The number one single today in 1968:
The number one single today in 1973:
The number one British single today in 1976:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Nov. 24
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It’s not yet 7 a.m. and students gather at UW-Madison’s practice field, shivering in the dark.
Without a word from their leader, and while most of their classmates are still asleep, the 260-some members of the UW Marching Band come to attention, ready to rehearse.
“Gooooood morning, Elm Drive!” band director Michael Leckrone’s voice booms, his headset carrying his game-day greeting to the street just east of the field.
The students start doing jumping jacks to get their blood pumping. A thermometer reads 37 degrees.
The band runs through its halftime show, a routine that changes every home game. For this particular game, the Nov. 3 contest against Rutgers, Leckrone came up with “Jersey Boys,” an arrangement filled with plenty of the high kicks and hip-popping that’s made the Badger Band so distinctive.
The sun rises and Leckrone moves to the tower positioned on the sidelines at the 50-yard line. From his perch, he picks at every imperfection.
“I sure see a lot of mistakes,” he says with a shake of his head. “Tubas, do it again.”
He corrects their spacing, fixes the way a particular note is played, reminds them that the balls of their feet, not the center, should hit the lines on the field. He does not praise them.
“That was better,” he says of their final run-through. “You’re going to get one more chance at 12:30 today.”
It’s a variation of a common refrain he tells his kids: You only get one chance to get it right.
And on Saturday, they’ll only get one more chance at Camp Randall under Leckrone, who will direct his last home football game after a 50-year career leading UW-Madison’s marching band.
A Wisconsin institution
Nostalgia has laced much of Leckrone’s last football season: In the back of his mind and in his assistants’ and students’ minds is a ticking clock, counting down the days, the rehearsals, the games he has left.
“Every event, someone will say, ‘This is the last time you’re going to do that,’” Leckrone said. “You’re only going to come on the field three more times. Two more times. Four more times. It’s a constant reminder. As we get closer to ‘the final curtain,’ as Frank Sinatra used to say, I think it’ll be more on my mind than ever.”
Since his first day — Sept. 1, 1969 — six chancellors and two acting chancellors have come and gone. He’s on his ninth football coach and directed halftime shows for 50 of Camp Randall’s 101 years.
“He represents the spirit of the university,” said Janice Stone, a former UW band member who has volunteered as one of Leckrone’s field assistants for 27 years. “When I think of the faces of the university, it’s the chancellor and Barry Alvarez and Mike.”
He’s also a rarity in the college band world: He is the marching band director but he is also the director of bands at UW-Madison, which means he is in charge of instruments, budgets and other administrative work. He also teaches.
Leckrone considered staying on as a music professor next year — he teaches one music course in the fall and two in the spring — but decided to retire fully at the end of this academic year.
His wife’s death in August 2017 — the love of his life, whom he met in seventh grade, married at 19 and spent 62 years with — factored into his decision. Since her passing, tucked into his black band jacket on game days is a photo of the two of them, surrounded by palm trees in Pasadena on their first trip to the Rose Bowl.
Leckrone’s health played a role as well. He had double bypass surgery in January 2017.
He also didn’t want to hear whispers that his time had passed, like a TV series that should have ended three seasons ago. He wants to end strongly, on a high note, like Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.”
“I wanted to not do it as a last gasp,” he said.
On Aug. 25, Leckrone told his students that this year would be his last. And he requested that this season be “business as usual.”
Students wiped away tears as Leckrone took long pauses and announced he would relinquish not only his baton, but an identity that has defined him.
Not a ‘sweetheart’
What the Camp Randall crowds see is a nice man who always sports a smile, still does the chicken dance at age 82 and looks as fondly at his students as at his six grandchildren.
What isn’t seen in the stadium is the hours of nitpicking on the practice field.
They don’t hear him screeching into his mic, “Hands! Watch the hand positions!”
They don’t see him throwing his clipboard from the tower only to ask a student to retrieve it after a two-minute diatribe about the trumpet players’ failure to “put some fight into it.”
They don’t catch that his request to play it “one more time” really means five more.
They don’t know how much he enjoys blowing his 35-year-old whistle, once, twice, three times in a row, however many times it takes for the students to stop playing so he can tell them what’s preventing them from achieving perfection.
“I don’t particularly have a reputation for being a sweetheart,” he allowed.
Halftime shows
Unlike the football games that sandwich the halftime shows, Leckrone has no final score on which to judge his success.
Cymbals clanging, drums beating, the Badger Band marches up and down the field as it’s done since 1885.
Leckrone’s assessment of the Nov. 3 show: “Pretty good,” but he says he likes to withhold judgment until he gets his hands on the film the following Monday.
Leckrone is always among the last to file off the field. He pats nearly every student’s shoulder or brushes their hand, dishing out a “good job” to those who look like they need it.
The students’ faces are red and their lungs out of breath after the 10-minute show, but they look pleased with themselves and the crowd’s reaction.
As Leckrone turns to head back to the end zone, one of his longtime assistants leans in and says to him what Leckrone has tried to forget all season: “Well, one more.”
‘Nobody like Mike’
Leckrone has the longest tenure of any marching band director, past or present, in the history of the Big 10, according to a survey submitted to each institution’s marching band director.
Mark Spede, president-elect of the College Band Directors National Association, pointed to just one current director with a tenure nearly as long as Leckrone’s. Arthur Bartner started at the University of Southern California in 1970, one year after Leckrone.
Leckrone was the clear frontrunner at UW-Madison, said H. Robert Reynolds, who led the university’s hiring search for the marching band director in the late 1960s.
Reynolds drove down to Butler University where Leckrone had worked his way up to band director just a few years after earning his music degree there. It was clear Leckrone had high energy and a special rapport with students.
Born and raised in Indiana, Leckrone would have been happy staying at Butler for his entire career.
“But you get ambitious,” he said.
Reynolds never expected Leckrone to stay so long. Directing marching bands is “a young man’s game” that people usually trade in for teaching or concert band positions.
Leckrone also didn’t expect to spend 50 years directing. Like many in higher education, he figured the next step in the career ladder was administration.
He tried it out, about 20 years ago, when he served as assistant director of the School of Music before quickly realizing it wouldn’t work. He missed making music.
Leckrone specifically requested not to serve on the search committee for his successor. Having the next director looking over his shoulder at the last one wouldn’t work, he said.
“I think Wisconsin’s been very lucky to have had him for 50 years,” Reynolds said. “And I think this transition is going to be difficult to satisfy the students, the alumni, the crowd at the games. They’re going to expect a Mike Leckrone band. Don’t get me wrong, there’s good marching band directors out there. But there’s nobody like Mike.”
Ideas unfulfilled
At 82, Leckrone still works full time, spending a few hours working from his Middleton home in the morning before driving his Ford Escape to campus between 9 and 10 a.m. Among his pre-set Sirius XM radio channels is Frank Sinatra.
He holds rehearsals from 3:45 to 5:30 p.m. on Tuesdays through Fridays and handles administrative and teaching duties before practice.
Leckrone gets home at about 6 p.m. and works until 11 p.m. on whatever needs to get done.
“There’s always the next show, always the next performance you have to get ready for,” he said.
He has ideas in his head for next year that will go unfulfilled.
Establishing traditions
Many Badgers fans come for the football and stay for the band.
It wasn’t always that way.
Leckrone took over the band at a “low ebb” in its 133-year history. The football team hadn’t won in 24 consecutive games. With the Vietnam War at its peak, the idea of putting on a uniform and marching around wasn’t popular, and Leckrone fielded fewer than 100 students in his first year.
Whereas others saw setbacks, Leckrone saw an untapped opportunity, a “sleeping giant.”
His 50-year career was not without some bad headlines: hazing, lewdness by band members, and an assistant director who resigned after reported inappropriate sexual behavior.
Leckrone suspended the band from a single home game in 2008, an action he said was wrong in hindsight because it punished all of the students instead of solely the offenders.
As the Badgers football team’s success grew and universities recognized how much money could be made in college athletics, the unbridled band faced new restrictions.
“There are times when I would love to play ‘On Wisconsin’ because I think the crowd needs it and the team needs it, but the script says it’s time to show the whirling hamburgers or whatever,” he said, referring to the advertisements shown on the Jumbotron.
Leckrone is most in his element during the Fifth Quarter, the 15-minute post-game show born in the early 1970s out of Leckrone’s own boredom at playing the same old songs.
“I realize what I do is not the most important thing in the world,” Leckrone said of his legacy. “I haven’t contributed to any great discoveries. I’ve brought a few smiles to people’s faces.”
Moments of happiness
On game days, Leckrone insists on walking from his office to the stadium and back, about two miles round-trip.
He rests occasionally on a stool in the band’s section, particularly in the second half, but is ready to hop on his ladder and strike up the band whenever the Badgers score.
Each year’s group of students has its own personality. Some are a little flaky. Some are tricksters, pulling pranks on Leckrone during practice. This year’s bunch, because of the circumstances, is more serious.
Leckrone has a theory he shares with all of his students about “moments of happiness.”
“Your mind lives on the moments of happiness,” he says. “They sometimes don’t last long and aren’t as big as we think they are, but if you can find a lot of them, you can live on them.”
With 1:06 on the clock and the Badgers ahead 31-17, restlessness sets in among the thousands at Camp Randall on Nov. 3.
Some of the spectators start filtering out of the stadium, hoping to beat the rush in the parking lots. Bucky Badger continues to work the crowd.
The showman stops watching the game, slowly turning himself around, capturing views of Camp Randall from every angle of his perch at the end zone, taking it all in — a moment of happiness.
Coda
After the game, band members gather in the courtyard of the Humanities building, looking up at their leader on the second-floor balcony. At least a hundred others — some parents of the students, others longtime band supporters — squeeze in to listen.
Gone is the voice that boomed over the stereo waking up Elm Drive, replaced with one speaking so softly that the crowd leans in, straining to hear his second-to-last dismissal speech.
The next couple of weeks will go by fast, Leckrone tells them, and himself, as he blinks back tears. He repeats one phrase four times: “Don’t take it for granted.”
Linking arms, the band sings “Varsity,” the tune that caps the end of every dismissal.
Leckrone says he can’t imagine life beyond this academic year. What will happen when there are no more arrangements to dream up in his head? Where will he watch next season’s football games? What will he do every Tuesday through Friday from 3:45 to 5:30?
He still has his last home football game on Saturday. There will be hockey games and basketball games and concert requests around the state. And in the spring, he will direct his final concert.
After dismissal, fans flood Leckrone for hugs and thank him for his service. Young children come up to him for photos or autographs. Much of this season has already felt like the last game, just an extended version of it.
Leckrone finally returns to his office, Room 4557, where dozens of framed photos and plaques adorn the walls. Two more frames lean against his desk, waiting to be hung.
“I’m running out of space,” he said. “But I’m running out of time, too.”
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Today in 1899, the world’s first jukebox was installed at the Palais Royal Hotel in San Francisco.
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Facebook Friend Gary Probst:
Be grateful, today, that kindness reigns over incivility. According to Harvard psychologist and author, Steven Pinker, today’s new incivility is simply a growing pain for the human race. We are safer, healthier and have more to be grateful for than ever. I agree.
Although people seem to be at humanity’s collective throat, things are much different than a few hundred years ago. The only nations where people are starving are where despots cause the suffering, not from a lack of resources. Modern farming has made it so. Starvation stems from greed and politics, not a lack of supply.There have always been murders and violence. If you compare what we witness, today, to other times of human history, we are in a time of peace–not where we would like it to be–but better than before.
As life improves, our next goal is, naturally, to make it even better. We face a challenging future, as robotics that replace human jobs are on the horizon. However, we will endure. We will prosper. We will take care of each other. Anybody with parents or grandparents who lived though the Great Depression remember hearing stories of human kindness.
If times become rough, again, we will come together and care for each other. Its in our DNA. Its part of our very nature. According to Dr. Pinker, humanity continues to evolve, not devolve. We’re getting there. However, as with all growth, its never in a straight line of the rise. There are blips and bumps along the way.Take time, today, to be grateful we live in a nation where we are able to disagree and duke it out on social media. We have a right to be indignant and that is a blessing. Its part of human growth and development. Resistance makes us stronger.
Thank God for each other. The farmers will take care of providing the turkey and the turkeys on Facebook will provide plenty of opportunity for you to grow. The connection between each other, in spite of disagreement and tone, is what makes our creator happy on this day of thanksgiving.
This is also appropriate today:
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My journalism professors wouldn’t be proud of me. Not only because I’ve spent my career satirizing the misadventures of America’s weirdos rather than uncovering corruption, but also because last week I cried at a city council meeting.
Reporters are taught to be dispassionate, objective observers. Getting emotionally involved had never been a problem for me before, except at the monthly disgraces they call meetings of the Sauk County Board, a body most politely described as a fly in the soup of American democracy. So tortured are the principles of good government and common decency that even a stoic feels moved to tears.
There isn’t supposed to be crying in journalism, but Baraboo is an emotional place these days, from City Hall to church pews to high school hallways. A photo depicting local prom-goers in an apparent Nazi salute was posted online last week, making international news and tying this community to hate speech. Locals feel outraged, attacked, disheartened and traumatized. We all lost the same loved one: Baraboo’s good name.
As one of the bereaved, I struggled to compose myself during last week’s council meeting. I listened to Jewish friends, good people thrust into a mess they didn’t make, call for healing and education. As the Chamber of Commerce president spoke, I thought of friends on the staff who spent the week fielding angry calls over a controversy they didn’t create, and may spend years working to overcome.
As a friend and alderman whose son appeared in the photo discussed the impact on his family, I thought of my own four children at the school who, despite not being pictured, may see the way they’re perceived — “You’re from Baraboo? Ick.” — change forever. I didn’t once think of the journalism professors who might say I’m friends with too many local newsmakers.
There’s much we don’t know about the circumstances surrounding the shooting and circulation of the photo. Each day, new accounts surface that move me to reject the face-value narrative that immediately spread around the world: “In that picture, the boys seem to be saluting like Nazis. It was taken in a mostly white community that must be a breeding ground for white supremacists.”
No, Baraboo is not.
I don’t believe it’s that simple. Yes, we live in a rural area, but we don’t wear ropes for belts. The shame in seeing Baraboo known only for that photo is that America might be surprised to learn this is a cosmopolitan little town. It supports the arts and public schools, and you can’t live here long without getting to know Jewish people and gay people and other minorities, such as those who think it’s OK to play Christmas music before Thanksgiving.
People don’t hide in terror behind the nearest tree when they approach or burn crosses on their lawns or break their Perry Como albums. Every community has its bigots, but I’d like to think that if we knew our high school was becoming a boot camp for Hitler Youth, the locals would be the first to step in.
We’ve learned this much: The view from the eye of a media — and social media — hurricane is terrifying. The instant a community is associated with hate, it becomes the target of that very thing. Whereas my Aunt Lucille, the Shakespeare of strongly worded letters, labored over her typewriter in upbraiding wayward CEOs and bureaucrats, today’s trolls with keyboard courage can tell you immediately and anonymously that you and your community are a pimple on America’s butt.
I can understand why the photo upset people, and I find calls for sensitivity training and Holocaust education entirely appropriate. I’d just like our knee-jerk, hit-send world to consider there may be more to the story than we know right now. Our modern world of social media and around-the-clock talking heads doesn’t much care for patience or complexity. But it’s best to evaluate events in context and resist the temptation to take them at face value. Maybe I learned something in all those journalism classes after all.
Whether we find out the photo depicts bigotry in action, an ill-conceived joke, a disastrous misunderstanding or something in between, the damage is done. An above-average small Wisconsin town bears a wound that won’t heal without leaving a scar. And that’s a crying shame.
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Today in 1963, the Beatles released their second album, “With the Beatles,” in the United Kingdom.
That same day, Phil Spector released a Christmas album from his artists:
Given what else happened that day, you can imagine neither of those received much notice.
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James Wigderson apparently doesn’t like the traditional Thanksgiving dinner, but …
Unfortunately, the non-traditional Thanksgiving is an argument I lost long ago.
Perhaps I should use the process Karin Tamerius, a psychiatrist and the founder of Smart Politics, created for the New York Times. In “How to Have a Conversation With Your Angry Uncle Over Thanksgiving,” Tamerius creates a bunch of no-win (if you’re a conservative) conversation paths similar to the “build your own adventure” books for children. At the end of the process, everyone at the family Thanksgiving table will be in favor of nationalized health care, higher taxes, forced unionization, and even rooting for the Detroit Lions.
You start with a choice.The “Angry Uncle Bot” allows your leftwing family members to practice their bumper sticker psychology and new talking points before actually trying it on a real human being. The “Liberal Uncle Bot” helps conservatives recognize that their facts and figures don’t matter as much as liberal feelings.
No, really. Your liberal uncle will say, “We need Medicare for All. Health care is a human right.” You, as the conservative, have three options:
Of course, choosing either of the first two options are “wrong.” Your only correct response is, “O.K., can you tell me more about that?”My favorite part of the game was the liberal uncle’s statement, “Many people can’t even afford medications or primary care. If we expand Medicare to include everyone, those people can get the help they need.”
If you respond, “National health insurance is a disaster where it’s been adopted,” you’re wrong again. But not because of Sweden.
“Not a good choice. This response will turn the conversation into a debate over facts and figures,” Tamerius wrote. “Debate is problematic because people tend not be persuaded by evidence and may even end up believing more strongly in their original position.”
Bad: “debate over facts and figures” and “people tend not be persuaded by evidence.” Because why have a factual debate?
Instead, you’re supposed to choose, “So, you think the government has a responsibility to make sure every person has basic health care, is that right?”
Why? “…it’s important to show your understanding by reflecting what you heard. Good reflections paraphrase what the other person said and highlight emotions. Truly exceptional reflections are met with, ‘Exactly! I couldn’t have said it better myself.’”
I know what I could say better myself to the annoying liberal relative who says, “We need Medicare for All. Health care is a human right.”
“Great, we’re going to take your portion of today’s dinner bill and set it aside for the $32 trillion in higher taxes that you want. And just to show that there are no hard feelings, we’ll let you walk home so you don’t have to feel guilty about the burning of fossil fuels. No, don’t take any turkey with you. Meat production contributes to global warming. I want you to feel really smug and warm on that ten mile hike home. The rest of us are going to enjoy our dinner while thanking the Pilgrims for coming to this country, bringing Western civilization with them.”
There will be more dessert for us, and a whole lot less acrimony.
Or you could ban politics from your table and discuss a nice, safe, uncontroversial topic, such as whether Packers coach Mike McCarthy should be fired.
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The number one British single today in 1954:
Today in 1955, RCA Records purchased the recording contract of Elvis Presley from Sam Phillips for an unheard-of $35,000.
The number one single today in 1960 holds the record for the shortest number one of all time:
The number one British single today in 1970 hit number one after the singer’s death earlier in the year:
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In the late 1960s, the ACLU was a small but powerful liberal organization devoted to a civil libertarian agenda composed primarily of devotion to freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, and the rights of accused criminals. In the early 1970s, the ACLU’s membership rose from around 70,000 to almost 300,000. Many new members were attracted by the organization’s opposition to the Vietnam War and its high-profile battles with President Nixon, but such members were not committed to the ACLU’s broader civil libertarian agenda. However, the organization’s defense of the KKK’s right to march in Skokie, Illinois, in the late 1970s weeded out some of these fair-weather supporters and attracted some new free speech devotees. But George H. W. Bush’s criticisms of the ACLU during the 1988 presidential campaign again attracted many liberal members not especially devoted to civil liberties.
To maintain its large membership base, the ACLU recruited new members by directing mass mailings to mailing lists rented from a broad range of liberal groups. The result of the shift of the ACLU to a mass membership organization was that it gradually transformed itself from a civil libertarian organization into a liberal organization with an interest in civil liberties. This problem was exacerbated by the growth within the ACLU of autonomous, liberal, special interest cliques known as “projects.” These projects have included an AIDS Project, a Capital Punishment Project, a Children’s Rights Project, an Immigrants’ Rights Project, a Lesbian and Gay Project, a National Prison Project, a Women’s Rights Project, a Civil Liberties in the Workplace Project, a Privacy and Technology Project, and an Arts Censorship Project. This loss of focus led Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz to waggishly suggest that “perhaps the Civil Liberties Union needs a civil liberties project.”
Since the George W. Bush administration, the ACLU’s dedication to its traditional civil libertarian mission has waned ever further. With the election of Donald Trump, its membership rolls have grown to almost two million, almost all of them liberal politically, few of whom are devoted to civil liberties as such. Meanwhile, the left in general has become less interested in, and in some cases opposed to, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the rights of the accused.
Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.
First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn’t actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.
Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, “Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?”
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due proess protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”
The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.
Conor Friersdorf adds:Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.
The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.
The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” The New York Times reports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.
The ACLU doesn’t object to any of those due-process protections when a person faces criminal charges. Indeed, it favors an even higher burden of proof, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” to find an individual guilty.
But the ACLU opposes the new rules for campuses. “Today Secretary DeVos proposed a rule that would tip the scales against those who raise their voices. We strongly oppose it,” the organization stated on Twitter. “The proposed rule would make schools less safe for survivors of sexual assault and harassment, when there is already alarmingly high rates of campus sexual assaults and harassment that go unreported. It promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused and letting schools ignore their responsibility under Title IX to respond promptly and fairly to complaints of sexual violence. We will continue to support survivors.”
One line in particular was shocking to civil libertarians: It promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused. Since when does the ACLU believe a process that favors the accused is inappropriate or unfair?
Not when a prosecutor believes she has identified a serial rapist, or a mass murderer, or a terrorist. In those instances, it is the ACLU’s enemies who declare that crime is alarmingly high and reason that strong due-process rights therefore make the world unacceptably unsafe. It is the ACLU’s enemies who conflate supporting survivors of violent crime with weakening protections that guard against punishing innocents. Those enemies now have the ACLU’s own words to use against it.
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The number one British single today in 1955 …
… on the day Bo Diddley made his first appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show. Diddley’s first appearance was his last because, instead of playing “Sixteen Tons” …
… Diddley played “Bo Diddley”:
The number one single today in 1965 could be said to be music to, or in, your ears:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 