Born on this day in 1967, Gary Herzberg was born in Montebello, California. Under the stage name Gary Allan; the scratchy-voiced singer debuted in 1996, with hits like “Smoke Rings In The Dark,” “Watching Airplanes,” and “Every Storm (Runs Out Of Rain).”

Today in 1956, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis posed for a photo at the Sun studio in Memphis. The foursome conducted an impromptu jam session, which was dubbed “The Million Dollar Quartet.”

An article about the session was published in the Memphis Press-Scimitar under the title “Million Dollar Quartet”. The recording was first released in Europe in 1981 as The Million Dollar Quartet with 17 tracks. A few years later more tracks were discovered and released as The Complete Million Dollar Session. In 1990, the recordings were released in the United States as Elvis Presley – The Million Dollar Quartet. This session is considered a seminal moment in rock and roll.

The jam session seems to have happened by pure chance. Perkins, who by this time had already met success with “Blue Suede Shoes”, had come into the studios that day accompanied by his brothers Clayton and Jay and by drummer W.S. Holland, their aim being to record some new material, including a revamped version of an old blues song, “Matchbox”. Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, who wanted to try to fatten this sparse rockabilly instrumentation, had brought in his latest acquisition, Jerry Lee Lewis, still unknown outside Memphis, to play piano (at the time, a Wurlitzer Spinet) on the Perkins session. Lewis’s first Sun single would be released a few days later. Sometime in the early afternoon, 21-year-old Elvis Presley, a former Sun artist now with RCA Victor, arrived to pay a casual visit accompanied by a girlfriend, Marilyn Evans.

After chatting with Phillips in the control room, Presley listened to the playback of Perkins’s session, which he pronounced to be good. Then he went into the studio and some time later, the jam session began. At some point during the session, Sun artist Johnny Cash, who had recently enjoyed a few hit records on the country charts, arrived as well. (Cash wrote in his autobiography Cash that he had been first to arrive at the Sun Studio that day, wanting to listen in on the Perkins recording session.) Jack Clement was engineering that day and remembers saying to himself “I think I’d be remiss not to record this,” and so he did. After running through a number of songs, Elvis and girlfriend Evans slipped out as Jerry Lee pounded away on the piano. Cash wrote in Cash that “no one wanted to follow Jerry Lee, not even Elvis.” Whatever Elvis’s feelings may or may not have been in regard to “following” Lewis, Presley was clearly the “star” of the impromptu jam session, which consisted largely of snippets of gospel songs that the four artists had all grown up singing. The recordings show Elvis, the most nationally and internationally famous of the four at the time, to be the focal point of what was a casual, spur-of-the-moment gathering of four artists who would each go on to contribute greatly to the seismic shift in popular music in the late 1950s.

During the session, Phillips called a local newspaper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar. Bob Johnson, the newspaper’s entertainment editor, came over to the studios with UPI representative Leo Sora with photographer George Pierce. Johnson wrote an article about the session, which appeared the following day in the Press-Scimitar under the headline “Million Dollar Quartet”.

Source: Wikipedia

Today in 1948, “Here Comes Santa Claus” by Gene Autry entered the Top 40 chart.

Autry’s original recording (in which he pronounces Santa Claus as “Santy Claus”) was a top-10 hit on the pop and country charts; the song would go on to be covered many times in the subsequent decades.

Autry got the idea for the song after riding his horse in the 1946 Santa Claus Lane Parade (now the Hollywood Christmas Parade) in Los Angeles, during which crowds of spectators chanted, “Here comes Santa Claus”. Autry’s lyrics combined two veins of the Christmas tradition, the mythology of Santa Claus and the Christian origin of the holiday (most explicitly in its mention of the nativity promise of “peace on Earth”). A demo recording was made by singer/guitarist Johnny Bond, whose recording made use of ice cubes to mimic the sound of the jingling sleigh-bells. This inspired the use of real sleigh-bells in Autry’s own recording of the song.

Source: Wikipedia

Today in 1957, “Jailhouse Rock” gave Elvis Presley a #1 country single in Billboard magazine.

Written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller,  RCA Victor released the song on a 45 rpm single on September 24, 1957, the song had a film release of Presley’s motion picture under the same name, Jailhouse Rock.

Rolling Stone magazine included it at number 67 on its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and was named one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. In 2004, it finished at number 21 on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Songs survey of top tunes in American cinema. On November 27, 2016, the Grammy Hall of Fame announced its induction, along with that of another 24 songs. In 2019, it ranked #31 in the list of Spain’s most heard radio station. Rock FM 500’s five hundred rockers of all time, as well as ahead as any other song of the 1950’as.

Presley’s performance of the song in the film, choreographed as a dance routine involving himself and a large group of male prisoners, was featured among other classic MGM musical numbers in the 1994 documentary That’s Entertainment! III. The film version differs from the single version of the song, featuring backing instrumentation and vocals not heard on the record.

Source: Wikipedia

This day in 1959, “The Battle Of New Orleans” won Song of the Year for composer Jimmy Driftwood and Best Country & Western Performance for Johnny Horton during the second annual GRAMMY Awards.

The song describes the Battle of New Orleans from the perspective of an American soldier; the song tells the tale of the battle with a light tone and provides a rather comical version of what actually happened at the battle. It has been recorded by many artists, but the singer most often associated with this song is Johnny Horton. His version scored number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959 (see 1959 in music). Billboard ranked it as the No. 1 song for 1959, it was very popular with teenagers in the late 50s/early 60s in an era mostly dominated by rock and roll music.

In Billboard magazine’s rankings of the top songs in the first 50 years of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, “The Battle of New Orleans” was ranked as the 28th song overall and the number-one country music song to appear on the chart.

Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.

Source: Wikipedia