14 Incredible Firsts in Music History
I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but there’s a chance that ancient pottery might be little time machines. Hear me out…
The First Stadium Show
In 1965, The Beatles packed New York’s Shea Stadium, wrecking previous ticket sales and show attendance records with 55,000 screaming fans. Selling out dozens of stadiums across the country has become old hat, and in fact, it’s kind of the only way to turn a profit as a musician these days. But it was pretty novel in the ‘60s.
The First Show in Space
Extraterrestrial musical improv — now we’re talking. In 1965, on the 13th manned flight into space, NASA astronauts Walter Schirra Jr. and Thomas P. Stafford snuck a harmonica and some bells onto the craft, and improvised the first musical performance outside of Earth.
The Oldest Known Musical Instrument
The Divje Babe flute is the femur of a prehistoric bear that has a couple of holes drilled in it, thought to have been made 60,000 years ago. It’s very clearly a crude, extremely metal little recorder. You know “Hot Cross Buns” slaps on this thing.
The Oldest Known Piece of Written Music
The Seikilos Epitaph is an engraved cylinder that was carved around the first century AD in modern-day Turkey. Other snippets of musical notation may predate this epitaph, but this is the oldest complete piece of music, which includes two poems and corresponding vocal notation.
The First Radio Broadcast
In 1906, inventor Reginald Fessenden broadcast a radio program that consisted of George Frideric Handel’s “Ombra mai fu (Largo)” and Fessenden himself playing “O Holy Night” on the violin. Then he read some Bible stuff.
The First FM Rock Radio Station
Sixty years later, WOR sprang up in New York, the first station dedicated specifically to rock ‘n’ roll. It lasted just over a year, but the structure of its programming — DJs running the show however the hell they felt like — is thought to have shaped the structure of rock radio and the genre as a whole over the next few decades.
The First Knighted Musician
While Bob Geldof of The Boomtown Rats was knighted for humanitarian work in 1986, Cliff Richard was knighted for rocking so damn hard in 1995.
The First Successful Musician Lawsuit
In 1960, jazz pianist Erroll Garner sued Columbia records for releasing albums from his back catalog, which was explicitly prohibited in his contract. The suit took three years, and Columbia had the gall to release two more of his albums in that time. But eventually the Supreme Court ruled in his favor — big time.
The First Album to Sell One Million Copies in a Year
Some older pieces of music reached the million mark, but it took years or even decades. In 1965, Harry Belafonte sold a million copies of the album Calypso in under a year, off the back of the smash hit “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song).”
The First Album to Sell One Million Copies in One Week
In 1999, The Backstreet Boys would blow ol’ Harry out of the water, hitting a mill in under a week with Millennium.
The First Parental Advisory
Ice-T’s 1987 album Rhyme Pays was the first to fall victim to the Tipper Gore-led initiative to keep bad thoughts out of children’s minds. That seems to be going pretty well. Before the classic black-and-white motif that made every album look cool as hell, original warnings were dinky little stickers that warned: “Tone of this album unsuitable for minors.”
The FIRST First Piece of Music Ever Recorded
Thomas Edison trademarked the phonograph in 1877, the first device that could record and playback audio recordings. He sang “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in his first recording. That was thought to be the oldest recording in human history — until 2008.
The ACTUAL First Piece of Music Ever Recorded
In 1860, inventor and musician Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the French folk song “Au clair de la lune” on his phonautograph, a device that could transcribe sound waves onto smoke-blackened paper or glass. It was originally supposed to just record information about sound waves, and while recordings can’t be played back, engineers figured out in 2008 that the etchings could be scanned and turned into audio files.
Even First-ER Recordings?
There’s a theory that pottery made on ancient pottery wheels may have accidentally recorded whatever was going on nearby, with human hands etching sound waves into the clay the same way the phonograph etches them into wax. If that audio information is there, we haven’t found a way to play it back yet. But the same thing happened with the phonautograph! There’s a chance we could hear our ancestors rocking out as far back as 4000 B.C.