Elvis was allegedly chided for playing rock 'n' roll at the Grand Ole Opry

Elvis Presley's first 'Ed Sullivan Show' appearance was his first public controversy

His 1956 appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" featured a raucous performance of “Hound Dog” and an abundance of suggestive hip-shaking from the fresh-faced 21-year-old. The appearance rocketed Presley to superstar status and threw him into his first public controversy.

A year before Elvis appeared on 'Ed Sullivan,' Bill Haley brought rock 'n' roll to the program

Although Elvis Presley's 1956 appearance on the popular TV show is viewed as a key moment in the rise of rock 'n' roll, the music appeared on the program a year earlier, on August 5, 1955, when Bill Haley and His Comets performed their hit "Rock Around the Clock."

Watch one of country music's most infamous performances

Jerry Lee Lewis started in the 50s as a supercharged rock ‘n’ roll star. His career imploded when it was revealed he’d married his teenaged cousin. By the time he was invited to the Grand Ole Opry, he’d reinvented himself as a country troubadour and promised to play by the venue’s strict rules. But as this infamous performance shows, Lewis couldn’t help bringing some of his past to the stage, much to the audience’s delight.

Why one country legend embraced punk rock

Dwight Yoakam was among the most popular country music acts of the 1980s, praised for his upbeat rockabilly and neo-Bakersfield sound. In this interview, Yoakam explains why he left the Midwest for California and began playing in punk clubs, including with an iteration of the legendary LA punk outfit X.

'The Grand Ole Opry' turned Nashville into the country music capital

By 1932, country was being broadcast to 30 states and parts of Canada. That influence turned the Tennessee city into a destination for those interested in working in the budding industry.

Novelist Charles Portis covered Elvis Presley as a young reporter

The "True Grit" and "Norwood" author spent time working as a reporter for Memphis newspaper The Commercial Appeal, where he covered Elvis Presley's brief military leave.

Elvis Presley wanted to record 'I Will Always Love You,' but Dolly Parton refused

After scoring a hit with her own recording of the song, Presley made plans to record his own version, but stipulated that Parton would need to grant him 50% of the publishing rights—perhaps the most valuable asset for a songwriter. Parton politely refused.

Ozzy Osbourne was never comfortable with being called 'metal'

Despite being called a forefather of the genre, the Prince of Darkness said he never understood why his music was called "heavy metal." "Back in the day, it was always just rock music," he told SPIN in 2013. "It’s still just rock music."

Watch Johnny Cash’s 1969 concert at San Quentin

Johnny Cash is one of the most recognizable names in country music, but by the 1960s, he was also a rock icon. Part of that status was due to his outlaw identity and willingness to play for true outsiders. This documentary from one of his most famous performances shows why.

Blues was a major influence on early rock

Early rock ‘n’ roll had a straightforward sound, relying mostly on guitar, bass, drums, piano, and saxophone playing up-tempo 12-bar blues. In subsequent decades, the form evolved and splintered into countless subgenres that used more diverse sounds, instruments, and lyrics.

Dolly Parton declined her nomination for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

The country icon was nominated in 2022 but bowed out, saying, “I don’t feel I have earned that right” and that she didn’t want votes split because of her inclusion on the ballot, though the Hall of Fame inducted her anyway. Interestingly, she also mentioned that the nomination motivated her to release a rock ‘n’ roll record in the future. She released “Rockstar,” a double-album featuring several duets and covers of popular rock songs, in 2023.

How underground radio revitalized rock 'n' roll

Early FM was a wasteland and quickly became the domain of amateurs and risk-takers, including many stations and DJs who played music that flew in the face of mainstream trends. This history of the band's scrappy beginnings unpacks how it realigned the rock charts.

DJ Alan Freed was eventually charged in a 'payola' scandal

After popularizing rock 'n' roll, both as a genre and as a culture, Freed became an industry power player, producing movies, hosting concerts, and minting superstars. By the end of the 50's, Freed was charged with 26 counts of commercial bribery, for a scheme they called "payola," and investigated by the House subcommittee on Legislative Oversight.

Fearing the corruption of its youth, Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll in 1956.

Tour the iconic Sun Studio in Memphis

Sun Studio is responsible for hundreds of hours of American music history, despite its rather modest setup. This tour of the one-room studio is not unlike the tour visitors take, with anecdotes about Elvis, U2, and a pious Bob Dylan, who quickly popped in to pay his respects.

Read an early piece of journalism on country music

This 1904 Harper’s Weekly article from Emma Bell Miles offers an early example of country music criticism. Miles traces the music’s roots to the mountaineers who pioneered it. It’s a famous piece for music writers: Miles saw a phenomenon building in the hills long before any major record label.

Outlaw Country was a subgenre that emerged in the 1970s

Outlaw country was a reaction against popular country music produced in Nashville. The name's origin is disputed, but it was firmly established with the 1976 album “Wanted! The Outlaws,” a record featuring songs by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser—artists who bucked industry norms.

Parton released her first recording at age 13

The song was written at the age of 11 with the assistance of her uncle, Bill Owens, and was released by Goldband Records in 1959, when she was 13. The rockabilly song doesn’t sound much like the country music that would make Parton famous in the next decade, but it does hint at the power of her voice.

70 years ago today, city officials in Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll to protect its youth from corruption after witnessing a 'provocative' concert the night before.

Three rock stars who made great country music

Steven Tyler, Tina Turner, and Darius Rucker all crossed into country. The author claims the trio shared a common trait: they weren't chasing a new audience. Instead, they were delving deeper into a sound already present in their work.

Yodeling wasn't intended to be music

Alpine herders originally used the technique to call cattle. When it made its way to the US, in the South and Appalachia, yodeling was a popular singing style in "hillbilly music," which eventually evolved into country.

Some dispute why the Newport crowd booed Dylan

Bruce Jackson, one of the directors for the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival, claimed that the story of Dylan being booed for going "electric" is a myth. Pointing to transcripts from the set's audio recordings, he argued that the audience wasn’t upset with Dylan; they were bothered that he couldn’t play for longer.

Honky-tonk features a rollicking stomp

Widely considered the first honky-tonk song, Ernest Tubb’s "Walking the Floor Over You" is a perfect example of the subgenre's upbeat percussion, barroom piano, and chippy lyricism. The song is a country music classic, being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and preserved in the Library of Congress.

Before the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed was a workaday songwriter

His job at Pickwick Records, a label that churned out budget records for department stores, was to crank out generic pop fare. One of those songs was 1964’s “The Ostrich,” a dance song in the style of Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion.”

Norman Rockwell considered himself an 'illustrator' rather than a 'painter'

In this 1962 interview with folk singer Tom Glazer, Rockwell points to Pieter Bruegel's Peasant Dance hung on the wall in his office. "He was a great painter, one of the fine arts painters," he said. "See I'm not a fine arts painter, I'm an illustrator. I illustrate stories, do magazine covers. This is quite different from a painter."

How Pearl Jam helped inspire Coachella

Pearl Jam hasn't yet played Coachella, but they did play a major role in inspiring the annual music festival. The story goes back to 1993, when Pearl Jam was protesting all Ticketmaster-owned venues, which made playing a Los Angeles-area date next to impossible. That led concert promoter Goldenvoice to the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, where the first Coachella took place six years later.

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

The distributor behind 'Rocky Horror' pulled the film from its scheduled national release, believing it would be a failure, though it eventually amassed a dedicated fanbase through midnight showings, a trend that continues over 50 years later.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

In preparation for this weekend's Eurovision finale, which is something like the World Cup of pop music, here's a young Céline Dion performing (for Switzerland?) at the 1988 competition.

20,000 letters to the advice columnist 'Dear Abby' provide insight into prevailing sex, religion, and LGBTQ fears, anxieties, and concerns from the 1950s onward.

Abraham Lincoln was almost assassinated weeks before his inauguration as he traveled from Illinois to DC through Baltimore in 1861; it took two independent claims for Lincoln to be convinced the threat was real

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

An initial public offering or 'IPO' is the process of a private company becoming public by putting shares of the company on the stock market for purchase.

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are historically hard to sell because they're old, subject to local landmark commissions, and often unfashionable

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

Volcanoes 'die' when their supply of magma runs out, if they are shifted away from their underlying magma reservoir, or if they get clogged by collapsing or their magma cooling back into rock.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is independent of Iran's regular army and is one of the most powerful and influential military-political organizations in the Middle East.