1961 in Music

A mailman, a drummer, and a fifteen-year-old The Marvelettes audition for Berry Gordy's Tamla label with a song co-written by Freddie Gorman, an actual mail carrier. Gordy reworks it and books a session on August 21. Lead singer Gladys Horton is fifteen years old. A twenty-two-year-old Marvin Gaye sits in on drums. Please Mr. Postman becomes the first Motown record to reach number one on the Hot 100. Gordy's assembly line, modeled on the Ford plant where he once worked, has produced its first finished car.

Five minutes at the piano Ben E. King finishes a session for Spanish Harlem and has leftover studio time. Producers Leiber and Stoller ask if he has anything else. He plays them a song on the piano. Mike Stoller sits down and works out the bass pattern in about five minutes, in the key of A. The record opens with that bass line, a triangle, and a brush scraped across the base of a snare drum. Stand by Me hits number one R&B and number four pop. The bass pattern is so simple that everyone who hears it believes they've always known it.

One take on crutches Patsy Cline hates the song. Willie Nelson wrote it, originally titled Stupid, and she wants nothing to do with it. But Owen Bradley books the session anyway. On August 21, Cline arrives at the Quonset Hut Studio on crutches, still healing from a car crash that threw her through a windshield two months earlier. Her ribs hurt too badly to hit the high notes. Bradley sends her home, records the instrumental track without her, and brings her back three weeks later. She sings Crazy in a single take.

A guitar, a harmonica, and Cafe Wha? Bob Dylan arrives in New York on January 24, nineteen years old, carrying a guitar and a few songs. Within hours he walks into Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street and plays for the first time. By September, a rave review in the New York Times catches the attention of John Hammond at Columbia Records. Hammond signs him and records his debut album in three afternoon sessions. Columbia spends about four hundred and two dollars on the whole thing. People at the label call it Hammond's Folly.

A record shop customer and a lunchtime show On October 28, a customer named Raymond Jones walks into Brian Epstein's record shop in Liverpool and asks for a single called My Bonnie by the Beatles. Twelve days later, Epstein goes to the Cavern Club for a Thursday lunchtime concert. George Harrison greets him in the dressing room: And what brings Mr. Epstein here? By December, Epstein has signed a management contract. The Beatles have played nearly a hundred shows at the Cavern this year alone, plus five hundred hours on stage in Hamburg. Nobody outside Liverpool has heard of them.

Sixteen minutes, no piano John Coltrane sets up at the Village Vanguard for four nights in November. Producer Bob Thiele meets him face to face for the first time at the club. On Chasin' the Trane, McCoy Tyner sits out entirely: just tenor saxophone, bass, and drums, blowing an unrehearsed blues that stretches past sixteen minutes. Eric Dolphy joins on alto for another take, pushing even closer to free jazz. Five selections are released on two separate albums. The complete sessions, four CDs of music, won't appear until 1997.

Eleven days On June 25, the Bill Evans Trio records five sets at the Village Vanguard: two in the afternoon, three at night. Evans on piano, Scott LaFaro on bass, Paul Motian on drums. The three of them play as equals, the bass no longer keeping time but carrying melody, the piano comping in fragments, every note a conversation. Eleven days later, LaFaro falls asleep at the wheel on a road in upstate New York and hits a tree. He is twenty-five. Evans does not record another trio album for more than a year.

A keyboard made from television tubes Del Shannon records Runaway at Bell Sound Studios in January. The bridge features a Musitron, a three-octave keyboard that co-musician Max Crook built from a clavioline, resistors, vacuum tubes salvaged from television sets, and parts from household appliances. Shannon points at Crook during the session and says play something. Crook improvises the solo on the spot. American Bandstand runs a contest asking listeners to guess what instrument they are hearing. The single spends four weeks at number one.

Prom dresses at the studio Phil Spector, twenty-one years old, has been producing hits for other labels all year: Ray Peterson, Curtis Lee, the Paris Sisters. In late 1961, he and partner Lester Sill found Philles Records. Their first signing is the Crystals, five teenagers from Brooklyn. The group records There's No Other Like My Baby on the evening of their high school prom, still wearing their dresses. The single debuts on the Hot 100 in November.

Three million copies on a tiny label Bobby Lewis records Tossin' and Turnin' for Beltone Records, a label so small it barely has national distribution. The song sits at number one for seven weeks, longer than anything else all year, and sells three million copies. Lewis manages one more Top 10 single. Beltone folds by 1963. But for one summer, the biggest record in America belongs to a label nobody has heard of.

Ten shillings and a stolen lullaby The Tokens, a doo-wop group from Brooklyn, record The Lion Sleeps Tonight, adapted from a melody called Mbube written by Solomon Linda, a Zulu migrant worker in South Africa, in 1939. Linda sold his rights for ten shillings. The Tokens' version reaches number one in the United States. Linda receives no credit and no royalties. Decades of copyright disputes follow before a court orders his family ten percent of performance royalties.

Spring reverb and a hundred watts Dick Dale is packing the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, playing a right-handed Stratocaster flipped upside down because he is left-handed. His playing is so aggressive that it destroys amplifiers. He partners with Leo Fender to build the first hundred-watt guitar amp, the Dual Showman, and adopts the Fender Reverb unit, whose spring tank produces a dripping, metallic wash. His single Let's Go Trippin' comes out two months before the Beach Boys release Surfin'. The sound of the California coast starts here.