On this day today:
1919 - Nat King Cole is born Nathaniel Adams Cole in Montgomery, Alabama, but would be raised in Chicago, Illinois.
1941 - Paul Kantner, a founding member of Jefferson Airplane, is born in San Francisco.
1951 - Scott Gorham (of Thin Lizzy, Supertramp) is born in Glendale, California.
1958 - The first "Greatest Hits" compilation is released, and it's by Johnny Mathis. It's a huge hit, and the format catches on quickly. The Mathis album stays in the Billboard 200 album chart for over nine years, a record not broken until Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon.
1958 - "Tequila" by The Champs hits #1 in America, becoming one of the most popular saxophone instrumentals of all time.
1959 - Mike Lindup (keyboardist, singer for Level 42) is born in London, England.
1967 - Jimi Hendrix releases "Purple Haze" in the UK.
1967 - Billy Corgan (frontman for The Smashing Pumpkins) is born in Elk Grove Village, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois.
1968 - The Bee Gees appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, marking their first appearance on American TV.
1973 - The sci-fi musical Lost Horizon, scored by Burt Bacharach, bombs at the box office. The failure precipitates Bacharach's split from longtime songwriting partner Hal David and Dionne Warwick, who had performed their songs for more than a decade.
1975 - Cher appears on the cover of Time magazine.
1978 - The Alan Freed biopic American Hot Wax, widely considered one of the best Rock and Roll movies of all time, premieres in New York City, featuring appearances and performances by Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins.
1978 - The Irish high school band U2, which just recently changed their name from The Hype, win the Limerick Civic Week Pop '78 talent competition, earning about $1,000 and a chance to record a demo for CBS Records.
1979 - Talking Heads make their first major TV appearance, performing "Take Me to the River" on American Bandstand. The lip-synced performance goes well, but the interview is a little awkward.
1984 - Van Halen's 1984 rises to #2 on the US albums chart, held off by Michael Jackson's Thriller, which has already topped the tally for 31 weeks. 1984 stays one spot behind Thriller for two more weeks before dropping down. Perhaps it would have hit #1 if Eddie Van Halen hadn't done the guitar solo on "Beat It."
1988 - Grimes is born Claire Elise Boucher in Vancouver.
1990 - Indie rocker Hozier is born Andrew Hozier-Byrne in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland.
1991 - Seven members of Reba McEntire's band, as well as her road manager and two pilots, are killed when their plane crashes near the Mexican border after a performance in San Diego. McEntire, along with two members of her band and some of her road crew, were on a different plane that took off before the one that crashed.
1992 - After reuniting at their ex-manager's funeral, Spinal Tap issue their 17th album, Break Like The Wind.
1998 - Mick Fleetwood joins The Corrs on stage for a St. Patrick's Day performance at Royal Albert Hall in London. Their performance of the Fleetwood Mac song "Dreams" is released as a single and becomes the first hit for The Corrs, going to #6 in the UK.
1999 - Sinead O'Connor records the first ever single via the Internet in a BBC studio as part of the Tomorrow's World program. The song is a cover of Bob Marley's "Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)" recorded for the War Child charity.
2001 - Seven Pearl Jam bootleg albums from their North American tour debut in the Billboard 200 albums chart, breaking the record for most appearances on the chart in a single week that the band established the previous year, when five bootlegs from their European tour landed on the chart.
2005 - Robert Plant is presented with his lifetime achievement Grammy award at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
2006 - The Smiths turned down a $5m (£2.8m) offer to reform for a music festival. The band who split acrimoniously in 1987, rejected the bid to get back together for this year's Coachella US festival.
2008 - Heather Mills is awarded 23.7 million pounds (about $47 million) in her divorce from Paul McCartney, substantially more than the $32 million Paul offered. Throughout the ordeal, Mills is vilified in the British press as being opportunistic.
2009 - Instead of getting boozed up on the streets like most people on St. Patrick's Day, Amy Winehouse gets sloppy at her court hearing in London to face charges that she attacked a fan at a charity event in 2008.
2017 - Popular World War II-era singer Vera Lynn releases Vera Lynn 100 to celebrate her 100th birthday. The album debuts at #3 on the UK chart, making her the oldest living artist to have an album on the tally.
2020 - A federal judge rules in favor of Katy Perry, overturning a verdict that her song "Dark Horse" infringed on the song "Joyful Noise" by Flame. The jury had ordered $2.78 million in damages.
2023 - Taylor Swift launches her Eras tour in Glendale, Arizona. The three-hour show is divided into 10 acts dedicated to the music and looks of each of her previous albums. It's her first trek since her Reputation Tour five years and four albums earlier.
