Curated playlist
1960s in music
- ReggaeReggae got its name by accident, from a phrase Toots Hibbert blurted out. A 1968 single carried the word.
- HippieThe word hippie first appeared in a 1965 San Francisco Examiner article.
- Hard rockHard rock declared its arrival with a 17-minute drum solo. Iron Butterfly released it in 1968.
- FunkJames Brown told his band to hit the first beat hardest. Funk began in African-American communities in the mid-1960s.
- Cultural impact of the BeatlesThe Beatles threatened to skip a segregated Florida show in 1964. City officials relented.
- BeatlemaniaA crowd of 300,000 met the Beatles in Adelaide in 1964. That was roughly half the city's population.
- Beat musicBeat music has nothing to do with the Beat Generation writers. It means driving rock and roll rhythms.
- Country musicThe steel guitar in country music traces back to Hawaii, not Appalachia. Country's sound was a braid of many traditions.
- British InvasionThe British Invasion may owe part of its start to a letter from a 15-year-old girl, Marsha Albert of Silver Spring, Maryland. She had watched a television news story about the Beatles, a story first prepared for the 22nd of November 1963…
- The Beatles AnthologyIn November 1995, one Beatles album sold 450,000 copies in a single day. It set a record for single-day album sales.
- J-popJapan once argued over whether rock music could be sung in Japanese. The band Happy End proved it could.
- Pop musicFor years, nobody could tell pop music from rock and roll. The two words meant nearly the same until the late 1960s.