Events
- January 8 — Billboard publishes its first "Most Played Juke Box Folk Records" chart, the first widespread method of tracking the nationwide popularity of current country music songs. The first No. 1 song is "Pistol Packin' Mama" by Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters. The new chart is the predecessor to today's Hot Country Songs chart.
- February 26 — Less than two months after the chart's inception, jazz and rhythm & blues performer Louis Jordan becomes the first African-American performer to top the Most Played Juke Box Folk chart (with "Ration Blues"). It is a big year for African-American performers: Jordan has a second No. 1 hit later in the year with "Is You Is or Is You Ain't (Ma' Baby)," while the Nat King Cole-led trio reach the top with "Straighten Up and Fly Right." Jordan and Cole are the only black performers to have a No. 1 hit until 1969, when Charley Pride breaks the streak.
Read more about this topic: 1944 In Country Music
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“The return of the asymmetrical Saturday was one of those small events that were interior, local, almost civic and which, in tranquil lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversation, of jokes and of stories exaggerated with pleasure: it would have been a ready- made seed for a legendary cycle, had any of us leanings toward the epic.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“By many a legendary tale of violence and wrong, as well as by events which have passed before their eyes, these people have been taught to look upon white men with abhorrence.... I can sympathize with the spirit which prompts the Typee warrior to guard all the passes to his valley with the point of his levelled spear, and, standing upon the beach, with his back turned upon his green home, to hold at bay the intruding European.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)