1959: The Year Classic Albums Were Born

When the year 1959 began, there were only 48 states. Alaska and Hawaii would became part of the United States during that annum, the third year of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's second term. It was the year Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba and took a goodwill tour of the U.S., two months after an interview with Edward R. Murrow on CBS television.

Mattel toy company launched the Barbie doll. In professional basketball, theCeltics beat the Lakers for the NBA crown--but it was the Minneapolis Lakers.

Bob Dylan, (then Robert Zimmerman), graduating from Hibbing High School in Minnesota might have gone that year to see the epic motion picture "Ben Hur" or the comedy "Some Like It Hot" that made cross dressing acceptable under certain circumstances--especially if it involved wooing Marilyn Monroe. Or he might have tuned in television shows like "Bonanza" and "The Twilight Zone," both premiering in 1959.

In music, the Grammy Awards were created and debuted. And on the darker side, a chartered plane transporting musicians Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the J.P. "Big Bopper" Richardson crashed in an Iowa snowstorm, killing them and the pilot, a tragedy later termed "the day the music died" in Don McLean's song, "American Pie." Famed New York disc jockey Allan Freed at WABC Radio refused to sign a statement saying he never accepted payola--payment for getting an artist's records on the air--and was fired.

But in jazz, there was no such bad news (if one discounts the increasing popularity of rock n' roll music that was pushing jazz toward the fringes of popularity). The year 1959, for whatever reason, whatever alignment of the planets or whim of the Fates, was a glorious year.

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