20 Concerts That Changed Music History In A Single Night

Elvis Presley was 19 when he played his first advertised professional show at Memphis’s Overton Park Shell on July 30, 1954, opening for country singer Slim Whitman with his Sun Records trio, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black. He played “That’s All Right,” shaking his legs out of nerves. The female fans screamed. He noticed and did it again, bigger.

The contralto Marian Anderson was denied access to Washington’s Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, a hereditary women’s civic organization. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt left the organization in protest, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes helped arrange a concert for Anderson in a more accessible location. On Easter Sunday 1939, Anderson began the performance of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” in front of 75,000 people gathered around the Lincoln Memorial and an audience of millions listening on the radio.

Frank Sinatra opened as a solo singer on December 30, 1942, at New York’s Paramount Theatre, backed by bandleader Benny Goodman’s orchestra, with Goodman introducing Sinatra that evening. Teenage girls, soon dubbed “bobbysoxers,” shrieked, sobbed, and swooned in the seats. He was scheduled for two weeks, but stayed eight. The extended run showed teenagers were an audience with their own purchasing power.

On July 3, 1951, Sister Rosetta Tharpe married Russell Morrison at Washington, D.C.’s Griffith Stadium before a paying audience of over 20,000, far exceeding the usual attendance for the baseball team. Following the wedding ceremony, she performed an entire electric gospel concert, complete with fireworks. Decca Records released the event as a 10-inch record with the wedding vows on one side and Tharpe’s gospel songs on the other.

Near midnight on July 7, 1956, at the Newport Jazz Festival, an outdoor festival in Rhode Island, Duke Ellington’s orchestra began “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” Tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves improvised a 27-chorus-long solo that threw the audience into a frenzy. The event made national news, landed Ellington on the cover of Time magazine, and yielded his best-selling record, Ellington at Newport.

On February 12, 1924, bandleader Paul Whiteman organized a concert at New York’s Aeolian Hall titled “An Experiment in Modern Music.” His goal was to demonstrate that music influenced by jazz could be played in concert halls. Composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, violinists Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler, and conductor Leopold Stokowski attended the concert. The highlight of the afternoon was the first performance of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin was at the piano, and his performance legitimized the idea that orchestral jazz was a worthy addition to the classical repertoire.

On July 5, 1958, Chuck Berry brought his rock guitar showmanship to the Newport Jazz Festival, an elite outdoor jazz festival in Rhode Island. Backed by veteran jazz drummer Jo Jones, Berry played “Sweet Little Sixteen” and did his signature duckwalk while purists and young people danced next to each other. This performance was shot for the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day.

Just 10 days out of federal prison on a narcotics charge, Billie Holiday took the stage at Carnegie Hall on March 27, 1948. She’d lost her cabaret card, the permit needed to sing in New York clubs that serve alcohol, in connection with her conviction, making ticketed concert halls her main performance space in town. That night’s show sold all 2,700 tickets before the curtain went up, a Carnegie Hall record, for a program of 32 tunes.

When Bill Haley and his Comets arrived in London, they were greeted by 4,000 screaming fans at Waterloo Station. Their British tour began on February 6, 1957, at the Dominion Theatre. It was the first major American rock ‘n’ roll tour to play the UK and resulted in aisle-dancing and warnings in the national press about moral decay. This was the opening night of British rock, and of the bands that would follow.

On January 16, 1938, bandleader Benny Goodman presented the first major jazz concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall. The packed performance, a historical review of the genre that ended in an energetic version of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” featured Goodman performing alongside Black musicians Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, Cootie Williams, and Johnny Hodges. In a building designed for classical music, an integrated jazz group defied the era’s segregated norms.

On March 21, 1952, DJ Alan Freed and record-store owner Leo Mintz organized what has been called America’s first big rock ‘n’ roll concert at Cleveland Arena, with R&B performers including Paul Williams and His Hucklebuckers. The arena held 9,950 people; however, duplicate and fake tickets brought in an estimated 20,000 or more. The show was halted by police and fire marshals, citing overcrowding, after the opening act, Paul Williams, played one song.

Carnegie Hall producer John Hammond arranged a concert in honor of blues singer Bessie Smith, who had died the year before. On December 23, 1938, bandleader Count Basie and singer Big Joe Turner performed, as did two boogie-woogie piano players, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis. The guitarist Big Bill Broonzy played in tribute to the bluesman Robert Johnson, who had passed away just four months prior. The concert sparked a national boogie-woogie piano craze.

Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter had already been recording since the 1930s, but on June 15, 1947, he played a solo concert at New York’s Town Hall. Playing a 12-string guitar, he delivered traditional work songs known as field hollers, blues and folk ballads to an audience of city intellectuals, musicians and young revivalists like Pete Seeger, a folk musician. Unpolished Southern roots music could hold a serious concert crowd. The folk revival had its foothold.

Because saxophonist Charlie Parker had pawned his brass instrument, he performed on a borrowed Grafton plastic alto saxophone during a live concert at Toronto’s Massey Hall on May 15, 1953. The bebop pioneers were present: Parker, Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Bud Powell (piano), Charles Mingus (bass), and Max Roach (drums). A televised boxing match kept the 2,700-seat hall partly full. Because Parker was under exclusive contract to Mercury Records, the resulting album credited him as “Charlie Chan.”

Mahalia Jackson headlined the First Annual Negro Gospel Music Festival at Carnegie Hall, selling out to a racially mixed audience. Sacred Black gospel music had not often been sold as a secular concert draw, but that October 1, 1950, show launched Jackson on a tour that would take her around the world. Gospel had found a new kind of stage.

Hank Williams was 25 when he made his debut on the Grand Ole Opry, the live country radio broadcast from Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, on June 11, 1949, backed by his band the Drifting Cowboys. The crowd went wild after Williams performed “Lovesick Blues,” demanding six straight encores, something the show had never seen before. Country music now had a national star.

On October 16, 1951, Judy Garland began a run as a solo act at the Palace Theatre in New York City, where she performed 149 shows over 19 weeks. Blending the song-and-variety style of vaudeville with theatrical pop singing, the Garland show was a commercial success, setting box-office and attendance records and rescuing her career from obscurity. She won a special Tony Award for reviving vaudeville itself. Long solo residencies had their own template.

Miles Davis wasn’t on the bill at the Newport Jazz Festival, the Rhode Island jazz get-together, on July 17, 1955. Still, he took part in an all-star jam, performing Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” with a muted trumpet. George Avakian, a Columbia Records exec, was among the audience members, and he signed Miles to a recording contract immediately following the jam session.

When the inaugural Newport Folk Festival, spearheaded by George Wein, Pete Seeger, and Albert Grossman, opened on July 25-26, 1959, it attracted over 13,000 fans to Freebody Park in Rhode Island. Its major event was an unannounced performance by 18-year-old Joan Baez during folk artist Bob Gibson’s set. Baez became an overnight folk superstar. Acoustic folk music, it turned out, could fill a festival.

On February 2, 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson performed high-energy sets for more than 1,000 teens at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. Trying to escape the freezing tour bus that night, Holly chartered a small plane for himself, Valens, and Richardson to reach the next stop, Moorhead, Minn. The plane crashed shortly after takeoff early on February 3, killing everyone on board.

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