| 78 | years ago | 1948 | Lulu, of To Sir With Love fame, is born. |
| 72 | years ago | 1954 | Adam Ant is born. |
| 69 | years ago | 1957 | Sun Records releases Jerry Lee Lewis' Great Balls of Fire. It will be his biggest hit, reaching #2 on the pop chart and #3 on the R&B and #1 on the Country and Western chart. |
| 69 | years ago | 1957 | Danny & the Juniors' At the Hop is released by ABC-Paramount. The Philly based quartet's best song was first issued on the small independent Singular label and sold only 7,000 copies locally. |
| 54 | years ago | 1972 | Singers James Taylor and Carly Simon are married by a judge in Simon's Manhattan apartment. Later that night, Taylor announces the news at his Radio City Music Hall concert and confides: “I don't know whether to be more nervous about the concert or the marriage.” Carly takes a bow onstage with new hubby after the encore. |
| 50 | years ago | 1976 | Country-rock band Firefall earns a gold record for its self-titled debut album, which includes the hit singles You Are the Woman and Livin' Ain't Livin'. |
| 49 | years ago | 1977 | During a concert at the Empire Pool in London, Elton John announces he is retiring from live performances. He'll be good to his word for fifteen months. On February 3, 1979, he will resume touring with a concert in Sweden. |
| 48 | years ago | 1978 | The Cars roll into Europe for a mini-tour that will include Germany, France, Belgium, and Britain. |
| 44 | years ago | 1982 | Kicking off a U.S. tour in Minneapolis, Devo proves it's still in the vanguard of rock-video interface by presenting the first “video-synchronized” rock concert. For the first half of the show, the members perform live in front of a fifty-foot diagonal rear projection screen that shows song lyrics, computer graphics, animated images, and pretaped live-action scenes featuring characters with which the band interacts, both verbally and physically. |
| 38 | years ago | 1988 | U2's concert movie Rattle And Hum opens. |
| 34 | years ago | 1992 | Bon Jovi's first album in five years, Keep The Faith is released. |
| 34 | years ago | 1992 | The Grateful Dead announces that for the first time they will not play a New Year's Eve concert in San Francisco, breaking a long standing tradition. |
| 31 | years ago | 1995 | Hootie and the Blowfish and Bob Dylan reach an out-of-court settlement for the group's unauthorized use of Dylan's lyrics in their song Only Want To Be With You. |
| 22 | years ago | 2004 | Barry Manilow postpones three concerts in Denver, Houston, and Dallas so he can recover from severe bronchitis. |
| 20 | years ago | 2006 | Paul McCartney’s Ecce Cor Meum (Behold My Heart), a new classical work for chorus and orchestra, premieres at London’s Royal Albert Hall. An album recorded with the same performers was released a few months earlier. |
| 10 | years ago | 2016 | Kay Starr, the self-described hillbilly singer who crisscrossed jazz, country, pop, blues, and rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s with hits like Wheel of Fortune and Rock and Roll Waltz, dies at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94. |