker is said to have written to Gibbs, "because if anything happens to me, you're out of business."

[Duke of Buckingham]

Mar 27, 1979:
Pattie Boyd and Eric Clapton are married

In early decades of the 20th century, the Viennese beauty Alma Mahler inspired groundbreaking works by a quartet of husbands and lovers drawn from nearly every creative discipline: music (Gustav Mahler); literature (Franz Werfel); art (Oskar Kokoschka); and architecture (Walter Gropius). It is possible that no pop-cultural muse will ever equal such a record, but if anyone came close in the modern era, it was the English beauty Pattie Boyd, whose participation in various affairs and marriages among the British rock royalty of the 60s and 70s inspired three famous popular songs, including "Layla," by second husband Eric Clapton, whom Pattie Boyd married on March 27, 1979.

A colorful account of the dramatic arc that led Boyd and Clapton to the altar in 1979 (and to divorce court in 1989) can be found in Pattie Boyd's 2007 memoir Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me, the subtitle of which names the other key player in the story's central love triangle. In summary form, it goes something like this: Boyd met Harrison and the two married soon after, with Harrison writing "Something." for Boyd. Later, Boyd met Clapton, Harrison's good friend, who fell in love with Boyd. Clapton ended up moving in with Boyd's teenage sister, but is said to have written "Layla." for Boyd, causing the sister to move out. Boyd then had a brief affair with Clapton, but later returned to Harrison just as the Beatles were breaking up and Clapton was in the early stages of an addiction to heroin. After finally breaking up with Harrison, Boyd returned to a now-clean Clapton, and the couple was married on March 27, 1979. Clapton's timeless classic, "Wonderful Tonight.", is said to also have been written for Boyd.

If it weren't for all the alcohol and infidelities that followed, it might well qualify as a perfect rock-and-roll fairy tale. Unfortunately, Pattie Boyd paints a picture of her years with Eric Clapton that makes one question whether such fairy tales ever existed. Even the happy event that took place on this day in 1979 gets low marks for romance in Boyd's account. It was more of a prank than a wedding, Boyd now says—an attempt by Clapton to win a drunken bet that he couldn't get his manager's picture in the paper. Clapton arranged the wedding the very next day, made that manager his best man and won the bet.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Mar 28, 1958:
W.C. Handy—the "Father of the Blues"—dies

"With all their differences, my forebears had one thing in common: if they had any musical talent, it remained buried." So wrote William Christopher Handy in his autobiography in discussing the absence of music in his home life as a child. Born in northern Alabama in 1873, Handy was raised in a middle-class African-American family that intended for him a career in the church. To them and to his teachers, W.C. Handy wrote, "Becoming a musician would be like selling my soul to the devil." It was a risk that the young Handy decided to take. He was internationally famous by the time he wrote his 1941 memoir, Father of the Blues, although "Stepfather" might have been a more accurate label for the role he played in bringing Blues into the musical mainstream. The significance of his role is not to be underestimated, however. W.C. Handy, one of the most important figures in 20th-century American popular music history, died in New York City on March 28, 1958.

While Handy's teachers might not have considered a career in music to be respectable, they provided him with the tools that made his future work possible. Naturally blessed with a fantastic ear, Handy was drilled in formal musical notation as a schoolboy. "When I was no more than ten," Hand wrote in Father of the Blues, I could catalogue almost any sound that came to my ears, using the tonic sol-fa system. I knew the whistle of each of the river boats on the Tennessee....Even the bellow of the bull became in my mind a musical note, and in later years I recorded this memory in the 'Hooking cow Blues.'" The talent and the inclination to take the traditional black music he heard during his years as a traveling musician and capture it accurately in technically correct sheet music would be Handy's great professional contribution. It not only made the music that came to be called "the Blues" playable by other professional musicians, but it also added the fundamental musical elements of the Blues into the vocabulary of professional song-composers. Jazz standards "The Memphis Blues" and "St. Louis Blues" are the most famous of Handy's own compositions, but his musical legacy can be heard in the works of composers as varied as George Gershwin and Keith Richards.

More than 25,000 mourners filled the streets around Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church for the funeral of W.C. Handy, who died at the age of 85 on this day in 1958.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Mar 29, 2006:
Tom Jones is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II

Tom Jones can apparently count among his many fans one Elizabeth Windsor of London, England—known professionally as Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen. A 38-year-old mother of four when the alluring Mr. Jones made his first great splash in March 1965, Her Majesty bestowed upon him four decades later one of the highest honors to which a British subject can aspire. On March 29, 2006, Queen Elizabeth II made the Welsh sensation Tom Jones—now Sir Tom Jones—a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Who can know exactly what it was about Tom Jones that appealed to the Queen, or how closely she followed his career through its many interesting turns? We do know that many of her female contemporaries, however, were drawn in as much by his charisma and legendary sex appeal than by any particular musical gifts. Not that Tom Jones wasn't a fine interpreter of popular song, but his greatest gift was as a live performer, and his live performances did tend to emphasize his charm, his dark good looks and his surprisingly funky dance moves as much as his singing. In his prime, in his form-fitting pants and shirts with plunging necklines, Tom Jones embodied an esthetic that was so easily lampooned in later years, that to lampoon it has itself become a tired cliché. Those who regard him as an object of fun would do well to revisit some of his 1960s and 70s television performances, which show him to be a powerfully appealing live entertainer.

As of 2008, the only pop stars of equal rank to Sir Tom are Paul McCartney, Elton John and Britain's ageless answer to Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard. Further down the chivalric ladder for the time being—and not entitled to the honorific "Sir"— are Commanders Roger Daltrey and Eric Clapton and, even further down, the lowly Mick Jagger, as yet a mere Member of the Most Excellent Order.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Mar 30, 1974:
John Denver has his first #1 hit with "Sunshine On My Shoulders"

Of his many enormous hits in the 1970s, none captured the essence of John Denver better than his first #1 song, "Sunshine On My Shoulders," which reached the top of the pop charts on this day in 1974.

"Sunshine On My Shoulders" was John Denver's attempt to write a sad song, which is really all one needs to know in order to understand what made Denver so appealing to so many. "I was so down I wanted to write a feeling-blue song," he told Seventeen magazine in 1974, "[but] this is what came out." Originally released on his 1971 album Poems, Prayers and Promises, Denver's lovely ode to the restorative powers of sunlight only became a smash hit when re-released on his John Denver's Greatest Hits album in late 1973—an album that went on to sell more than 10 million copies worldwide.

It should come as no surprise that an artist who played such an enormous role in the softening of mainstream pop music in the 1970s would find little support from rock critics. "Television music" marked by "repellent narcissism" was Rolling Stone's take on Denver. "I find that sunshine makes me happy, too," wrote Robert Christgau of The Village Voice, "[but] there's more originality and spirit in Engelbert Humperdink."

Such critical response did little to dampen public enthusiasm for Denver's records during his heyday, however. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, John Denver has sold 32.5 million records—4.5 million more than Michael Bolton, and only 4.5 million fewer than Bob Dylan.

Born Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. on December 31, 1943, in Roswell, New Mexico, John Denver died in California on October 12, 1997, when his ultra-light aircraft crashed into Monterey Bay.





Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine almost always makes me high

If I had a day that I could give you
I'd give to you a day just like today
If I had a song that I could sing for you
I'd sing a song to make you feel this way

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine almost always makes me high

[Duke of Buckingham]

Mar 31, 1943:
Oklahoma! premieres on Broadway

The financial risk of mounting a Broadway musical is so great that few productions ever make it to the Great White Way without a period of tryouts and revisions outside of New York City. This was as true in the 1940s as it is today, and especially so during the war years, when the producers of an innovative little musical called Away We Go had real concerns about their show's commercial viability. Even with lyrics and music by two of theater's leading lights, Away We Go was believed by many to be a flop in the making. Indeed, an assistant to the famous gossip columnist Walter Winchell captured the prevailing wisdom in a telegram sent from New Haven, Connecticut, during the show's out-of-town tryout. His message read: "No girls. No legs. No chance." This would prove to be one of the most off-base predictions in theater history when the slightly retooled show opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943 under a new title—Oklahoma!—and went on to set a Broadway record of 2,212 performances before finally closing more than 15 years later.

What was it that made Oklahoma! seem so risky? For one, it was the first show undertaken by the already legendary composer Richard Rodgers without his longtime partner, Lorenz Hart. Hart's drinking and other personal problems had rendered him unable to work by 1942, so Rodgers would undertake his next project with a new partner, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. While Rodgers and Hammerstein almost instantly clicked as a songwriting duo, the creative chances they were taking with Oklahoma! were significant. The show had no big-name stars involved in it, it was based on relatively obscure source material and it was an ambitious experiment in integrating music and dance in service of storytelling rather than spectacle. At a time when Broadway musicals always opened with a "bang," Oklahoma! would open with a lone cowboy singing a gentle idyll about corn and meadows.

From the very first moment on opening night, however, Oklahoma! hit a nerve. The show's choreographer, the legendary Agnes DeMille, later recalled the audience reaction to that opening number, "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin': "[It] produced a sigh from the entire house, that I don't think I've ever heard in the theater. It was just, 'aaaahh...' It was perfectly lovely, and deeply felt." Of the reaction to the title song, "Oklahoma!," actress Joan Roberts, the original Laurey, said, "The applause was so deafening, and it continued and continued. We repeated two encores, and we stood there, until they stopped applauding! And I didn't think they ever would!" That famous number had been changed from a solo to a full-cast showstopper only weeks earlier, during the show's final tune-ups in Boston before the beginning of its history-making Broadway run on this day in 1943.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Apr 1, 1984:
Marvin Gaye is shot and killed by his own father

At the peak of his career, Marvin Gaye was the Prince of Motown—the soulful voice behind hits as wide-ranging as "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" and "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)." Like his label-mate Stevie Wonder, Gaye both epitomized and outgrew the crowd-pleasing sound that made Motown famous. Over the course of his roughly 25-year recording career, he moved successfully from upbeat pop to "message" music to satin-sheet soul, combining elements of Smokey Robinson, Bob Dylan and Barry White into one complicated and sometimes contradictory package. But as the critic Michael Eric Dyson put it, the man who "chased away the demons of millions...with his heavenly sound and divine art" was chased by demons of his own throughout his life. That life came to a tragic end on this day 1984, when Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his own father one day short of his 45th birthday.

If the physical cause of Marvin Gaye's death was straightforward—"Gunshot wound to chest perforating heart, lung and liver," according to the Los Angeles County Coroner—the events that led to it were much more tangled. On the one hand, there was the longstanding conflict with his father dating back to childhood. Marvin Gay, Sr., (the "e" was added by his son for his stage name) was a preacher in the Hebrew Pentecostal Church and a proponent of a strict moral code he enforced brutally with his four children. He was also, by all accounts, a hard-drinking cross-dresser who personally embodied a rather complicated model of morality. By some reports, Marvin Sr. harbored significant envy over his son's tremendous success, and Marvin Jr. clearly harbored unresolved feelings toward his abusive father.

Those feelings spilled out for the final time in the Los Angeles home of Marvin Gay, Sr., and his wife Alberta. Their son the international recording star had moved into his parents' home in late 1983 at a low point in his struggle with depression, debt and cocaine abuse. Only one year removed from his first Grammy win and from a triumphant return to the pop charts with "Sexual Healing," Marvin Gaye was in horrible physical, psychological and financial shape, and now he found himself living in the same house as the man who must have been at the root of many of his struggles.

After an argument between father and son escalated into a physical fight on the morning of April 1, 1984, Alberta Gay was trying to calm her son in his bedroom when Marvin Sr. took a revolver given to him by Marvin Jr. and shot him three times in his chest. Marvin Gaye's brother, Frankie, who lived next door, and who held the legendary singer during his final minutes, later wrote in his memoir that Marvin Gaye's final, disturbing statement was, "I got what I wanted....I couldn't do it myself, so I made him do it."

[Duke of Buckingham]

Apr 2, 1974:
The Sting sweeps the Oscars and ragtime composer Scott Joplin gets his due

The name Scott Joplin is now nearly synonymous with ragtime—the loose, syncopated musical style that swept the nation in the late-19th century and laid the groundwork for the emergence of jazz in the early 20th. Yet the most important figure in the history of ragtime was a virtual unknown as recently as the late 1960s. It was then that a grassroots ragtime revival began making Joplin and his music known within a growing community of dedicated enthusiasts. It took the star-making power of Hollywood, however, to transform him from a relatively minor cult figure into a household name. The transformation was completed on this day in 1974, when the musical score to The Sting earned Scott Joplin a share of an Oscar, more than five decades after his death in 1917.

The Sting starred Robert Redford and Paul Newman in a story of good-guy con men in 1930s Chicago. Ragtime music had passed out of fashion more than three decades before the events depicted in The Sting, but director George Roy Hill had fallen for Scott Joplin's piano music after hearing his son play an album by classical musicologist and ragtime revivalist Joshua Rifkin. Hill gave the job of scoring The Sting to a young Hollywood composer named Marvin Hamlisch, who worked largely from 1909 sheet music to arrange and orchestrate six of Joplin's compositions for use in The Sting—the melancholy "Solace" and upbeat "The Entertainer" most prominent among them. Historical accuracy aside, Joplin's music proved to be an incredibly effective choice for evoking the mood of Depression-era America.

The Sting and Marvin Hamlisch both had big nights at the 46th annual Academy Awards on April 2, 1974. The Sting won Best Picture, among seven total Oscars, and Hamlisch won three, including Best Song and Best Dramatic Score for The Way We Were along with the award for Best Song Score and/or Adaptation for The Sting. The win for the Joplin-based score of The Sting brought the ragtime revival to the mainstream. Less than two weeks after the Oscars, "The Entertainer" was released as an instrumental single, reaching #3 on the Billboard pop charts in mid-May, while the soundtrack album from The Sting reached the #1 spot on the album charts simultaneously. At the Grammy awards the following year, "The Entertainer" helped propel Marvin Hamlisch to a win in the Best New Artist category, prompting Hamlisch to call Scott Joplin "the real new artist of the year" in his acceptance speech.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Apr 3, 1948:
The Louisiana Hayride radio program premieres on KWKH-AM Shreveport

Even the most ardent non-fans of country music can probably name the weekly live show and radio program that is regarded as country music's biggest stage: the Grand Ole Opry, out of Nashville, Tennessee. Yet even many committed country fans are unfamiliar with a program that, during its 1950s heyday, eclipsed even the Opry in terms of its impact on country music itself. From its premiere on this day in 1948 to its final weekly show in 1960, The Lousiana Hayride, out of Shreveport, Louisiana, launched the careers not only of several country-music giants, but also of a young, genre-crossing singer named Elvis Presley, the future King of Rock and Roll.

In many ways, The Louisiana Hayride was a straightforward knock-off of the Grand Ole Opry, but with two key differences. While both programs focused on country music and targeted the same geographic area with their 50,000-watt signals, The Louisiana Hayride embraced new artists and new musical innovations that the staunchly traditionalist Grand Ole Opry would never consider. While the Opry would rarely if ever feature a performer who had not yet had a hit record, the Hayride often featured up-and-coming artists who had yet to find an audience. And while the Opry banned the electric guitar, the Hayride embraced the instrument that would help transform one strain of "hillbilly music" into the new, hybrid form called rock and roll.

The Louisiana Hayride was the brainchild of Horace Lee Logan, who first became a radio host on Shreveport's KWKH-AM in 1932 at the age of 16. Because most of the talented country artists who got their first breaks on the Hayride—Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Webb Pierce, Faron Young—would eventually move on to Nashville, it was common to hear The Lousiana Hayride referred to as "the Grand Ole Opry's farm team." Logan, however, always referred to the Opry as "the Tennessee branch of the Hayride."

In addition to giving Hank Williams his first wide radio audience in 1949 and then welcoming him back after the Opry fired him for drunkenness in 1952, Logan and The Louisiana Hayride also gave 19-year-old Elvis Presley a crucial break in October 1954. After a lackluster, single-song debut on the Grand Ole Opry failed to garner him a return invitation, Elvis gave a knockout performance of That's All Right (Mama) and Blue Moon of Kentucky on The Louisiana Hayride that set him on his path toward stardom.

An interesting footnote to the story of The Louisiana Hayride involves the origin of a famous Elvis-related phrase. In gratitude to Horace Logan for the boost he'd provided when Elvis was an unknown back in 1954, Presley gave a return performance on the Hayride in December 1956, at the very peak of his popularity. Midway through the show, thousands of young Elvis fans abandoned their seats after the King's performance, noisily chasing after him in the wings while the live broadcast continued. It was then that Logan took the microphone and coined a famous phrase: "Please, young people...Elvis has left the building...please take your seats."

[Duke of Buckingham]

Apr 4, 1913:
Muddy Waters is born

When Bob Dylan picked up an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he permanently alienated a portion of his passionate fan base. When Muddy Waters went electric roughly 20 years earlier, he didn't have a fan base to be concerned about, and those who did go to his shows probably had no quarrel with his motivation for plugging in, which was simply to play loud enough to be heard inside a raucous nightclub. Little could those lucky Chicagoans have known that they were hearing the birth of a style of blues that would become a fundamental part of their city's cultural identity. Out of all the bluesmen plying their trade in the clubs of the Windy City in the late 40s and early 50s, none did more than Muddy Waters to create the Chicago Blues—the hard-driving, amplified, distinctly urban sound with roots in the rural Mississippi Delta, where Waters was born on this day in 1913.

Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He played and sang at parties and fish fries from the age of 17, spending his days picking cotton on the Stovall Plantation for 50 cents a day. In 1941, folklorist Alan Lomax, on his famous trip through the Delta on behalf of the Library of Congress, discovered Waters and made the first recordings of his slide-guitar blues, released many years later as the "Plantation Recordings." By 1944, Waters had joined the Great Migration that took African Americans by the hundreds of thousands north to cities like Chicago. It was there that his country blues evolved into the aggressive Chicago Blues exemplified on famous songs like "Rollin' Stone," "Hoochie Coochie Man," "Mannish Boy" and "Got My Mojo Working."

The first of those songs would later provide songwriting inspiration to Bob Dylan and the idea for a name to a famous British rock group. The Rolling Stones were just one of hundreds of blues-based groups that formed in England in the early 1960s, inspired in part by Muddy Waters' records and by his tour of Britain in 1958. Waters would be regarded as a blues giant on the strength of his 1947-1958 Chess Records recordings alone, but it was the influence of those records on a young generation of British musicians that formed the basis for his inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Born on this day in 1913, Muddy Waters died near his adopted hometown of Chicago on April 30, 1983.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Apr 5, 1994:
Kurt Cobain commits suicide

Modern rock icon Kurt Cobain commits suicide on this day in 1994. His body was discovered inside his home in Seattle, Washington, three days later by Gary Smith, an electrician, who was installing a security system in the suburban house. Despite indications that Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, killed himself, several skeptics questioned the circumstances of his death and pinned responsibility on his wife, Courtney Love.

At least two books, including one penned by Love's estranged father, and a nationally released documentary, Kurt & Courtney, openly expressed doubt that Cobain killed himself and all but accused Love of having her husband killed. Her volatile reputation and healthy list of enemies helped to circulate the rumors. However, police have concluded that Cobain's death was the result of suicide.

Cobain's downward spiral began taking shape in Italy the previous month. He went into a coma and nearly died after mixing champagne and the drug Rohypnol. The public was led to believe that the coma was induced by an accidental heroin overdose, since Cobain had a well-known problem with the drug.

Back at home in Seattle, the police were called to Cobain and Love's home when he again threatened to kill himself. Although Cobain stated in a 1991 interview that he didn't believe in guns, the officers confiscated four from his possession. As his wife and friends watched him spin out of control, they attempted to intervene. Cobain mostly ignored their concerns but reluctantly checked into a rehabilitation clinic in Los Angeles at the end of March.

On March 30, Cobain walked away from the clinic without informing his family or friends. For the next few days, Love could not locate him and decided to hire a private detective on April 3. The detective made contact with Cobain the following day in Seattle, but Cobain refused to return to Los Angeles.

In the meantime, Cobain had convinced a friend to buy him a gun, claiming he needed it for protection. On April 5, Cobain returned home. He had ingested enough Valium and heroin to reach near-fatal levels. In the apartment above the garage was Cobain's sloppily written suicide note, quoting Neil Young's lyric that it is "better to burn out than to fade away."

[Duke of Buckingham]

Apr 6, 1974:
The Eurovision song contest launches a bona fide star


In Brighton, England, on April 6, 1974, the judges of the 19th Eurovision Song Contest crushed the hopes of tiny Luxembourg by denying that nation in its bid for a historic third straight victory at the pan-European musical event. Those judges did the rest of the world a favor, however, by selecting the Swedish entry as the winner instead. Which is not to say anything against the song "Bye Bye I Love You" as performed by Luxembourg's Irene Sheer. It's just that Sweden's entry was a song called "Waterloo," performed by a group called ABBA, which went on to become something of a sensation. ABBA's win at the annual Eurovision Song Contest on this day in 1974 launched the group on its monumental international career, marking the first and still only time that the Eurovision Song Contest crowned a previously unknown winner destined for legitimate superstardom.

The Eurovision Song Contest was originally conceived as a way for the member countries of the European Broadcasting Union to participate in a simultaneous live broadcast—a major technical challenge in 1956. From a one-night event involving only seven participating countries in its first year, the contest has grown into a week-long spectacle involving preliminary rounds of competition among representatives of more than 20 countries in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the former Soviet Union. But while the annual contest is now one of the most-watched television events in the world, one thing Eurovision has consistently failed at doing is launching new artists to truly international stardom. The sole, shining exception to this rule is ABBA. (All apologies to 1988 winner Celine Dion, who was already something of a star prior to her Eurovision victory, and to 2006 winner Lordi, probably the finest monster-costumed Finnish metal band of all time, but a band that so far enjoys only a cult following outside of northern Europe.)

The year that ABBA was chosen as Sweden's Eurovision entry was the second in which contest competitors were allowed to perform in any language they wished. (A national-language restriction was reinstated in 1977 before being abolished in 1999.) This proved to be critical to ABBA's international success. While the UK judges awarded ABBA zero points toward their winning total on this night in 1974, their English-language "Waterloo" became an instant hit with the British public—the first of nine UK #1 hits for the biggest group ever launched by the Eurovision Song Contest.

[Duke of Buckingham]

1959 - Chuck Berry's "Memphis" was released.

Memphis, Tennessee (song)

"Memphis, Tennessee" is a song by rock & roll singer-songwriter Chuck Berry. It is sometimes shortened to "Memphis". In the UK, the song charted at #6 in 1963, at the same time Decca Records issued a cover version in the UK by Dave Berry and the Cruisers, who came from Sheffield, Yorkshire. Dave Berry's version also became a UK Top 20 hit single, the first of a string of British hit singles which ended with a cover of BJ Thomas' "Mama" reaching #5 in 1966. "Memphis, Tennessee" was most successfully covered by Johnny Rivers whose version of the song was a #2 US hit in 1964.

Berry later composed a sequel, "Little Marie", which appeared in 1964 as a single and on the album St. Louis to Liverpool.

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 23 1965 - The Supremes made the studio recording of "Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart."

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 25 1910

The Firebird - Igor Stravinsky

The Firebird (French title: L'oiseau de feu; Russian: Жар-птица, Zhar-ptitsa) is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1910 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company, with choreography by Michel Fokine. The ballet is based on Russian folk tales of the magical glowing bird of the same name that is both a blessing and a curse to its captor. When the ballet was first performed on 25 June 1910, the critics were enthusiastic.

Stravinsky was a young, virtually unknown composer when Diaghilev recruited him to create works for the Ballets Russes. The Firebird was his first project. Originally, Diaghilev approached the Russian composer Anatoly Lyadov, but later hired Stravinsky to compose the music.

The ballet has historic significance not only as Stravinsky's breakthrough piece — "Mark him well", said Sergei Diaghilev to Tamara Karsavina, who was dancing the title role: "He is a man on the eve of celebrity..." — but also as the beginning of the collaboration between Diaghilev and Stravinsky that would also produce Petrushka and The Rite of Spring.

The ballet centers on the journey of its hero, Prince Ivan. Ivan enters the magical realm of Kashchei the Immortal; all of the magical objects and creatures of Kashchei are herein represented by a chromatic descending motif, usually in the strings. While wandering in the gardens, he sees and chases the Firebird. The Firebird, once caught by Ivan, begs for its life and ultimately agrees to assist Ivan in exchange for eventual freedom.

Next, Prince Ivan sees thirteen princesses, with one of whom he falls in love. The next day, Ivan chooses to confront Kashchei to ask to marry one of the princesses; the two talk and eventually begin quarreling. When Kashchei sends his magical creatures after Ivan, the Firebird, true to its pledge, intervenes, bewitching the creatures and making them dance an elaborate, energetic dance (the "Infernal Dance"). The creatures and Kashchei then fall asleep; however, Kashchei awakens and is then sent into another dance by the Firebird. While Kashchei is bewitched, the Firebird tells Ivan the secret to Kashchei's immortality – his soul is contained inside an enormous, magical egg. Ivan destroys the egg, killing Kashchei. With Kashchei gone and his spell broken, the magical creatures and the palace all disappear. All of the "real" beings, including the princesses, awaken and with one final hint of the Firebird's music (though in Fokine's choreography she makes no appearance in that final scene on-stage), celebrate their victory.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Ich bin ein Berliner

"Ich bin ein Berliner" (German pronunciation: [ˈʔɪç ˈbɪn ʔaɪn bɛɐˈliːnɐ], "I am a Berliner") is a quotation from a June 26, 1963, speech by U.S. President John F. Kennedy in West Berlin. He was underlining the support of the United States for West Germany 22 months after Soviet-supported East Germany erected the Berlin Wall to prevent mass emigration to the West. The message was aimed as much at the Soviets as it was at Berliners and was a clear statement of U.S. policy in the wake of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Another notable (and defiant) phrase in the speech was also spoken in German, "Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen" ("Let them come to Berlin"), addressed at those who claimed "we can work with the Communists", a remark which Nikita Khrushchev scoffed at only days later.

The speech is considered one of Kennedy's best, both a notable moment of the Cold War and a high point of the New Frontier. It was a great morale boost for West Berliners, who lived in an exclave deep inside East Germany and feared a possible East German occupation. Speaking from a platform erected on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg for an audience of 450,000, Kennedy said,

Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum ["I am a Roman citizen"]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner!"... All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

Kennedy used the phrase twice in his speech, including at the end, pronouncing the sentence with his Boston accent and reading from his note "ish bin ein Bearleener", which he had written out using English spelling habits to indicate an approximation of the German pronunciation.

[Duke of Buckingham]

U.S. Route 66

U.S. Route 66 (US 66 or Route 66), also known as the Will Rogers Highway and colloquially known as the Main Street of America or the Mother Road, was one of the original highways within the U.S. Highway System. Route 66 was established on November 11, 1926—with road signs erected the following year. The highway, which became one of the most famous roads in America, originally ran from Chicago, Illinois, through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before ending at Los Angeles, California, covering a total of 2,448 miles (3,940 km). It was recognized in popular culture by both a hit song and the Route 66 television show in the 1960s.

Route 66 served as a major path for those who migrated west, especially during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and it supported the economies of the communities through which the road passed. People doing business along the route became prosperous due to the growing popularity of the highway, and those same people later fought to keep the highway alive in the face of the growing threat of being bypassed by the new Interstate Highway System.

Route 66 underwent many improvements and realignments over its lifetime, and it was officially removed from the United States Highway System on June 27, 1985 after it had been replaced in its entirety by the Interstate Highway System. Portions of the road that passed through Illinois, Missouri, New Mexico, and Arizona have been designated a National Scenic Byway of the name "Historic Route 66", which is returning to some maps. Several states have adopted significant bypassed sections of the former US 66 into the state road network as State Route 66.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Giselle

Giselle (French: Giselle ou les Wilis) is a ballet in two acts with a libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier, music by Adolphe Adam, and choreography by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot. The librettist took his inspiration from a poem by Heinrich Heine. The ballet tells the story of a lovely peasant girl named Giselle who has a passion for dancing, and when she finds out the man she loves is engaged to someone else she dies of a broken heart. Giselle was first presented by the Ballet du Théâtre de l'Académie Royale de Musique at the Salle Le Peletier in Paris, France, on 28 June 1841. The choreography in modern productions generally derives from the revivals of Marius Petipa for the Imperial Russian Ballet (1884, 1899, 1903).