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

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".
• The first North American charanga is the Orquesta Gilberto Valdés, in New York.
• 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.
• 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. 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.
• 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.
• 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. 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.
• 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.
• Both the National Catholic Bandmasters Association and American School Band Directors Association are founded.
• The Gibson Les Paul, a popular and early solid body electric guitar, is introduced.
• Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening present the first public concert of electroacoustic music at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
• Elliott Wexler of Philadelphia becomes the first rack jobber of recorded discs, a person who rents retail space to stock product, and replenishes the product as needed. This practice is used in places like gas stations that do not typically stock discs, but may do so in some circumstances.

1953

• Alan Freed launches a show called The Biggest Rhythm and Blues Show, a package tour that included Ruth Brown and Wynonie Harris. The show would become the "largest-grossing R&B revue up to that time".
• Elvis Presley records his first songs, "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin". These records would introduce Presley to Sam Phillips, who worked for Sun Records.
• Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte see a show featuring a performer who goes by the sole name of Odetta; the African-American singer and guitarist becomes one of the stars of the American folk revival, helped in part by her race, which "bestowed an air of credibility on her music" for some folk audiences, because her style reflected that field's strong inspiration in rural African-American music.
• The Dixie Hummingbirds' "Let's Go Out to the Programs" becomes a major hit, their signature song and a classic piece of gospel.
• The launches a periodical devoted to the study of music education, entitled Journal of Research in Music Education.
• Alarmed by the Soviet Union sending cultural figures abroad, the American government creates the United States Information Agency to coordinate cultural activities internationally.
• George Russell becomes well known within the jazz community with the publication of Lydian Concept of Total Organization, which offers a "complex system of associating chords with scales organized by their degree of consonance or dissonance".
• The Spaniels' "Baby, It's You" popularizes the use of nonsense syllables like doo-doo-doo-wop to "add rhythmic accompaniment to romantic songs", imitating the use of the string bass in other rhythm and blues groups; this technique becomes a central part of black vocal harmony groups.
• The first pan-North American Estonian song festival for male choruses is held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and will alternate between there and the United States, usually New York; a similar gathering for female choruses begins the following year.
• Benny Goodman embarks on a famously disastrous tour with Louis Armstrong's All Stars. Goodman insults Armstrong, an elder statesman of jazz, and Goodman himself is perturbed at the more vaudevillean elements of Armstrong's show. Goodman has a nervous breakdown, and retires from popular music.
• A score by Alfred Newman for the film The Robe is the first to be released in true stereo sound.
• The Prisonaires, a vocal group based in the Tennessee State Penitentiary, have a hit with "Just Walkin' in the Rain". The song establishes Sun Records.
• Radio Liberty begins broadcasting to Russia.
• The Red Tops, led by Walter Osborne and based out of Vicksburg, Mississippi, begins performing locally, soon becoming one of the most popular blues bands of the mid-South until 1973.

1954

• Elvis Presley records "That's All Right (Mama)" and "Blue Moon of Kentucky", both breakthrough recordings that launched his career and helped bring African-American musical techniques to white audiences.
• Jazz musician Miles Davis discovers an "intensely personal sound that was often heard in tightly muted playing, close to the microphone", a trend exemplified by a recording of the blues number "Walkin' with J. J. Johnson, Horace Silver and Kenny Clarke.
• The Fender Stratocaster, the first electric guitar with three pickups, is introduced by the Fender Electric Instrument Company. It will play a major role in the popularization of rock and roll.
• The first published bibliography on a specific genre of popular music is Alan Merriam's A Bibliography of Jazz.
• The Newport Jazz Festival is founded in Newport, Rhode Island, reflecting a growing acceptance for jazz as an art.
• Fender introduces the Stratocaster model of guitar, the first model that came to be viewed as a fashion statement in addition to a musical instrument.
• The Chords "Sh-Boom" and a subsequent pop cover by The Crew-Cuts help "launch an American fad for amateur black harmony groups" that came to be known as doo wop. By the end of the year, The Penguins' "Earth Angel" established the long-term popularity of doo wop. "Sh-Boom" has also been called the first rock and roll recording.
• WDIA, an influential and well-studied radio station in Memphis drastically boosts its broadcasting area, helping the group Spirit of Memphis.
• For the first time, a number of African-American performers achieve the Billboard pop charts in the same year: Hank Ballard & The Midnighters' "Work with Me, Annie", The Crows' "Gee", The Chords' "Sh-Boom" and Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters' "Honey Love". "Sh-Boom" also becomes a hit for a cover band, The Crew Cuts.
• Bruno Nettl conducts research showing that the "rise", or the inclusion of new or repetitive melodic material at a higher pitch than the opening, is a distinctive feature of all Native American music of California.
• The Moonglows innovate a new technique in the field of black vocal harmony with their single "Sincerely", in which the singers blow nonsense sounds in the microphone to create a vocal effect.
• Little Richard and his drummer, Charles Connor, introduce a new rhythm to the field of black popular music in imitation of a train; the beat will be adopted by many rhythm and blues, rock and roll and doo wop groups.
• Fandango begins broadcasting on KNXT in California, the first TV show to target Mexican-American audiences with Spanish language musical performances.
• Lionel "Chica" Sesma moves the popular Latin Holidays, a ballroom dance-oriented party, to the Hollywood Palladium, where the dances will become an integral part of the Mexican-Californian music scene.
• Mahalia Jackson becomes the first gospel performer with her own television show, the Mahalia Jackson Show, on CBS.
• Alex Bradford organizes the first all-male gospel choir.

1955

• Ali Akbar Khan becomes the first Indian musician to perform on American television, on Alistair Cooke's Omnibus.
• Teenagers enter the mainstream pop music market in greater numbers, leading to the Billboard Top 100 measuring the "preferences of a younger, more specialized segment of the population that it had before".
• Bill Haley & His Comets' "Rock Around the Clock" (recorded on April 12, 1954) is a pioneering release that tops both the popular and rhythm and blues music charts. It is rereleased this year (after its initial release the year before) with a controversial film about teenage rebellion and violence called Blackboard Jungle. The song will make Haley into the first major white rock and roll star. The film is the first to link popular music with the generation gap and adolescent rebellion.
• Fats Domino's "Ain't It a Shame", a recording which made him a "prototypical rock and roll star—and well on his way to becoming an iconic figure of American popular music."
• Chuck Berry records "Maybellene" with Jerome Green and Willie Dixon. This song, along with Bo Diddley's "Bo Diddley" and "Pretty Thing", popularize the use of the guitar as the "focal instrument" of rhythm and blues.
• Little Richard records "Tutti Frutti". The song becomes a surprise hit that helped inspire such pioneers as Otis Redding, James Brown and Paul McCartney.
• Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers record "Why Do Fools Fall in Love", a popular doo wop hit.
• Elvis Presley's "I Forgot to Remember to Forget" is a major hit that establishes Presley as a country star. Presley leaves Sam Phillips and goes to RCA Records, Hill & Range publishers and Colonel Tom Parker and manager. Phillips convinces Carl Perkins to move from country and western to a more rhythm and blues-influenced style, resulting in the recording of "Blue Suede Shoes", which becomes a hit in the following year.
• Ozark Jubilee begins a -year run on ABC-TV as the first network TV program to showcase country music stars.
• Harry Belafonte begins a brief fad for pop music based on calypso, a style of Trinidadian music. His biggest hits are "Jamaican Farewell" and "Banana Boat (Day-O)". The success of calypso helps legitimate the popular songs of the American roots revival.
• The Weavers return to performing, with a show at Carnegie Hall, after years of being blacklisted for alleged ties to Communism.
• Critically beloved opera singer Marian Anderson becomes the first African American allowed to perform at the Metropolitan Opera for the first time.
• Leonard Roseman's score for Rebel Without a Cause and Elmer Bernstein's for The Man With the Golden Arm are influential jazz-tinged film compositions.
• Mahalia Jackson and the Drinkard Singers are the first gospel performers to appear at the Newport Folk Festival.
• James Howard becomes the first scholar to publish extensive research on the pantribal powwow.
• Gilbert Chase's America's Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present is published; it becomes one of the most acclaimed works of American music history, and was the first major work to evaluate American music on its own terms rather than from a European perspective.
• Perez Prado records "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White", which became the best-selling record worldwide this year, and launches the American chachacha craze.
• The Cobweb, a film scored by Leonard Rosenman, is the "first Hollywood score to employ 12-tone technique."
• Lejaren A. Hiller and Leonard M. Isaacson produce the first "computer-generated (music) composition", the Illiac Suite.
• Marian Anderson becomes the first African-American singer to perform with the Metropolitan Opera Company, in Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera. A few weeks later, baritone Robert McFerrin becomes the first black male to do so.
• Norman Granz produces the Jazz at the Philharmonic project at the Music Hall in Houston, Texas. This is a controversial show that is a jazz milestone, giving "first-class treatment to jazz musicians for the first time".
• Leontyne Price becomes the first African-American singer to perform in an opera on television, in Tosca by Puccini.
• Horace Silver's The Preacher is an influential early fusion of bop and gospel music.
• Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz is the first major popular music encyclopedia to be published.
• Congress passes a law banning the practice of payola, offering inducements to disc jockeys and executives to promote particular recordings.
• Seth Loving invents the humbucking pickup for the electric guitar. This eliminates much of the instrument's noisy interference and reduces its response to high frequencies.
• Approximate: Tally Recording Studio is founded in Bakersfield, California, becoming the first major studio of the Bakersfield sound.

1956

• The Wizard of Oz is first shown on television, beginning its transformation into an iconic symbol of American culture.
• Elvis Presley first performs on network television, on CBS's Stage Show, making him the "hottest act in show business" at the time. His hit "Heartbreak Hotel" becomes "the prototype for a new genre of morbidly self-pitying rock songs". He also appears on The Ed Sullivan Show, but is taped only from the waist up because his hip movements are seen as too risqué for American audiences. Later in the year, after a performance of "Hound Dog" on The Milton Berle Show in which he grabs his crotch and gyrates his hips in a sexually charged manner, Presley becomes the subject of criticism for what they saw as degenerate moral values. "Hound Dog" would go on to become the biggest selling record of the 1950s, and Presley's performance will play a major role in launching his career.
• Columbia House becomes the first record club in the United States.
• Pat Boone, who had released a string of hit cover versions of African-American popular songs that sold better than the original, releases a cover of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally". Boone's version is outsold by Little Richard, an event that Keir Keightley called a "symbolic (and) economic triumph of original rock'n'roll over its putatively inferior and commercial copy".
• Forbidden Planet becomes the first movie to have an all-electronic music soundtrack. This was the first widespread exposure to electronic music for ordinary Americans. The soundtrack's composers were the husband and wife team Bebe and Louis Barron.
• My Fair Lady smashes Broadway records, and will run for six years and a total of 2,717 performances.
• Nat King Cole becomes the first "African-American to headline a TV network variety series", The Nat King Cole Show.
• The Clancy Brothers form Tradition, a record label, originally just to record themselves, however, they would go on to record popular folk musicians such as Lightnin' Hopkins and Odetta Hopkins.
• The word bluegrass is first used in print.
• Cover versions of popular songs by African-American artists decline, in large part because the original, African-American recording begins to outsell the covers.
• Members of the Alabama Citizens' Council assault Nat King Cole onstage, leading to massive media attention to the Christian anti-rock and roll movement. Later that year, Louisiana passes a law forbidding interracial social functions, entertainment or dancing of any kind.
• The Navy School of Music takes over all individual advanced training for military musicians.
• The Coasters' "Down in Mexico" is the first in a string of hits by that group, popularizing a style of "teenage-oriented productions,... mainly novelty songs (with) comic lyrics and a playful vocal style accompanied by a rhythm and blues combo".
• "Blue Suede Shoes" by Carl Perkins becomes a massive success and is the "first million-selling triple-play crossover (to move) from the top of the country charts, to those of rhythm & blues, and then pop".
• Dizzy Gillespie's jazz orchestra becomes the first such group to be officially recognized by the U.S. government, when it is chosen to tour as a goodwill ambassador for the State Department.
• The Carl Orff method of music instruction is introduced by Arnold Walter at a in St. Louis.
• The film Rock Around the Clock is the first of many to frame a rock performance as a dramatic account of rock culture. Reports of rioting fuel controversy and help perpetuate the notion that rock is linked to juvenile delinquency. Similar films are released later in the year: Rock, Rock, Rock and The Girl Can't Help It.

1957

• Mike Seeger produces an album called American Banjo Scruggs Style, an anthology of bluegrass banjo that "lent new prestige and permanence" to the genre.
• Composer and French horn player Gunther Schuller coins the term third stream, referring to music "that brought jazz techniques into the classical sphere, or vice-versa".
• Pat Suzuki signs to a major label, RCA, the first Japanese American to do so.
• West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein with choreography by Jerome Robbins, a book by Arthur Laurents and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, opens, reflecting Bernstein's view that American musical theater excelled in a form between opera and light entertainment.
• Tommy Sands' "Teen-Age Crush" is a surprise hit after being used in the television play Singing Idol, loosely based on Elvis Presley. The success of the song inspires Ricky Nelson to begin a musical career that led to pop stardom.
• The television show American Bandstand, which features popular music performers for teen audiences, debuts for national audiences. Within a month, it is reaching "more viewers than any other show on daytime television", and the show's success, along with the popularity of Elvis Presley's movie Jailhouse Rock, is taken as evidence that teenage pop listeners are a viable audience for television programs.
• American Bandstand features Jackie Wilson, one of the show's first African-American performers. His "Reet Petite" is a major hit helps establish both Wilson and producer Berry Gordy.
• Art Laboe, a disc jockey in Los Angeles, is probably the first to use the term oldie to describe former hit records with nostalgic value.
• Israel Young founds New York's Folklore Center, which will become a major part of the American roots revival.
• Jazz performer John Coltrane has a spiritual awakening, quits drugs and begins practicing yoga and studying Eastern religion. He will go on to explore the musics of East and South Asia.
• The Staff Band Officer position is created to monitor military musical activities within their areas.
• Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim's West Side Story is an influential musical, in that it focused on lower-class life and used "new and exciting rhythms".
• Legendary gospel singer Sam Cooke releases "You Send Me", a secular song that marks the beginning of his transition into a pop singer.
• George Walker becomes the first African American to earn his D.M.A. at the Eastman School of Music.
• Julio Collazo and Francisco Aquabella come to the United States, becoming "catalysts for the development of North American (Santería) ceremonial music making".
• Martin Denny's Exotica is the beginning of the exotica genre, a style of lush music influenced by both Hawaiian and Latin styles.
• Miles Davis and Gil Evans' "Miles Ahead" marks a "significant development in the use of a large orchestra (twenty players) to expand" the band's sound and style, in the field of cool jazz.
• Dick Clark's American Bandstand is picked up by ABC, making a him a national celebrity and the show a cultural phenomenon that helps shape American popular music.
• The Famous Ward Singers are the first gospel group to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival.
• John Lewis, organizer of the Monterey Jazz Festival, opens the "first summer jazz school" in Lenox, Massachusetts.
• The first computer music studio is created by Max V. Mathews in Murray Hill, New Jersey at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

1958

• American Bandstand introduces a number of "cleaned-up versions of the coolest new black dances", promoted in "conjunction with upbeat new songs, often specially recorded just for this purpose. Two of the earliest were The Bop, from "At the Hop", and The Stroll, from "The Stroll". The success of American Bandstand and host Dick Clark turned Philadelphia, the show's home, into a "mecca for music men".
• "Lonely Teardrops" by Jackie Wilson is a major hit. Producer Berry Gordy perfected the "formula he would exploit for the next decade, producing an unprecedented series of best-selling records with a variety of different black artists". "Lonely Teardrops"' "upbeat arrangement was designed to exploit one of the latest dance fads... called the cha-lypso, a kind of cha-cha done to a modified calypso beat".
• The second wave of the American folk revival begins, led by the apolitical group the Kingston Trio", and their hit single, "Tom Dooley".
• La Monte Young's Trio for Strings is an early work of experimental West Coast chamber music that began the field of minimalism.
• Gus Palmer Sr. revives the Black Legs Society, or Tonkonga, of the Kiowa, a society that features song, dance and music.
• The Chantels' "Maybe" is the first of many songs from the next few years to cross "over into the mainstream and (establish) the commercial viability of 'girl groups' in the music industry".
• Mantle Hood founds the first gamelan education program in the United States, at the University of California, Los Angeles, with Hardja Susila becoming the first Javanese instructor; Hood will also establish the concept of bi-musicality, in which music students are expected to perform the music they study.
• Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song becomes the first American musical with an Asian-American cast.
• Alvin Ailey's Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater becomes the first African-American resident concert dance company to earn a national reputation.
• The Country Music Association is formed to promote country music in the United States; its predecessor was the Country Music Disk Jockeys Association.
• Gibson introduces the first twin-necked electric guitar, and the Flying V guitar, the first of many with outlandish shapes.
• Stereo records are introduced.
• The Grammy Awards are first instituted to recognize popular performers, as voted on by the United States National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. They will become the most prestigious award in popular music. The name Grammies is chosen in a contest, with the winning entry coming from Jay Danna of New Orleans, who wins twelve LPs as a reward.

1959

• The Mark II, an advanced electronic synthesizer, is installed in a Columbia University studio by the Radio Corporation of America. This technological advance greatly simplified electronic music-making and recording.
• Bluegrass music gains greatly in audience and acclaim with the release of Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, compiled by Mike Seeger for Folkways, the Folksong '59 concert in Carnegie Hall and an article by Alan Lomax in Esquire.
• Miles Davis' "So What" from Kind of Blue reflects a major innovation, basing "the thirty-two bar structure... not on a chord pattern but an eight-note Dorian, or modal, scale". "Walkin'" was released as a 33-⅓-rpm record, "a format developed for classical music". This is the beginning of modal jazz.
• Berry Gordy forms Motown Records, which will be among the most influential (record labels) in American popular music, and the first African-American-owned label to reach great success in the American pop market.
• Columbia University opens the first "fully-equipped academic electroacoustic music studio" in the country.
• The Lucky Strike Hit Parade, a staple show on both radio and television, is canceled, due to decreased demand for the Hit Parade specialty, "old-fashioned pop singers, who usually lacked the immunity to standards of musical taste essential to carry off a convincing rendition of a typical rock and roll tune".
• Bessie Griffin becomes the first gospel singer to perform in a cabaret, as the lead in Portraits in Broze at New Orleans' Cabaret Concert Theater.
• Jazz on a Summer's Day is the most influential, and one of the first, full concert documentary films.
• The payola scandal rocks the American music industry, leading to Congressional inquiry, after the publication of a New York Times article the day after Alan Freed is fired from WABC radio "after refusing to sign a statement that he had never taken money or gifts to promote a record".
• One of the most acclaimed performers of the American folk revival, Joan Baez, begins performing in the Cambridge, Massachusetts coffee house scene.
• Englewood Cliffs Studios is founded in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey by Rudy Van Gelder. It will be the primary recording studio for much of the soul jazz and hard bop recordings of the 1950s and 60s.
• The New Lost City Ramblers record six albums and an EP for Folkways Records, "initiating a new genre within the (American folk revival) called 'old time'".
• The Drifters are the first of a number of African-American rhythm and blues combos to have hits using the Brazilian baion rhythm (cha cha) with "There Goes My Baby" and "Dance with Me".
• Berry Gordy founds Motown Records in Detroit, which will go on to dominate the field of soul music. One of the other major labels of soul will be Stax Records, also founded this year, by Jim Stewart in Memphis.
• The Cross-Bronx Expressway in New York has profound effects on the area's socioeconomic conditions, escalating the "deterioration of buildings and the displacement of people", an important development that will "profoundly shape the aesthetics and activities" of hip hop culture.
• Fidel Castro comes to power in Cuba, prompting a wave of immigration to Miami and elsewhere, leading to increased prominence for Cuban music.
• Ritchie Valens, the first Latin rock star who had a hit with an English version of a Mexican huapango, "La Bamba", dies in a plane crash with the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly, also both popular rock stars. It will become known as the Day the Music Died.
• The first African Americans initiated into the Santería Afro-Cuban religion, of which music is an integral part, travel to Cuba to do so.
• Johnny Pacheco joins the band of Charlie Palmieri, establishing Pacheco's career; he will go on to become one of the most popular bandleaders and performers in the New York salsa scene.
• The Association of Ukrainian Choirs of America is formed to promote the burgeoning field of both religious and secular Ukrainian American choral singing.
• Dennis Murphy begins working on the construction of gamelan instrumentation, possibly becoming the first American to "build gamelan instruments who meant to model Indonesian ensembles directly".
• By far the most well-known Filipino folkloric dance company, the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company, tours the United States for the first time, bringing newfound public awareness of Filipino music throughout the country.
• The jazz quartet of Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden release The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century, landmark recordings that help establish the field of free jazz.
• One of the first successful white blueswomen, Barbara Dane, becomes the first white woman featured on the cover of Ebony magazine.

1960

• Elvis Presley is discharged from the Army and hosts a television show with Frank Sinatra, revitalizing both men's careers.
• Joan Baez signs to Vanguard, marking that label as "the mover and shaker on the (folk music revival) scene".
• The 3rd United States Infantry Fife and Drum Corps is formed by the Army to play colonial-era instrumentation, primarily for special official occasions. The Corps' Drum Major is the only person in the Army authorized to salute with his left hand.
• Beginning in the spring of this year, "We Shall Overcome" becomes an omnipresent part and an unofficial anthem of civil rights demonstrations.
• Stax Records is founded by Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, soon becoming the home of Otis Redding, Rufus Thomas, Booker T. & the MG's and Sam & Dave, making Stax one of the premier soul labels of the decade.
• George Robinson Ricks' dissertation "Some Aspects of the Religious Music of the United States Negro: An Ethnomusicological Study with Special Emphasis on the Gospel Tradition" is the first lengthy description of African-American gospel music.
• Ornette Coleman begins performing, causing a "major aesthetic controversy" due to his "dissonant harmonic style and abandonment of chorus structures and fixed harmonic changes as means of organizing improvisation flow". This is the beginning of free jazz.
• Robert E. Brown founds a performance-based world music program at Wesleyan University, which includes instruction in Indonesian traditions; Brown will go on to found many similar programs, as well as the Center for World Music in San Francisco.
• James Cleveland has his first "smash hit" with "The Love of God", which helps establish him as one of the foremost entertainers in American gospel music.
• Blues is performed for the first time at the Newport Jazz Festival.
• Elvis Presley's "His Hand in Mine" is a landmark recording that helps define the field of white gospel.

1961

• A compilation of Robert Johnson recordings entitled King of the Delta Blues Singers is released, from recordings made in 1936 and 1937. At the time, no photographs of the late blues singer were known, and he was considered a "sort of invisible pop star". The recording turned him into a cultural icon among a "coterie of prominent young musicians", who imitated his style of blues. People like Bob Dylan were inspired by Johnson, drawing on his work as a "source of a tacit ethos, silently transmitted, internationally shared, creating a new mythic example of what rock and roll could be."
• The police attempt to break up a folk musician march and concert in Washington Square Park, leading to a riot. The event is a signal of the return of politics to folk music, having recovered from the blacklisting and McCarthyism of the 1950s.
• Alexander Kuchma, Jack Raymond and Mark Selivan form the Balalaika and Domra Society of New York, which helps sustain and inspire the Russian balalaika orchestra tradition in the United States.
• Composer La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield create a concert series in the loft of Yoko Ono; these are said to have begun the downtown music tradition of New York City.
• Grace Bumbry becomes the first African American to sing at the prestigious Bayreuth Festival.
• Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg helps settle a strike of performers at the Metropolitan Opera, perhaps the "first sign of an official governmental policy on the arts".
• Allan and Sandra Jaffe open Preservation Hall in New Orleans, a music venue that helped revitalize the city's jazz scene, and was the only venue in the city at the time to host the traditional black jazz performers.
• Hale Smith's Contours for Orchestra is an influential piece, using avant garde, especially the twelve-tone serial technique.
• Bill Clifton organizes the first bluegrass festival on July 4, which is sparsely attended, in Luray, Virginia.
• The death of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic leads to "political and social upheaval" in that country and many immigrants coming to the United States, bringing with them Dominican music.
• The first training course in the music education method of Zoltán Kodály is held.
• Mariachi los Camperos de Nati Cano is founded, and will become one of the longest-lasting, most well-known and influential of American mariachi groups.
• Celia Cruz leaves Sonora Matancera, an influential group who had popularized Cuban dance music throughout the Americas; Cruz will go on to become perhaps the longest lasting institution of American salsa music.
• The Famous Ward Singers are the first gospel group to perform in nightclubs.
• The Modern Jazz Quartet opens up the "concert stage to the jazz ensemble" with an unprecedented performance with the Cincinnati Symphony.
• The Clancy Brothers are invited to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, launching their career and garnering newfound respectability for the Irish American showband tradition.
• The U.S. Navy School of Music is moved to Norfolk, Virginia. During the move, two ships bring bands from Washington, D.C. to Norfolk; along the way, they play in honor of George Washington as they pass his grave.
• The Valadiers become the first white Motown group with their recording of "Greetings, This Is Uncle Sam".

1962

• A&M Records, one of the first artist-owned record labels, releases its first hit song, Herb Alpert & His Tijuana Brass' "The Lonely Bull".
• The journal Perspectives of New Music, funded by the Fromm Music Foundation, is first published, aimed at those who link "aesthetic work to complex analytical and compositional systems".
• Otis Redding begins his career recording for Stax/Volt in Memphis, soon becoming the label's best-selling artist.
• Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs are invited to join the popular sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, "one of the great coups of the" American folk revival, signalling a newfound acceptance for folk music and bluegrass among mainstream Americans.
• The fanzine Broadside is founded to focus on topical folk music, rapidly becoming one of the most important publications in the field.
• The New State Ballroom opens in Boston, soon becoming the preeminent Irish American music venue and displacing the Intercolonial Hall.
• Though it has never been made clear that he was officially blacklisted, many folk fans come to believe that Pete Seeger has been blacklisted from the popular folk-oriented TV show Hootenanny, leading to a boycott of the show by fans and performers, including the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary. Seeger himself, however, though he did believe he had been blacklisted, also encouraged other performers to appear on the show, including Judy Collins, Theo Bikel and the New Lost City Ramblers. Peter, Paul & Mary become among the first major pop groups to take outspoken positions on controversial issues.
• The song "Walk Right In", originally recorded by Gus Cannon & the Jug Stompers in 1930, becomes a major hit for Erik Darling's Rooftop Singers, and an unusually successful single for the American folk revival, otherwise mostly LP-based at the time. The song also prompts a comeback career by Gus Cannon, who had retired from music to work as a gardener in Tennessee.
• Peter, Paul & Mary begin recording for Warner Bros. Records, beginning with Peter, Paul & Mary, leading to their successful career as one of the most popular of the mainstream pop-folk bands, insisting also on complete artistic control over their recordings, a rarity in the era.
• John Barry's score for Dr. No is an important film score in that it was an early work to use rock and medieval music.
• James Cleveland's arrival in California is celebrated by a concert attended by most of the area's gospel elite.
• No Strings, by Richard Rodgers, features the first interracial kiss seen on Broadway.
• Sanford Allen becomes the first full-time African-American violinist with the New York Philharmonic.
• The release of Booker T & the M.G.'s' Green Onions marks the beginning of Memphis soul.
• The British group Blues Incorporated is probably the first all-white Chicago-style blues band in the world.

1963