1962 in Music

A babysitter, a locomotive, and the first release on a brand-new label Eva Boyd is seventeen years old, earning thirty-five dollars a week watching the infant daughter of two songwriters barely older than she is. When one of them plays a new melody, Boyd starts dancing with the baby. The songwriters bring her to the studio to cut a demo. The head of their publishing company hears it and decides the demo is the record. The Loco-Motion becomes the first single on Dimension Records, and it hits number one. Boyd invents the actual dance afterward, mimicking the driving arm of a train during a photo shoot.

The wrong Crystals sing a number-one hit A twenty-one-year-old producer needs to record a song before a rival label can release a competing version. The group whose name will appear on the label is three thousand miles away in New York. He hires a Los Angeles vocal group instead, puts a different singer on lead, credits the record to the absent group, and releases it without telling them. He's a Rebel reaches number one in November. The actual Crystals learn about it when they are asked to perform the song live. They have never heard it before.

Three hours in a church A guitarist returns from a State Department tour of Brazil carrying a new rhythm. He calls a tenor saxophonist and books a session at a Unitarian church in Washington, D.C., because the acoustics are better than any studio he can afford. Six musicians arrive around one in the afternoon. By five-thirty, they have recorded an entire album. Jazz Samba introduces bossa nova to American listeners and eventually reaches number one on the album chart. Within a year, every jazz club and cocktail lounge in the country is playing Brazilian music.

A movie theater on McLemore Avenue A seventeen-year-old organist, a twenty-year-old guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer are at a Memphis studio to back a rockabilly singer. During a break, the organist starts a bluesy riff on a Hammond organ. The studio owner hits record. Green Onions reaches number one R&B and number three pop, the first hit from a label named after its two founders' combined syllables. The studio is a converted movie theater. The sloping floor and old carpeted walls give every recording a warm, close sound that no other city can replicate. The band is interracial in a city that is not.

Five thousand seven hundred dollars well spent The owner of King Records refuses to pay for a live recording, insisting that fans will stop attending concerts if they can hear the show on vinyl. The performer finances the session himself, paying five thousand seven hundred dollars out of pocket to rent the Apollo Theater and a two-track tape machine. James Brown and the Famous Flames play one night in October. The resulting album spends sixty-six weeks on the chart and sells over a million copies.

A country album that crosses every line Ray Charles asks his A&R man to pull the best country standards from Nashville's top publishers. He records ballads with a string section and uptempo numbers with his own band and backup singers, cutting sessions in New York and Hollywood two weeks apart. I Can't Stop Loving You holds number one on the pop, R&B, and adult contemporary charts simultaneously. A Black soul singer recording country music during the most intense period of the civil rights struggle is not a marketing strategy. It is an act of will. The album sells seven hundred thousand copies in its first month.

A satellite, a leather shop, and the first British number one in America Ten days after a communications satellite completes its first transatlantic television relay, a producer in a flat above a leather goods shop in North London finishes an instrumental named after it. The melody is played on a three-octave keyboard powered by batteries, with piano hammers fitted with drawing pins for a tinny, futuristic timbre. Telstar reaches number one in both Britain and the United States. It is the first record by a British group to top the American chart.

A penny per record, split four ways After being rejected by one label because guitar groups are supposedly on their way out, four musicians from Liverpool finally record at a London studio in June. The producer is unhappy with the drummer. By August, a new drummer is in. By September, he is sitting on a stool playing tambourine while a session musician takes his place on the kit. The single reaches number seventeen in Britain. The contract pays one penny per record sold, divided among all four of them.

Fifteen minutes on a telephone Bob Gaudio writes a song in fifteen minutes. He brings it to his group, and they record it for Vee-Jay Records. Sherry spends five weeks at number one. Before the year ends, their follow-up Big Girls Don't Cry does the same. The Four Seasons have two consecutive number-one hits in their first five months on the national scene, driven by a falsetto so high and sharp it cuts through any car radio.

Elmo Lewis and a blues club in West London Two teenagers see a young man playing slide guitar at a jazz club in Ealing, performing under a stage name borrowed from his blues hero. They start rehearsing together. In July, the slide guitarist names the group while on the phone with a club owner, pulling the words from a Muddy Waters song. Their first public show is at a jazz club on Oxford Street. The bass player and drummer who will complete the lineup do not join until later. Nobody records anything.

Blowin' in the Wind in ten minutes Bob Dylan claims he writes a song in ten minutes. He first performs it at a Greenwich Village hootenanny in April, and it appears in Broadside magazine before he ever takes it into a studio. When he finally records it in July, it is one of several songs cut that day for an album that will not come out until the following spring. In the meantime, a folk trio managed by the same manager covers it, and their version reaches millions first.

She's Got You and a voice with no walls Patsy Cline opens the year with a single that crosses from number one country to the pop top fifteen. She tours with Johnny Cash and June Carter, plays Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, and appears on national television. Her voice sits so far forward in the mix that the lush orchestral arrangements behind her feel like weather: present, surrounding, but never competing. She records an entire album of ballads with the same approach, every syllable intimate enough to sound like a conversation.