Timeline of music in the United States (1950–1969)

This is a timeline of music in the United States from 1950 to 1969.

1950 The Fender Esquire guitar is released; it is the first "mass-produced, solid body electric guitar".Miller, p. 39. The recent success of "Tennessee Waltz", a "folk" or country song, a number of cover versions are released, including Jimmy Mitchell's, arranged for jazz band by Erskine Hawkins, and Patti Page, whose version is "pathbreaking" as Page sings "four-piece harmony with herself, creating a delicate latticework of sound... simultaneously direct and ethereal, plain yet highly ornamented, with an aura of childlike magic".Miller, p. 46. Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson's Atlantic Records has its first major hit with Ruth Brown's "Teardrops from My Eyes".Miller, pp. 48–49. Pete Seeger and The Weavers release a cover of Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene", inspiring a brief fad for pop-folk music based around a "bright, homey, simple, folksy melody sort of tune"Miller, pp. 187–188. This claim is in quotes in Miller, but is not specifically cited. that tamed the rough sounds of American folk music for mainstream tastes.Lankford, p. xii.Mitchell, p. 70. North Korea invades South Korea, instigating the Korean War and delaying the U.S. Army's intention to implement a program to train military bands.U.S. Army Bands Seeburg introduces the first 45 rpm jukebox. Early 1950s music trendsComposer John Cage leads a group of New York musicians in the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, along with Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and David Tudor.Crawford, p. 709. The Modern Jazz Quartet, led by John Lewis, begins performing, intending to expand the "audience for modern jazz... (and) provide music that could be listened to attentively in a concert hall".Crawford, p. 764. The rise of anti-Communist hysteria, McCarthyism, leads to a decline in popularity for American folk music, Russian-American balalaika orchestras and other fields of music. Nashville, Tennessee becomes the national center for country music, helped in large part by the popular radio show, Grand Ole Opry. D. T. Suzuki, a Japanese author, lectures at Columbia University. Among the intendees is John Cage, whose "musical thought was entirely transformed by this encounter"; Cage's technique becomes central in the development of modern art music, and is in part inspired by Suzuki and Zen Buddhism.Rycenga, Jennifer, Denise A. Seachrist and Elaine Keillor, "Snapshot: Three Views of Music and Religion", pp. 129–139, in Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Mambo becomes a major craze in the United States, led by Perez Prado, the "most widely acclaimed bandleader" of the era. Chinese American intellectuals, unable to return to China after the formation of the People's Republic, spur the development of American Peking opera and instrumental theater traditions. Greenwich Village begins to become a major center for music, especially the folk music revival and bluegrass.Mitchell, p. 62. B. B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland add elements of gospel and jazz to the traditional sound of blues.Bird, p. 45, calls this the "urbanization" of traditional blues. Sing Out!, a magazine for folk music aficionados, is first published.Lankford, p. 54 Elektra, a record label, opens in New York City; it will eventually become one of the major labels of the folk music revival.Lankford, p. 67. Mahalia Jackson becomes the first to perform gospel music at Carnegie Hall.Darden, p. 215. The 45rpm single is introduced.Sanjek, David and Will Straw, "The Music Industry", pp. 256–267, in Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Irving Berlin's Call Me Madam uses a song, "They Like Ike", that inspires Dwight Eisenhower's presidential campaign slogan, "I Like Ike". A Chicago-based group, including Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz, make series of groundbreaking records that offer the "most advanced harmonic and contrapuntal sounds employed in jazz to that date".Chase, p. 519. Douglas Moore's Pulitzer Prize-winning tragic opera Giants in the Earth is the "effective beginning of realism in American opera".Chase, p. 555. Joe Bostic organizes the first of a series of Negro Gospel and Religious Music Festivals, which will become an overwhelming success and the "first big all-gospel concert in history". Muddy Waters "Louisiana Blues" is a popular song that brings a new, more intense and exciting form of Chicago blues, characterized by the use of the electric guitar.Bird, p. 235. Radio Free Europe begins broadcasting in Czechoslovakia. Sam Phillips founds the Memphis Recording Service, the first permanent studio in Memphis. He will record many important R&B, blues and country performers there, including Jackie Brenston, Howlin' Wolf and B. B. King. Word Records is founded. It will soon become the biggest company in the Christian music and gospel sectors of the industry.

1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I is a very popular musical, inaugurating one of the "most illustrious decades" in the history of the Broadway musical. Disc jockey Alan Freed learns from Cleveland record store owner Leo Mintz that white youths were becoming interested in African-American music, and starts The Moondog Show in response, becoming the first white disc jockey to play rhythm and blues for mostly white listeners.Crawford, p. 725. Pee Wee King's "Tennessee Waltz" becomes a national hit for Patti Page; though the recording is perceived as "country music", it shows "little of the character of traditional country music" and features "Page singing a sweet-sounding overdubbed duet with herself in a voice and diction essentially free of regional traits".Crawford, pp. 739–740. Fender begins producing electric bass guitars, the first model being the Fender Precision Bass.Miller, p. 42. Todd Storz and Bill Stewart begin the Top 40 radio format at KOWH in Omaha, Nebraska, inspired by the jukebox. This development would be seen by some observers and critics as a "recipe for cowardice, bringing to popular music one of the most insidious trends in postwar American society, the deployment of market research to create a placid emporium in which consumers are given the dubious satisfaction of never finding, or fulfilling, a fresh or disturbing desire". The Top 40 format also heralded a change in popular music by reinforcing the "popular taste", leading to the development of melodies into riffs, riffs into jingles and jingles into hooks, "instantly recognizable sound patterns... designed to snare a listener's attention". The Top 40 format also sped up the "circulation of songs (generating) a kind of 'dynamic obsolescence' that bred a restless quest for sheer novelty".Miller, pp. 53–54; quotes around dynamic obsolescence in Miller. The first wave of the American folk revival falls apart after the publication of Red Channels: Communist Influence on Radio and Television, which prominently mentioned folk band The Weavers.Miller, p. 188. Miriam Rappaport forms the Jewish Folk Lab in New York, an important venue for the revival of interest in Influential gospel label Nashboro Records is founded.Darden, p. 291. Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats' "Rocket 88" and Johnnie Ray's "Cry" are both sometimes considered the first rock and roll songs. One of the most prominent female and black composers of the era, Julia Perry, achieves renown with her Stabat Mater for contralto and string orchestra. The Clovers' "Don't You Know I Love You" is the first in a string of hits created under the guidance of Jesse Stone, who innovated what became known as the "Atlantic sound" in rhythm and blues. The first Peking opera club, Chinese Opera Club in America, in the United States is founded in New York City, by Chinese students stranded there. Ballet dancer Janet Collins becomes the first African-American artist to appear onstage at the Metropolitan Opera, in a production of Aida."Janet Collins, 86; Ballerina Was First Black Artist at Met Opera", The New York Times. William Warfield and Muriel Rahn become the first African-American concert artists to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show.Southern, pp. 361–364. Vladimir Ussachevsky finishes the first compositions by an American of musique concrète. The RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer, created by Herbert Belar and Harry F. Olson, is created, though it will not be complete until the following year. It is the first musical synthesizer.

1952 Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky of Columbia University present the "first American tape-music concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York".Crawford, p. 703. The first North American charanga is the Orquesta Gilberto Valdés, in New York.Koskoff, p. 255. The Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University is among the first library of jazz materials, and will soon be the world's most comprehensive. John Cage becomes the "first American to complete a tape composition", Imaginary Landscape No. 5, and also publishes Williams Mix, an influential piece of less than five minutes in length, produced by categorizing sounds in a process that bypassed personal preference in their ordering, as well as 4′33″, which consisted entirely of silence with the intention of focusing the audience's attention on ambient sounds.Crawford, p. 707. Kitty Wells' "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels", an answer song to Hank Thompson's "The Wild Side of Life", is the beginning of the era of female country stars.Crawford, p. 741 It "showed that a song from a women's point of view could become a best-seller". Cleveland-area radio personality Alan Freed hosts the Moondog Coronation Ball, a rock concert that ended in a riot after running out of room for ticket-holding fans; the crowd was estimated at between 6,000 and 25,000 black teenagers.Miller, p. 59. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's "Kansas City", recorded by Little Willie Littlefield is a pioneering melodic pop blues song that later become hits for Wilbert Harrison, Little Richard and The Beatles. The song helped launch the careers of Leiber and Stoller, who would become two of the most prominent songwriters in the field.Miller, p. 66. Harry Everett Smith, working for Moses Asch and Folkways Records, releases the Anthology of American Folk Music, a pivotal collection in the popularization of American folk music and the development of a roots revival.Lankford, p. 40. It inspires urban Northerners to seek out the music of rural Southerners. Under the leadership of Frederick Fennell, the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music establishes the first wind ensemble based at an institution of higher education. Though short-lived, the Orquesta Gilberto Valdés is the first charanga, a Cuban band format, in North America. Irish immigration, which had surged following World War II, increases again after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which favors immigrants from Ireland. The new Irish community increases the demand for popular Irish-styled music, and spurs the development of the Irish dance and music culture centered in Dudley Street, Boston.Gedutis, p. 40. The Ukrainian Music Institute is founded in New York, to promote traditional Ukrainian music. The last film studios switch to using 35 mm tape, allowing "music to be recorded more quickly and easily than ever before; music tracks had greater fidelity and less background noise, and could be cut and edited with unprecedented ease and precision". The first professional full-time group specializing in early music performance is the Pro Musica Antiqua, founded by Bernard Krainis and Noah Greenberg. The group will later be known as New York Pro Musica. Johnnie Ray's "Cry" is the first song by a white rhythm and blues singer to top both the pop and R&B charts.Coleman, p. 71. Both the National Catholic Bandmasters Association and American School Band Directors Association are founded.Hansen, p. 271. The Gibson Les Paul, a popular and early solid body electric guitar, is introduced.