Pick a Day

7 APRIL

In Music History

1979 Rickie Lee Jones is the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. She performs her hit "Chuck E.'s In Love" and does a full-beatnik rendition of "Coolsville," complete with cigarette and beret.

1979 Minute By Minute by The Doobie Brothers claims the top spot on the US albums chart, thanks in part to "What A Fool Believes," written by Kenny Loggins and Doobies frontman Michael McDonald.

1978 The Police release "Roxanne" in the UK. BBC Radio 1 refuses to play it, which tanks the song, but when the band tours America a year later it catches on in that country, becoming their first hit.

1975 After a show in Paris, Ritchie Blackmore leaves Deep Purple to form Rainbow. He is eventually replaced by Tommy Bolin.

1975 John Cooper, frontman for the Christian rock band Skillet, is born in Memphis, Tennessee.

1971 The Rolling Stones announce their own record label, Rolling Stones Records, which they vow to make a "small operation we can handle" so as not to suffer the pitfalls of The Beatles' Apple Records.

1970 Popular songwriting team Hal David and Burt Bacharach win the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" from the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Performed by B.J. Thomas, it hit #1 on the US charts. Bacharach also takes the prize for Best Original Score for his work on the film.

1968 At the Generation Club in New York, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, B.B. King, Richie Havens and Buddy Guy take the stage for a jam session in tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., who was killed three days earlier.

1968 Three days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nina Simone performs "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)" at the Westbury Music Fair in Long Island, New York, in his honor. The song was written by her bassist, Gene Taylor, less than 24 hours earlier.

1962 Bobby Rydell wins the role of Hugo in the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie.

1959 Marty Robbins records "El Paso."

1959 As the snow melts in Mason City, Iowa, Buddy Holly's glasses are found from the plane crash that killed him two months earlier. They are turned in to police, where they stay until 1980, when a sheriff finds them and returns them to Holly's widow.

1958 Nat King Cole portrays famed blues musician W.C. Handy in the biographical film St. Louis Blues. The star-studded cast includes music greats Mahalia Jackson, Eartha Kitt, Ella Fitzgerald, Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, and 10-year-old Billy Preston as a young Will Handy.

1956 The Platters make their national television debut on Tommy & Jimmy Dorsey's Stage Show on CBS.

1956 Network TV premiere: Rock & Roll Dance Party with Alan Freed, on CBS.