21 JANUARY
Featured Events
2020 Ever the trendsetter, Dolly Parton creates a viral meme that shows off four sides of her personality, as represented by LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Tinder. Celebrities like Oprah, Janet Jackson, Jennifer Garner, and Miley Cyrus join in on the fun with their own versions.More
1987 The Second Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies are held in New York City. Inductees include The Coasters, Eddie Cochran, Bo Diddley, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Bill Haley, B.B. King, Clyde McPhatter, Rick Nelson, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Smokey Robinson, Big Joe Turner, Muddy Waters, and Jackie Wilson.
1984 "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" by Yes goes to #1 in America, an uncharacteristic hit for the prog-rockers and their only Top 10.
1978 The soundtrack album to Saturday Night Fever hits #1 in the US and stays there for an astonishing 24 weeks.
1966 George Harrison marries Pattie Boyd in Surrey, England, with Paul McCartney as best man. The couple met on the set of The Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night. Eric Clapton would later fall in love with Pattie, inspiring the song "Layla."
1966 The first Trips Festival, a three-day event, begins at the Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco. It's a landmark event in the evolution of psychedelic music. More
1938 Lupine disc jockey Wolfman Jack is born Robert Weston Smith in Brooklyn, New York. In the 1960s he blasts rock 'n roll to the masses from a high-powered border blaster signal at XERF-AM in Mexico.
21 JANUARY
In Music History
2023 Beyoncé plays a private show in Dubai, her first full concert in four years, for a reported $24 million. Her 11-year-old daughter Blue Ivy joins her on "Brown Skin Girl," the first live performance of the song.
2017 "Raindrop... drop-top..." the Atlanta rap trio Migos hit #1 in America with the meme-worthy "Bad and Boujee."
2014 Against Me! release the album Transgender Dysphoria Blues, their first since lead singer Laura Jane Grace came out as transgender. The album began as a concept piece about a transexual prostitute back when Grace was still presenting as a man (Tom Gabel). The personal implications became clear when she came out and her bandmates figured out what was going on. Two of the four members of the band - drummer Jay Weinberg and bass player Andrew Seward - quit before it is completed, but the album earns strong reviews and Grace becomes a leader in the fight for transgender rights.
2004 The warts-and-all Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster makes its debut at the Sundance Film Festival.More
2002 Peggy Lee dies of complications from diabetes and a heart attack at age 81.
1999 Blues singer/pianist Charles Brown, known for "Driftin' Blues" and "Merry Christmas Baby," dies of congestive heart failure at age 76.
1998 James Brown is released from a South Carolina hospital after undergoing treatment for an addiction to painkillers.
1997 Elvis Presley's controversial manager Colonel Tom Parker dies at age 87.
1996 Frankie "Cannibal" Garcia (of Cannibal and the Headhunters) dies of an AIDS-related illness at age 49.
1993 French singer Noël Rota aka Helno (of Les Negresses Vertes) dies of a heroin overdose at age 29.
1989 Kid 'N Play's soon-to-be-gold debut album, 2 Hype, which was released three months earlier, debuts at #96 on the Billboard 200 chart.
1984 Bon Jovi release their self-titled debut album. The first track is "Runaway," the group's debut single and first to get airplay. It was written by frontman Jon Bon Jovi, who recorded it with session musicians before the band formed.
1984 Jackie Wilson dies at 49. He has been incapacitated since suffering a heart attack on stage in 1975.
1983 Lamar Williams (the bassist who replaced Berry Oakley in The Allman Brothers Band) dies of lung cancer, possibly from exposure to Agent Orange during his service in the Vietnam War, at age 34.
1982 B.B. King donates his entire record collection to the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The 20,000-record collection includes 7,000 discs King aired as a disc jockey at Memphis' WDIA in the '50s.
Pat Boone Goes Metal
1997Pat Boone releases the album In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy, where he covers various hard rock classics, including "Stairway To Heaven," "Enter Sandman" and "Crazy Train."
Boone was one of the top pop singers of the '50s and '60 before turning his focus to gospel. Known for a sound even he describes as "vanilla," the staunchly conservative Boone takes on his musical nemesis - heavy metal - by turning the songs into lounge productions. Ritchie Blackmore and Ronnie James Dio both appear on the album, which cracks the US chart at #125, his first entry on the Albums chart since 1961. Boone wasn't always in the mood for metal. In 1991, he told Goldmine: "Heavy metal groups like Judas Priest and AC/DC and Guns N' Roses; they've gone beyond degradation and depravity to inhumanity. The very name heavy metal – there's nothing human about that."
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