Tommy’s Coffee Break Calendar for May 17th

It was "Folk" before it was "Pop"... -- Reggie makes history!!! -- A great songwriter remembered...

5/17/1963 (54 years ago today) - Four years from now, it will be called The Monterey Pop Festival, and it will go down in history as one of the great events of the legendary "Summer Of Love", but it started out as something else altogether: On this date, the first Monterey Folk Festival took place, and over the next three days, you'd get to see Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary, Jerry Garcia, Doc Watson, Lightnin' Hopkins, The Modern Folk Quartet and even The Andrews Sisters! Keep in mind, it's pre-Beatlemania-time, so a line-up like this was a pretty big-'n'-cool deal...

5/17/1975 (42 years ago today) - Gotta give it up for Mr. Reginald Dwight here, he was the first to do this: Elton John received a Platinum Record award for sales of a million copies of his just-released LP "Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy" -- It was, after all, the very first album EVER to be certified Platinum on the day of its release(!), something that {strangely} never happened for Elvis or The Beatles...Killer vocal performance right here:

5/17/1944 - Born on this date, criminally-overlooked singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester -- Born and raised in Louisiana and Tennessee, his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967 led to his moving to Canada in 1967 to avoid military service, and this is essentially where he began his career in music -- Like, say, Randy Newman, Jesse had a series of critically acclaimed solo albums and though he remained mostly in the shadows with a devoted cult-like following, it was his songwriting prowess that gave him true success, with many of his compositions being covered by a wide variety of artists: Patti Page, Elvis Costello, James Taylor, Roseanne Cash, Jimmy Buffett, Lucinda Williams, The Everly Brothers, Joan Baez, Anne Murray, Reba McEntire, Lyle Lovett and Emmylou Harris were all big fans of his work --  Jesse became a Canadian citizen in 1973, gained amnesty in the U.S. in '77, and re-settled here in 2002. He passed away from esophageal cancer at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, April 11, 2014 at age 69.

Share your memories with the Calendar here on our web site and on the WBLM Facebook and Twitter pages with the hashtag #TommysCoffeeBreak.

"I don't know what called to me/But I know I had to go...", xoxo!