Pick a Day

Music History Events: Song Inspirations

October 4, 1967 George Harrison and John Lennon appear on David Frost's TV show, where they take the "pro" side in a debate over Transcendental Meditation. On the panel is the author Juan Mascaro, who later sends Harrison a book containing a translation of Chapter 47 of Tao Te Ching, which he uses as the lyric for the song "The Inner Light."

June 7, 1967 An article appears in the Daily Mirror describing a mean man named John Mustard, giving John Lennon the idea for the Beatles song "Mean Mr. Mustard."

April 1, 1967 A former champion horse jockey named Sir William Pigott-Brown rents one of his properties - a 19th century farm in the countryside outside London - to Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, who has his recently signed band Traffic record their debut album there.More

October 10, 1964 The Olympic Games open in Tokyo, inspiring the song "Tokyo Melody."

November 23, 1963 On the BBC program That Was The Week That Was, Millicent Martin performs "In The Summer Of His Years," which was written in haste after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

February 9, 1963 Hattie Carroll, a 51-year-old bartender in Baltimore, is killed after a disgruntled patron hits her with a cane. Bob Dylan writes a song about it called "The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll," which appears on his The Times They Are A-Changin' album.

June 18, 1961 Would-be riders of the Hudson Belle break into a stampede after learning that some of them are holding fraudulent tickets. The next day, a young Bob Dylan hears about the story and writes Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues.

January 24, 1961 Mel Blanc, who was the voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and many other cartoon favorites, gets in a horrible car accident on a stretch of road in Los Angeles known as "Dead Man's Curve." Hearing the news, Roger Christian is inspired to write a song about the treacherous turn.

August 28, 1955 Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till is murdered by two white men in Money, Mississippi, for talking to a white woman. His story later inspires Bob Dylan's "The Death of Emmett Till" and Emmylou Harris' "My Name is Emmett Till."

January 28, 1953 Derek Bentley is hanged for the murder of Police Constable Sidney Miles, who on November 2, 1952, was shot dead on a Croydon rooftop by 16-year-old Christopher Craig. Christopher Craig, too young to be executed, was paroled in 1963. The murder and trial later become the topic of the Ewan MacColl song "Ballad Of Derek Bentley."

April 14, 1950 The character Dan Dare appears on the front cover of the British comic Eagle, later inspiring a song by Elton John.

December 5, 1945 Flight 19 disappears over the Bermuda Triangle, inspiring a song by B.A. Robertson.

October 19, 1945 Harris Glenn Milstead, who performs as the drag queen Divine, is born in a suburb of Baltimore. Most famous as an actor (Pink Flamingos, Hairspray), he also records dance music, including the UK hit "You Think You're a Man."

January 27, 1944 The Siege of Leningrad ends, a harsh military operation undertaken by Germany under Hitler's command to attempt to seize the Russian city. The Decemberists would later commemorate this event with their song "When The War Came."

January 29, 1942 Claudine Longet is born in Paris. The French singer is the subject of the Rolling Stones song "Claudine."

August 20, 1940 In exile in Mexico, Leon Trotsky is attacked with an ice pick by Stalinist agent Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río. Trotsky dies of brain injuries the next day in a Mexican hospital. His assassination is immortalized in The Stranglers' song "No More Heroes."

June 30, 1934 Adolf Hitler begins Operation Hummingbird, the Röhm Putsch, or the Night of the Long Knives which culminates in the murder of Ernst Röhm on July 2. Al Stewart later writes a song about it called "The Last Day Of June 1934."

May 24, 1930 After taking off from Croydon, London, on May 5, the British aviator Amy Johnson lands in Darwin, Australia, inspiring the songs "Amy" (by Horatio Nicholls) and "Flying Sorcery" (by Al Stewart).

April 15, 1927 15 inches of rain falls on New Orleans in 18 hours, later inspiring the Randy Newman song "Louisiana 1927."

July 22, 1922 Irving Berlin's mother dies, which results in him writing "All By Myself," "All Alone" and "What'll I Do?"

March 7, 1918 Lena Guilbert Ford, who wrote the lyric to "Keep The Home Fires Burning," is killed in a zeppelin raid on her London home.

August 17, 1915 Leo Frank, the murderer of Mary Phagan, is kidnapped from his prison in Milledgeville, driven to Marietta, and lynched. This inspires the musical Parade.

July 17, 1912 20-year-old Dorothy Goetz, the first wife of Irving Berlin, dies of typhoid fever in New York. They had been married less than 6 months. Berlin writes his first ballad: "When I Lost You."

October 15, 1890 New Orleans police chief David Hennessy is gunned down in the first widely publicized Mafia murder in the USA. The event is memorialized in the song "The Hennessy Murder."

December 30, 1865 The author, journalist and poet Rudyard Kipling is born in Bombay, Imperial India. The Joni Mitchell song "If" is based on his poem of the same name.

November 21, 1846 The literary character Sweeney Todd makes his first ever appearance, in a short story The String of Pearls: A Romance. The story later becomes a musical, complete with the song "The Ballad Of Sweeney Todd."

November 9, 1845 Elizabeth Reed Napier is born. She provides the title for the The Allman Brothers Band song "In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed" when Dickey Betts sees her headstone at Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon, Georgia.

December 8, 1828 Martha Ella Blocksom, subject of the song "Lorena," is born in Zanesville, Ohio.

November 20, 1820 Whaling ship The Essex is rammed and sunk by a whale in the South Pacific, later inspiring the song "Nantucket Sleighride."

April 27, 1810 Beethoven composes his "Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor," (better known as "Für Elise".) The piece is dedicated to Therese Malfatti, a friend and student of Beethoven's.