Some people believe this to be the first music video:
Ricky Nelson: Travelin’ Man
Country became a separate music category:
Patsy Cline: Crazy
“Girl groups” started popping up. The Marvelettes came from Motown.
The Marvelettes: Please Mr. Postman
Folk music made the charts.
The Tokens: The Lion Sleeps Tonight
44 comments
Skip to comment form
Surf music rears its head:
Dick Dale and the Deltones: Let’s Go Trippin’
The Shirelles were the first girl group to hit #1 with their combination of doo wop and uptown soul, music often written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King:
The Shirelles: Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow
I just spewed my coffee all over watching the Iraqi journalist throw his shoes at Bush. Too bad Bush ducked.
music show I saw besides the concerts my parents took me to (classical), was Dick Dale. He played at an old 30’s ballroom in a decrepit amusement park across the bay from Balboa Island where I spent my summers as a kid. His show was on a saturday afternoon. I snuck out in my tiny Sabot boat and rowed across the bay where I paid my allowance money and experienced my first taste of wild live music and heaven. I found a vinyl copy of his first album as an adult and it is still great. The CD version is way too clean. I think I saw him in 60 but after ‘Lets go Trippin’ even the inland teens in LA were doing The Stomp.
do you take a picture of a record spinning? Or a video of the artist doing the song a few years later? Or recently?
Quarter to Three
Funnel of Love
this is my absolute favorite Mary Wells song. They (Motown execs…Berry Gordy) should have let her sing like this more.
My fantasy is that if I can track down her vocal coach I could sing like this!
a doowop from 61
I think it’s a predecessor to the torchy female singers from Dusty to Cilla Black.
Pay Peterson a rockabilly cat charted with this one
country song by the Scorpions. The sound is pure 60’s, this is the version I first heard.
seems to belong to a school of his own. From He’s a Rebel, Hello Mary Lou to Town Without Pity, his songs always seemed to be in his own space and time. A 61 hit.
50’s doowap to a singer songwriter staring in 61. This is from 62 I think but it’s one of your stranger pop songs. It was put out as the B side to the Majestic,a inane dance tune that flopped. This is one was great.
I sat out a snow blizzard in Portland in a remodel wreck by wiling away the hours pouring over 1961 charts. Kept me from the screaming meamies. Enjoyed looking at the period as a transition, musically speaking.
for me anyway. An essay about 1961 on dec 14th! well……
and whoever threw those shoes gave me the bestest birthday present EVAH! :*)
Patsy Cline.