Today’s history highlights groundbreaking country music milestones, major stage debuts for iconic rock bands, and the birth of a clarinet pioneer.

Notable Births

• 1655 : Johann Christoph Denner, inventor of the clarinet, was born.
• 1879 : Composer John Ireland was born.
• 1930 : Don Ho, Hawaii’s best-known musician and singer (“Tiny Bubbles”), was born.
• 1948 : Dan Fogelberg, multiple-platinum singer-songwriter, was born.

🎵 Major Events & Releases (On-This-Day)

• 1924: “The Prisoner’s Song” by Vernon Dalhart became the first country music record to sell one million copies.
• 1930: Guy Lombardo and his orchestra recorded “Go Home and Tell Your Mother.”.
• 1938: Robert Johnson played a show at a roadhouse outside Greenwood, Mississippi. It has been speculated that he was poisoned after the show, which caused his death several days later.
• 1952: The original version of “Hound Dog” was recorded by Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton in Los Angeles, California.
• 1965: The Jefferson Airplane made its stage debut at the Matrix Club in San Francisco, California.
• 1965: The Beatles’ album Help! was released in the United States.
• 1967: Fleetwood Mac made their stage debut in Great Britain at the Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival.
• 1990: Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed after a light rack fell on him before a concert in Brooklyn, New York.

Bio-Musik Feature: Austin’s Live Music Pioneers

Continuing our dive into the archives, today we highlight another prominent Texas musician who helped build the Live Music Capital of the World.

• Stevie Ray Vaughan: A central figure in the Austin blues rock scene, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s legacy is deeply preserved within the Wittliff Collections’ Texas Music archives. The extensive Stevie Ray Vaughan Research Collection contains 27 boxes of materials gathered by biographers Bill Crawford and Joe Nick Patoski for their book Stevie-Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire. The archive features rare bootleg recordings of Vaughan’s early bands, such as the Cobras and Double Trouble, spanning from 1975 to 1990, alongside photographs, interviews, and video recordings.