1958 in Music

A pencil through a speaker cone Link Wray pokes holes in the speaker cone of his Premier amplifier with a pencil, plugs in, and records Rumble at a small studio in Frederick, Maryland. It is an instrumental built on three distorted power chords and almost nothing else. Radio stations in New York, Boston, and Detroit ban it because 'rumble' is slang for gang fight, making it the only instrumental ever pulled from the airwaves for its supposed capacity to incite violence. It reaches number sixteen on the pop chart without radio support. The sound Wray gets from those punctured speakers, thick and grinding and overtone-rich, is the sound of the next decade arriving early.

A tombstone inscription becomes a number one hit Phil Spector is eighteen years old. He has formed a group called the Teddy Bears, written a song called To Know Him Is to Love Him, and booked a session at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles for seventy-five dollars. The title comes from his father's gravestone. Benjamin Spector killed himself when Phil was nine. The record takes two months to get airplay, then climbs to number one and stays for three weeks. A teenager has written, arranged, produced, and performed a chart-topping single. Within four years, that teenager will be filling Gold Star with multiple pianos, multiple guitars, and multiple drummers, building a production method so dense it will need its own name.

The song that charts everywhere at once The Everly Brothers' All I Have to Do Is Dream reaches number one on all four Billboard singles charts simultaneously: pop, R&B, country, and Most Played by Jockeys. No single has done this before. Don and Phil Everly sing in close harmony so precisely interlocked that the two voices fuse into a third sound, neither brother's alone. Boudleaux and Felice Bryant write them another hit, Bird Dog, which goes to number one on the Hot 100 later that year. The brother-harmony vocal style they are perfecting will echo through the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Simon and Garfunkel.

Forty-eight records become one chart On August 4, Billboard publishes the first Hot 100, combining four separate rankings, jukebox play, radio airplay, retail sales, and trade survey, into a single list. The first number one is Ricky Nelson's Poor Little Fool, a song written by fifteen-year-old Sharon Sheeley that Nelson dislikes so much he refuses to perform it on his family's television show. One chart to rule pop music: the Hot 100 will become the standard measure of commercial success in American music for the rest of the century.

A murder ballad goes to college The Kingston Trio, three men from Palo Alto who got their break when a comedian canceled a nightclub booking, record Tom Dooley in three days for Capitol. The song is a two-chord folk ballad about a Confederate veteran hanged in North Carolina in 1868 for stabbing his girlfriend. It sells a million copies by Christmas and reaches number one pop. College students who have never set foot in Appalachia start buying acoustic guitars. The folk revival that will produce Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and the Greenwich Village scene of the early 1960s starts here, with a fraternity-polished murder ballad.

Johnny B. Goode, country boy Chuck Berry records Johnny B. Goode and Sweet Little Sixteen at Chess Studios in Chicago with Lafayette Leake on piano, Willie Dixon on bass, and Fred Below on drums. Berry originally writes the lyric as 'that little colored boy could play,' then changes it to 'country boy' to broaden the audience. Johnny B. Goode reaches number eight pop, number two R&B. At the Newport Jazz Festival that summer, Berry duck-walks across the stage during a clarinet solo, and the filmmaker Aram Avakian captures it for Jazz on a Summer's Day. Nineteen years later, Johnny B. Goode will be placed on the Voyager Golden Record and launched into interstellar space.

The king reports for duty Elvis Presley is inducted at the Memphis Draft Board on March 24, serial number 53310761. At Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, two days later, he receives his military haircut in front of press cameras. He quips: 'Hair today, gone tomorrow.' His mother Gladys, who has been ill, dies on August 14 at the age of forty-six. Elvis sobs at the funeral while the Blackwood Brothers sing. Ten days later he is back at Fort Hood. By October he is on a troopship to Germany. Rock and roll's biggest star will not make another record for two years, and the industry will spend those years trying to replace him with safer substitutes.

Thirteen years old at Heathrow Jerry Lee Lewis arrives in London on May 22 for a thirty-seven-date UK tour. At Heathrow Airport, a reporter discovers that Lewis's wife Myra is thirteen, not fifteen as Lewis claims. British tabloids call him a cradle robber. The tour is canceled after three concerts. Back in America, his booking fee drops from ten thousand dollars a night to two hundred and fifty. Lewis will spend the next decade in commercial exile. In rock and roll's first great self-destruction year, he is the most spectacular casualty.

A hundred guitars that almost nobody wanted Gibson introduces the Flying V and the Explorer, two electric guitars made from African limba wood with angular, futuristic bodies that look like nothing else in any music store. Gibson manufactures eighty-one Flying Vs and nineteen Explorers. Almost no one buys them. The line is discontinued within a year. Albert King picks up a Flying V. Dave Davies will later grab an Explorer. By the 1980s, the original 1958 models will sell at auction for a quarter of a million dollars each.

Berry Gordy writes his way toward a label Berry Gordy Jr. co-writes Lonely Teardrops for Jackie Wilson with his sister Gwen and Roquel Billy Davis. Wilson records it for Brunswick, and it goes to number one R&B. Gordy has now written six Jackie Wilson A-sides in eighteen months. The songwriting royalties are modest, but the confidence is not. Within a year he will borrow eight hundred dollars from his family savings and start pressing records on his own Tamla label in Detroit.

A mortgage for a tape recorder In Memphis, Estelle Axton mortgages her family home for twenty-five hundred dollars so her brother Jim Stewart can buy an Ampex 350 tape recorder for his fledgling label, Satellite Records. Stewart has been cutting country singles in a garage. The Ampex changes nothing immediately. But within three years, Satellite will become Stax, move into an abandoned movie theater on McLemore Avenue, and the tape recorder Axton's mortgage bought will capture Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MGs, and the Memphis soul sound.

Jazz opens up Miles Davis records Milestones with a sextet that includes both Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane. The title track is built on two modes, G Dorian and A Aeolian, instead of rapid chord changes. The players improvise over scales rather than racing through harmonic puzzles. It is a door opening onto Kind of Blue, still a year away. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, Ornette Coleman records his debut, Something Else, nine original compositions on alto saxophone that throw out chord changes almost entirely. Two different musicians, on opposite coasts, arriving at the same conclusion: less structure, more space.