1962 - Ray Charles started a 14-week run at No. 1 on the U.S. album chart with Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. He chose to record interpretations of 12 country songs, drawing almost equally from recent hits and older standards. The sly virtuosity within Charles' approach was to treat these tunes as a a songbook to be reinvented, not as songs that were tied to their rural roots.
1965 - The Kinks played a show in Springfield, Illinois that they later learned was organized by John Wayne Gacy, who later became a notorious serial killer.
1980 - The Rolling Stones release Emotional Rescue. Comprised of leftovers from the previous album's sessions and hastily written new numbers. Emotional Rescue may consist mainly of filler, but it's expertly written and performed filler.
1986 - The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead was released in the U.S. It's their great leap forward, taking the band to new musical and lyrical heights. Johnny Marr created a dense web of guitars, alternating from minor-key rush to faux rockabilly and bouncy acoustic pop. The rich musical bed provides Morrissey with the support for his finest set of lyrics. Shattering the myth that he is a self-pitying sap, Morrissey delivers a devastating set of clever, witty satires of British social mores, intellectualism, class, and even himself.
2013 - Blues and soul legend Bobby "Blue" Bland died at the age of 83. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame described him as "second in stature only to B.B. King as a product of Memphis's Beale Street blues scene"
2015 - Leon Bridges releases his debut album, Coming Home. Less than a year earlier, Bridges was still washing dishes at a restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas, and playing at open mics in his spare time. He posted his songs on Soundcloud, they went viral and sent record labels across the country into a frenzy to sign the retro-soul singer. Surprisingly, Bridges never meant to be a soul singer. He grew up on '90s R&B titans like Usher and Ginuwine and was only superficially aware of the soul legends that ended up shaping his style.
"It's crazy that even though I grew up on Ginuwine, the soul has always been in me," he tells Spin. "I just had to tap into it." (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
2016 - Bluegrass artist Ralph Stanley who was known for his distinctive singing and banjo playing, died at age 89. With his brother Carter, he helped popularize the bluegrass genre. Stanley won new fans when his work featured in the Coen brothers film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?".
2019 - Dave Bartholomew died of heart failure at the age 100. Many musicians recorded Bartholomew's songs, but his partnership with Fats Domino produced some of his greatest successes, like "Ain't That a Shame". Bartholomew's other hit songs as a composer include 'I Hear You Knocking', 'Blue Monday', 'I'm Walkin'', 'My Ding-A-Ling', and 'One Night.'
Birthdays:
June Carter Cash was born today in 1929.
Stu Sutcliffe, the Beatles' original bassist, was born today in 1940. Sutcliffe died of a brain hemorrhage in 1962, at age 22.
Robert Hunter, lyricist, singer-songwriter and poet, best known for his work with the Grateful Dead, born on this day in 1941.
Randy Jackson is 65.
Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley is 59.
KT Tunstall is 46.
Jason Mraz is 44.
Duffy is 37.
On This Day In Music History is sourced from This Day in Music, Allmusic, Song Facts and Wikipedia.