1950 in Music

A storefront on Union Avenue A man opens a tiny recording studio in Memphis, glues acoustic tiles to the ceiling himself, and advertises that he will record anything, anywhere, anytime. The policy is simple: he will record anyone who can pay. In Memphis in 1950, that openness is radical. Within a year he is recording the most important blues musicians in America. Within five years he will discover the biggest pop star on the planet.

The first solid-body ships from Fullerton In a cinderblock shop in Fullerton, California, the first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar rolls off the line. A trademark dispute forces a rename almost immediately. It ends up called the Telecaster, a nod to the coming age of television. Working guitarists love it because it stays in tune, cuts through a band, and costs less than a Gibson archtop.

Two Polish brothers charter a label in Chicago Two immigrant brothers formally establish a record label on the South Side of Chicago. They sign the artists the major labels ignore, almost all of them Black, and press records in runs of a few thousand. Within three years their catalog will include the most important electric blues recordings ever made.

A twenty-one-year-old pianist from New Orleans A session at a small studio on Rampart Street in New Orleans produces a boogie-woogie piano single with a mumbled, exuberant vocal. The record tops the R&B chart. It is now regularly cited as the first rock and roll single. The pianist is twenty-one years old and will still be performing the same song fifty years later.

One woman harmonizing with herself A producer uses the new technique of overdubbing to let a singer harmonize with her own voice on a country waltz. The result sells ten million copies and becomes the best-selling single of the year. One woman, singing with herself. The idea that the studio can create something impossible in a live room has arrived.

A dead man's song becomes the hit of the summer A folk quartet records a song written by a musician who died the previous December, penniless, in a tiny apartment in Queens. He never saw a royalty check from the song he had been performing since the 1930s. The cover version sells two million copies and holds number one for thirteen weeks.

A zither from a Viennese pub A pub musician who has never left Austria and speaks no English records a film theme on a table zither in a London hotel room. The instrumental outsells everything in America for nearly three months. He was discovered by a film director scouting locations in Vienna. The pop charts in 1950 are wonderfully strange.

Three number ones from Castle Studio A twenty-six-year-old country singer already drinking heavily, already burning through a career that will end three years later on the back seat of a car, cuts three number-one hits in a single year. He also records a song held for release until 1951, when a pop singer's cover will prove that Nashville songwriting can conquer the mainstream.

A first session in Jim Beck's studio A twenty-two-year-old Texan walks into a Dallas studio for his first recording session. That single session produces two sides. His smooth, sliding vocal phrasing, stretching a single syllable across three or four notes, will influence every country singer who follows for the next fifty years.

The Maharaja's guarantee A premiere of orchestral songs by a composer who died the previous September almost goes unrecorded. The performance is captured only because the Maharaja of Mysore puts up a financial guarantee so it can be committed to tape for his personal collection of roughly 20,000 records. The recording circulates as pirate copies for decades. It remains one of the most beautiful things ever committed to tape.

Cool jazz leaves the gate A series of sessions with a nine-piece group, arrangements built on French horns and tubas instead of the standard bebop quintet, bends the entire trajectory of jazz. The music is quiet, precise, and harmonically rich where bebop is fast and virtuosic. Meanwhile a bebop pianist records solo sides that translate the music's rhythmic and harmonic language onto the keyboard with a ferocity that leaves other pianists shaking their heads. Jazz is splintering.