1957 in Music

The Devil in the room Before recording Great Balls of Fire at Sun Studio on October 8, Jerry Lee Lewis gets into a screaming theological argument with Sam Phillips. Lewis, expelled from Southwest Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, for playing boogie-woogie in chapel, refuses to sing the song. 'How can the Devil save souls?' he shouts. Phillips argues that his music can be a force for good. The tape runs the entire time. The argument cuts off, and somehow the next thing on the reel is one of the most explosive piano recordings ever made. It sells a million copies in ten days.

A grocery store in the desert Norman Petty's recording studio at 1313 West 7th Street in Clovis, New Mexico, is a converted family grocery store, hand-built and considered state-of-the-art. Traffic noise on 7th Street forces all recording after dark. On February 25, Buddy Holly and the Crickets cut That'll Be the Day in two takes. The title comes from John Wayne's repeated line in The Searchers, which Holly and drummer Jerry Allison picked up after seeing the film together. Holly's contract with Decca prohibits re-recording, so Petty credits the band name instead. By September it tops both the US and UK charts.

Peggy Sue was Cindy Lou Buddy Holly records a song called Cindy Lou, named after his niece. Drummer Jerry Allison suggests renaming it after his girlfriend, Peggy Sue Gerron, as a romantic gesture. They also scrap the original cha-cha rhythm for Allison's rolling paradiddle pattern on a loosely tuned snare. The song is released on Coral Records as a Buddy Holly solo single while That'll Be the Day comes out on Brunswick as the Crickets, a scheme designed so DJs will play records by two seemingly different acts.

Thirty rejections and a ban in Boston Bye Bye Love, written by husband-and-wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, has been turned down by thirty acts before the Everly Brothers record it. It reaches number one country and number two pop. Their follow-up, Wake Up Little Susie, is banned by Boston radio stations after the Catholic Diocese objects to a song about a couple falling asleep at the drive-in. The ban does nothing. It hits number one on the pop, country, and R&B charts simultaneously.

Dale Cook fools nobody Sam Cooke has been the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, one of gospel's most important groups, drawing audiences of screaming young women who scandalize the church community. When he records a pop single for Keen Records, he uses the pseudonym Dale Cook to protect his gospel reputation. His voice is too distinctive. You Send Me spends three weeks at number one pop and six weeks at number one R&B, selling 1.7 million copies. The crossover from sacred to secular creates a template that will soon be called soul music.

Sputnik on the ferry Little Richard is touring Australia when the Soviet Union launches Sputnik on October 4. On a domestic flight, he sees the plane's engines glowing red and becomes convinced angels are holding the aircraft aloft. Days later, crossing the Hunter River on the Stockton ferry after a Sydney show, he tells his band he is quitting rock and roll and throws four diamond rings into the water. He drives from California to Huntsville, Alabama, enrolls at Oakwood Bible College, and becomes a theology student. Before quitting, he had three top-ten hits on Specialty Records in 1957 alone: Lucille, Jenny Jenny, and Keep A-Knockin'.

Twenty million viewers at three o'clock American Bandstand goes national on ABC on August 5, airing weekdays at 3 p.m. when teenagers get home from school. Dick Clark hosts from a studio in Philadelphia, still broadcasting live. Within six months, 101 stations carry it. The show becomes a kingmaker: a single play can break a record. Two days after the national debut, fifteen-year-old Paul Anka performs Diana, a song he wrote about his unrequited crush on an eighteen-year-old church organist in Ottawa. It sells twenty million copies.

A flatbed lorry and a Scout hut On July 6, the Quarrymen play at the St. Peter's Church fete in Woolton, Liverpool, first on the back of a flatbed lorry in a procession of floats, then on a stage behind the church before a display by the City of Liverpool Police Dogs. Fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney arrives and watches from the crowd. In the Scout hut afterward, he picks up a guitar, tunes it (a skill none of the Quarrymen have mastered), and plays Eddie Cochran's Twenty Flight Rock, Gene Vincent's Be-Bop-a-Lula, and a medley of Little Richard songs. John Lennon is impressed that McCartney knows all the words.

Nineteen horns in a church on 30th Street Miles Davis and arranger Gil Evans reconvene at Columbia's 30th Street Studio, a converted church with a three-story ceiling, to record Miles Ahead with a nineteen-piece orchestra. It is their first collaboration since the Birth of the Cool sessions eight years earlier. Meanwhile, John Coltrane, recently fired from Davis's band for addiction, cleans up in Philadelphia and joins Thelonious Monk for a six-month residency at the Five Spot Cafe in the Bowery. The room holds a hundred people at most. The residency is never professionally recorded.

A saxophone in the desert at 3 a.m. Sonny Rollins records Way Out West at Contemporary Records in Los Angeles, starting at three in the morning to fit everyone's schedule. The album is a trio: just Rollins on tenor saxophone, Ray Brown on bass, Shelly Manne on drums. No piano, no guitar. The cover photograph by William Claxton shows Rollins standing in the desert in a Stetson and gun belt, holding his saxophone at the hip like a pistol.

Stereo on one side, train sounds on the other Sidney Frey of Audio Fidelity Records has Westrex cut the first mass-produced American stereophonic LP in November. It is a demonstration disc: the Dukes of Dixieland on one side, railroad sound effects on the other. Atlantic Records, meanwhile, becomes the first label to use an eight-track tape machine. The stereo era has not quite arrived, but the equipment is in the room.

A waltz after midnight Patsy Cline appears on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts on CBS on January 21. She wants to sing A Poor Man's Roses, but producers insist on Walkin' After Midnight. The viewer response is so strong that Decca rush-releases the single within three weeks. It reaches number two country and number twelve pop, a crossover that anticipates the Nashville Sound. The same year, RCA builds Studio B on Music Row. Jim Reeves records Four Walls there in February, a record that producer Colin Escott later calls the first Nashville Sound record.