Events
- January 11 — Billboard increases the length of its Hot Country Singles chart to 50 positions, up from 30.
- February 1 — Buck Owens' mega-hit, "Love's Gonna Live Here," finishes its 16-week run at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart. To date, it is the most recent song to spend 10 or more weeks atop the chart.
- July 31 — A private aircraft piloted by Jim Reeves crashes during a thunderstorm near Nashville, Tennessee. Both Reeves and business partner Dean Manuel are killed in the crash; their bodies are found two days later following a massive search for the two missing men. Reeves, already a huge country star, would leave behind hundreds of un-released recordings; many of those songs became huge posthumous hits during the next decade. Reeves' death comes just 16 months after the airplane crash deaths of Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas, leaving a huge void among country music fans.
- November 28 — "Once a Day," by Connie Smith, begins an eight-week stay at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart. To date, it is the longest-running No. 1 song by a solo female act, and will make the 23-year-old Smith — a native of Elkhart, Indiana — an overnight sensation.
Read more about this topic: 1964 In Country Music
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden into history, it is the stories we didn’t write, the questions we didn’t ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)