9 MAY
Featured Events
2005 Kenny Chesney and Renee Zellweger get married. Their union lasts just four months, but provides inspiration for Chesney's song "I'm Alive."
1992 Bruce Springsteen performs on US TV for the first time when he finally accepts a longstanding offer to be the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. He plays three songs from Human Touch and Lucky Town, the albums he released simultaneously five weeks earlier.
1987 The Grateful Dead shoot the video for "Touch Of Grey" after a concert in Monterey, California. After the show, the shoot is set up and the audience brought back in to watch two different performances of the song: one by the band and another by their skeleton likenesses - the "Dead Ringers." It's the first music video by the band, and it goes into rotation on MTV, giving the group their first hit single.
1974 Bruce Springsteen gets a huge career boost when he opens for Bonnie Raitt at her Boston Arena show. Playing his full two-hour set at Raitt's insistence (rare for an opening act), Bruce is so impressive that Rolling Stone's Jon Landau writes in Boston's The Real Paper, "I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time." Landau went on to become Springsteen's manager and producer.
1970 The Canadian band The Guess Who hit #1 in America with "American Woman." The song is actually a tribute to the women of Canada.
1964 Louis Armstrong's "Hello, Dolly!" hits #1 in the US, making him the first artist to displace The Beatles, who held the top spot the previous 14 weeks with "I Want To Hold Your Hand," "She Loves You" and "Can't Buy Me Love."
1949 Billy Joel is born in The Bronx, New York, raised in Hicksville on Long Island.More
9 MAY
In Music History
2022 Patti Labelle plays Cedric The Entertainer's overbearing mother in the episode of The Neighborhood, "Welcome To The Mama Drama." At the end, they all sing her hit "Lady Marmalade."
2020 Rock pioneer Little Richard dies of bone cancer at the age of 87. Over the course of his legendary career he recorded some of America's most recognizable songs, including "Tutti Frutti," "Long Tall Sally," and "Good Golly Miss Molly."
2017 Italian trance DJ Robert Miles dies in Ibiza, Spain, at age 47 after a short illness.
2014 Michael Jackson's second posthumous album, Xscape, is released.
2014 Hunter Hayes breaks the record for most concerts performed in different cities in a single day when he plays 10 shows in 24 hours.
2013 The RIAA starts counting streaming toward its Gold and Platinum awards, with 1,500 album streams equal to one album sale (a "unit"), and 150 song streams counting for one song sale.
2013 Rocker Sixto "Sugar Man" Rodriguez receives an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from his alma mater, Wayne State University, Detroit.
2010 Cyndi Lauper is the ninth contestant booted off Season 9 of The Celebrity Apprentice.
2006 The Red Hot Chili Peppers release their ninth album, Stadium Arcadium. Featuring the hit singles "Dani California" and "Snow (Hey Oh)," it's their first album to hit #1 in the US.More
2005 The music video for Stevie Wonder's "So What The Fuss" is issued with a descriptive audio track by Busta Rhymes for the visually-impaired.
2003 The Eagles, trimmed to a four-man lineup (Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit) after parting ways with Don Felder, start their Farewell I tour in Richmond, Virginia, the title a mocking reference to the many "farewell" tours that aren't really. They play 168 dates on the tour over a span of three years.
2000 Bad Religion release their 11th full-length studio album, The New America. It's the band's final release on Atlantic Records and their final recording with drummer Bobby Schayer, who had been a member of Bad Religion since 1991. On The New America, guitarist Brett Gurewitz (who left Bad Religion in 1994, but eventually rejoined the band in the next year) co-wrote the song "Believe It" with frontman Greg Graffin.
1998 Brian Wilson plays his first ever solo concert (no Beach Boys) at a show in St. Charles, Illinois.
1998 Blues musician Lester Butler dies of a heroin and cocaine overdose at age 38.
1989 In an interview with The Washington Times, Public Enemy's "Minister of Information," Professor Griff, blames Jews for "the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe."More
FDA Approves The Pill, So Does Loretta Lynn
1960The birth control pill is introduced in the US, inspiring Loretta Lynn to sing a song about it.
By the time the birth control pill hits the US market in 1960, 28-year-old Loretta Lynn has already given birth to four of her six children. She's just beginning her professional music career, signing her first recording contract with Zero Records and recording a collection of original songs that will soon land her on the Grand Ole Opry stage. Still, the honky-tonk girl from rural Kentucky has no idea that a pill has been invented that will give her reproductive freedom (when she does find out about it, she can't afford to take it), leading her to give birth yet again in 1964 to a set of twins. A decade later, contraception is still a hot-button issue as Supreme Court cases like Eisenstadt vs. Baird challenge laws that prevent unmarried women and teenagers from having access to the pill (some states even outlawed the pill for married couples). In the midst of all this, Lynn releases "The Pill," a comedic song about a woman who takes a stand against her husband for getting her pregnant year after year and finds freedom when she goes on the pill. Aside from a little-known French tune by The Singing Nun, there has never been a song about contraception before, let alone one that celebrates it. Lynn, who is still riding high on her win as the Country Music Association's first female Entertainer of the Year, is a regular fixture at the top of the country charts, but this new bit of blasphemy is too much for staunch conservatives. Radio stations pull the song from the air, and outraged preachers forbid parishioners from listening to it, lest they run out and not get pregnant. Of course, all of this only calls more attention to the song. It peaks at #5 on the country chart and #70 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Lynn's highest-charting single on the pop chart – and the most controversial song of her career. Lynn, who once told Playgirl Magazine that she would've taken the pill "like popcorn" if she had the choice, still doesn't understand why a song about real life can give rise to such a furor. She tells Songfacts: "I didn't understand that, because everybody was taking the pill. I didn't have the money to take it when they put it out, but I couldn't understand why they were raising such a fuss over taking the pill."
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