Events
- January 4 — Elvis Presley records a 10-inch acetate demo at the Memphis Recording Studio; the two songs are "Casual Love Affair" and "I'll Never Stand In Your Way."
- February 20 — "Slowly" by Webb Pierce becomes the first No. 1 song on Billboard's country charts to feature the pedal steel guitar. Soon, many of country music's great songs would feature the pedal steel guitar.
- June 19 — Top recording "I Don't Hurt Anymore" by Hank Snow begins 20 week run at #1 on Best Seller list. "One by One" by Red Foley and Kitty Wells begins 21 week run at #2 on same chart, managing a single week at No. 1 later in the year. For most of the summer and fall, "I Don't Hurt Anymore" holds "One By One" out of the top spot.
- July 17 — Ozark Jubilee debuts (on radio) as a weekly live broadcast over KWTO-AM. On August 7, ABC Radio begins carrying 25 minutes of the program nationally, hosted by Red Foley.
- July 6 — Elvis Presley releases his first single, "That's All Right"/"Blue Moon of Kentucky." A month later, Billboard gives the song a positive review, with the reviewer calling Presley a "strong new talent," and by September is a No. 1 hit in Memphis.
- October 2 — Elvis Presley makes his one and only appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, and is supposedly told to "go back to driving a truck in Memphis." Two weeks later, he has the last laugh, debuting on the Louisiana Hayride and is soon making regular appearances.
- November 13 — A Billboard disc jockey poll reports that disc jockeys are playing 11 percent country on radio stations, compared to 42 percent pop and 5 percent rhythm and blues.
- November 20 — Bartenders in Hammond, Indiana request that disc jockeys at WJOB radio stop playing Ferlin Husky's "The Drunken Driver," about an intoxicated driver who causes a crash that kills two children; the song "is hurting business," the union claimed.
Read more about this topic: 1954 In Country Music
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape ... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.”
—Marilyn French (b. 1929)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)