1961 – George Formby, OBE died aged 57. The British singing comedian and ukulele player made over 20 films, and his best known song is ‘Leaning On A Lamp Post.’
1963 – Country singers Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins were killed in a plane crash near Camden, Tennessee. They were travelling to Nashville after appearing at a benefit concert for the widow of Kansas City disc jockey ‘Cactus’ Jack Call, who had died in a car crash.
1966 – Police were called, after over 100 music fans barricaded themselves inside Liverpool’s Cavern Club to protest at the clubs closure. The club had run up debts of over £10,000.
1967 – Engelbert Humperdinck was at No.1 on the UK singles chart with ‘Release Me.’ The singer’s first of two number 1’s, the song spent six weeks at the top of the chart and a record fifty six weeks on the chart.
1972 – Elton John released ‘Rocket Man’ as a single. The song was inspired by the short story “The Rocket Man” in The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, and echoes the theme of David Bowie’s 1969 song ‘Space Oddity’.
1974 – Chris Difford placed an advert in a shop window saying: ‘lyricist seeks musician for co-writing’. Glen Tillbrook answered the ad and the pair went on to form Squeeze and had hits with ‘Cool for Cats’, ‘Up the Junction’, ‘Tempted’, ‘Labelled With Love’, and ‘Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)’.
1993 – Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown became parents when Whitney gave birth to a baby girl, Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown. Bobbi went on to become a reality television and media personality, singer, and actress. She died in hospice care on July 26, 2015, at the age of 22 after being found face down in a bathtub in her Georgia home. She was later placed into a medically induced coma.
1995 – Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ won three Grammys for Song of the Year, Best Male Vocal Performance and Best Rock Song. The track was featured in the film Philadelphia (1993), an early mainstream film dealing with HIV/AIDS which stars Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington.
1999 – Dusty Springfield died after a long battle against cancer, aged 59. The British singer had her first UK hit single in 1963 with ‘I Only Want To Be With You’.
2013 – A pencil doodle by Paul McCartney when he was a teenager sold for over £3,000. The sketches were drawn by McCartney during the late 1950s while a student at the Liverpool Institute High School For Boys. The drawings showed multiple faces with different expressions on a single sheet of paper in pencil.
2016 – Bob Dylan sold his personal archive of notes, draft lyrics, poems, artwork and photographs to the University of Tulsa, where they would be made available to scholars and curated for public exhibitions. The 6,000 item collection also included master recording tapes of Dylan’s entire music catalog, along with hundreds of hours of film video.
