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Featured Events
2019"Old Town Road" by the rapper Lil Nas X makes the Country chart, but is removed the following week when Billboard declares it ineligible for the tally. The attention leads to a remix with Billy Ray Cyrus that goes to #1 on the genre-agnostic Hot 100.More
1999Pearl Jam's debut album Ten is certified Diamond for sales of over 10 million copies in America.
1995Eazy-E releases a statement announcing that he has AIDS, and also that he has fathered seven children with six different women. He dies 10 days later.
1991Eddie Van Halen and his wife Valerie Bertinelli welcome a son, Wolfgang Van Halen, who eventually becomes the bass player in Van Halen.
1972The Dripping Springs Reunion festival kicks off in a field near Austin, Texas. Envisioned as the Woodstock of country music, the 3-day event features performances by Willie Nelson, Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Kris Kristofferson, Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens and Dottie West. The festival is poorly promoted and a huge flop, with attendance estimated at about 20,000 (combined) when at least 180,000 were expected. Two years later, Willie Nelson uses the same site for the first of his Fourth of July Picnic concerts, which becomes a popular annual event and helps establish Austin as a music destination.
1945The #1 song in America is "Rum and Coca-Cola" by The Andrews Sisters. It's a sanitized cover of a calypso song about American servicemen in Trinidad who get drunk and solicit prostitutes.
16
In Music History
2020Chris Martin takes to Instagram to perform a virtual concert in support of the World Health Organization as the coronavirus pandemic takes hold. It's the first of a series of "Together At Home" concerts done by a variety of artists.
2019Surf rock pioneer Dick Dale dies at 81.
2017Ray Davies, frontman of The Kinks, is knighted for services to the arts by the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace.
2017Ed Sheeran launches his ÷ (Divide) tour in Turin, Italy. The trek lasts two-and-a-half years and breaks U2's record for highest-grossing tour, raking in $775.6 million on 255 dates. U2's 360 tour (2009-2011) took in $735.3 million.
2016Frank Sinatra Jr., the only son of Frank Sinatra, dies of a heart attack at age 72 while on tour in Daytona Beach, Florida.
2016First Lady Michelle Obama delivers the keynote address at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, promoting her "Let Girls Learn" initiative and launching the star-studded Diane Warren-penned anthem "This Is For My Girls."More
2013Bobbie Smith of The Spinners dies of pneumonia and influenza at age 76.
2011Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine collapses backstage at a concert in Russia. He was in extreme pain from kidney stones but insisted on performing six songs for the crowd before going to the hospital 30 minutes later.
2009Songwriter Jack Lawrence dies at age 96 after he falls at his home in Redding, Connecticut. He co-wrote Frank Sinatra's first solo hit, "All or Nothing at All."
2008Daniel MacMaster (lead singer of Bonham) dies of a staph infection at age 39.
2008Session drummer Ola Brunkert, who played on many ABBA recordings, dies at age 61.
2007Tupper Saussy of The Neon Philharmonic dies of a heart attack at age 70.
2005Singer-songwriter Elizabeth Janie Coffey loses an action in England's High Court for copyright infringement in her claim that Madonna's song "Nothing Really Matters" infringed on a song Coffey had written earlier.
2002Liza Minnelli takes her fourth trip down the aisle when she marries promoter David Gest in New York. Michael Jackson serves as best man and Elizabeth Taylor is matron of honor.
2000Jay-Z and Beyoncé meet for the first time at MTV's Spring Break festival in Cancun, where both are performing (Bey with her group, Destiny's Child). They go on their first date two years later.
Otis Redding Becomes First Artist With Posthumous #1 Hit
1968Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay" hits #1, becoming the first-ever posthumous #1 hit. Redding died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967.
Redding really was sitting on the dock of the (San Francisco) Bay when he came up with the line, "I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again." He took the idea to Steve Cropper, his producer at Stax Records, who wrote the rest of the song with him. Cropper made it about Redding's life, how he went from a small town in Georgia to headlining the famous Fillmore West in San Francisco ("I left my home in Georgia, headed for the 'Frisco bay"). Cropper was also the guitarist in Booker T. & the MG's, the house band at Stax, which backed Redding on the track. Redding was a rising star at the label, poised for a breakthrough when he died at age 26. Cropper was on the road with Booker T. & the MG's when he found out. He returned to the studio and mixed the track, completing the song even before Redding's body was found. Released on January 8, 1968, it becomes Redding's sole Hot 100 chart-topper, and surprisingly, his only R&B #1. With civil unrest at home and the Vietnam War raging overseas, the song is a tranquil oasis in troubled times. A very mindful hit, it's an inaction anthem of sorts, with Redding just sitting there with his thoughts, impervious to the world at large. Near the end of the song, Redding runs out of words and starts whistling. The plan was to fill in this section with lyrics, but he died before he could.
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