Today In Oldies Music History: May 26
--Births
1886: Al Jolson1904: George Formby
1909: "Papa" Charlie McCoy
1916: Moondog
1920: Peggy Lee
1926: Miles Davis
1940: Levon Helm
1940: Ray Ennis (The Swinging Blue Jeans)
1941: Art Sharp (The Nashville Teens)
1944: Verden Allen (Mott The Hoople)
1945: Garry Peterson (The Guess Who)
1946: Mick Ronson (David Bowie, Mott The Hoople)
1948: Stevie Nicks (Fleetwood Mac)
1949: Vicki Lawrence
1949: Hank Williams Jr.
Deaths
1933: Jimmie Rodgers1968: Little Willie John
1977: William Powell (The O'Jays)
2006: Desmond Dekker
Events
1953: After hitchhiking to the Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Show in Meridian, MS, Elvis Presley wins second prize in the talent competition there.1956: Liberace plays to a huge crowd of 16,000 at Madison Square Garden in a three-hour solo performance that draws mostly ladies.
1956: Two months after heading to his scheduled television appearance and nearly dying in a car crash, Carl Perkins finally appears on NBC-TV's Perry Como Show.
1958: On the third date of his first English tour, Jerry Lee Lewis is booed off the stage, having two days previously revealed that he was married to his 14-year-old cousin, Myra Lee Brown. The scandal forces Jerry Lee to end this tour immediately, flying back to America, where he finds the scandal has unfortunately followed him.
1965: At their insistence, the Rolling Stones perform "How Many More Years" with one of their influences, bluesman Howlin' Wolf, on tonight's episode of ABC-TV's Shindig!
1969: Still on honeymoon, John Lennon and Yoko Ono check in to room 1742 in Montreal's Hotel La Reine, where they begin their second "bed-in" for peace.
1972: With Mott The Hoople threatening to disband due to public indifference, David Bowie gives the band two of his new, unrecorded songs. The band passes on "Suffragette City" but decides to cut a song called "All The Young Dudes," a massive hit that revives the group's career.
1974: An overenthusiastic crowd at a David Cassidy concert in London rushes the stage, injuring a thousand screaming fans and crushing 14-year-old Bernadette Whelan, who died from her injuries four days later. A distraught Cassidy refuses to tour for the next eleven years.
1976: On a transatlantic British Airways flight, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin get drunk and verbally harass the other first-class passengers on the flight, including actors Dudley Moore and Telly Savalas.
1977: The rock group KISS provides Marvel Comics with a small vial of their blood to be mixed with printers' ink for their upcoming faux-autobiographical comic.
1977: Beatlemania! a Broadway tribute to the music of the Beatles, starring sound- and look-alikes, opens at the Winter Garden Theater to rave reviews.
1982: The late Bobby Darin is awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1735 Vine St.
1993: Singapore lifts its decades-old ban on the music of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Chicago.
1994: Michael Jackson marries his first wife, Lisa Marie Presley, only daughter of Elvis, in a secret ceremony held in the Dominican Republican. The couple would divorce twenty months later.
1996: Firemen arrive at the burning home of Eric Clapton to find the guitarist running in and out of the home to save his guitar collection. The house is gutted, with about three million dollars' damage.
2008: Yale awards Paul McCartney an honorary Doctorate of Music.
Releases
1962: The Isley Brothers, "Twist And Shout"1973: Deep Purple, "Smoke On The Water"
Recording
1937: Lionel Hampton, "Flying Home"1963: Elvis Presley: "Echoes Of Love," "Please Don't Drag That String Around," "(You're The) Devil In Disguise," "Never Ending"
1966: Elvis Presley: "Where No One Stands Alone," "Down In The Alley," "Tomorrow Is A Long Time," "Love Letters"
1966: The Beatles, "Yellow Submarine"
1967: The Beatles, "It's All Too Much"
1971: Don McLean, "American Pie"
Charts
1962: Mr. Acker Bilk's "Stranger On The Shore" hits #11973: The Edgar Winter Group's "Frankenstein" hits #1
1973: The Beatles' LP The Beatles 1967-1970 hits #1
