5 FEBRUARY
In Music History
1957 Bill Haley arrives in London for his first British tour. He's the first American rock star to tour there and is met by about 4,000 fans at Heathrow Airport, mostly thanks to promoters who hyped his coming as "the second battle of Waterloo."
1955 The Fontane Sisters' "Hearts of Stone" hits #1 in America for the first of three weeks.
1944 Al Kooper (of The Blues Project, Blood, Sweat & Tears) is born Alan Peter Kuperschmidt in Brooklyn, New York.
1944 J.R. Cobb (guitarist for Classics IV, Atlanta Rhythm Section) is born in Birmingham, Alabama.
1943 Chuck Winfield (trumpet player for Blood, Sweat & Tears) is born.
1941 Cory Wells (of Three Dog Night) is born Emil Lewandowski in Buffalo, New York.
1941 Barrett Strong, who teams with producer Norman Whitfield to write a number of Motown hits, including "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," is born in West Point, Mississippi.
1935 Alex Harvey (of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band) is born in Glasgow, Scotland.
1931 Eddie Cantor makes his debut radio appearance, singing on Rudy Vallee's Fleischmann Hour.
1930 Jazz trumpeter Don Goldie is born Donald Elliott Goldfield in Newark, New Jersey. His father, Harry "Goldie" Goldfield, was also a trumpet player who worked with Paul Whiteman.
1923 Country singer-songwriter Claude King, known for the 1962 hit "Wolverton Mountain," is born in Keithville, Louisiana.
Paul Simon Announces Farewell Tour
2018Paul Simon announces his final tour, the Homeward Bound Tour.
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Featured Events
2017 Lady Gaga opens the Super Bowl halftime show with a verse from "God Bless America," followed by the song Woody Guthrie wrote as a parody, "This Land Is Your Land."More
2012 The Super Bowl XLVI halftime show becomes the most-watched television event in history, at 118 million views. Performing artists include Madonna, LMFAO, Nicki Minaj, and Cee Lo Green.
2008 On the day of the Super Tuesday primary elections in America, luminaries from across many genres of music (country - not so much) voice their enthusiastic support for Barack Obama, who wins big in the primaries on his way to the White House.More
1988 The John Hughes film She's Having A Baby debuts in US theaters. Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern star as a young married couple whose lives are about to be upended by the birth of their first child. The soundtrack features Kate Bush's heart-wrenching ballad "This Woman's Work," written and recorded expressly for the movie.More
1983 Continental shift: "Africa" by Toto replaces "Down Under" by Men At Work at #1 in the US.
1948 Actor Christopher Guest, known as Alan Barrows of the fictional folk trio The Folksmen and Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap, is born in New York City. The mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap tells us Tufnel was born in Squatney, London.
1929 Hal Blaine, the famous session drummer coined the term "Wrecking Crew" for the prolific group of Los Angeles studio musicians, is born in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
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