635 Gerry and the Pacemakers “How Do You Do It” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” 1963

“Signed by Beatles manager Brian Epstein in 1962, Gerry and The Pacemakers made their name with ballads like ‘How Do You Do It,’ ‘I Like It,’ ‘Ferry Cross the Mersey,’ ‘Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying’ and more. Their biggest hit was the song ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone,’ originally from Rodgers & Hammerstein musical ‘Carousel,’ which had enthralled the group’s lead vocalists and co-founder, Gerry Marsden, when he first saw the film in his youth. The Pacemakers’ rendition of that song has been the anthem of the crowds at Liverpool Football Club for three decades; it is played before kick-off every Saturday, is inscribed on the club gates and has remained the Pacemakers’ most popular concert request” (PR Newswire, 11/17/2011).

Gerry and the Pacemakers “How Do You Do It”

Gerry and the Pacemakers “You'll Never Walk Alone”

634 Freddie (1936-2006) and the Dreamers “I’m Telling You Now” 1963

Freddie And The Dreamers had been traveling the live circuit since 1959 and—though they came from Manchester—rode into the charts on the back of the Merseybeat boom. Having seen the Beatles perform If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody in The Cavern, Freddie and co purloined the arrangement for their own recording, which took them to No 3 in the singles chart in 1963. From here, the group made an easy transition as a family entertainment group, with appearances in UK pantomimes and the US charts. In fact, they proved so popular stateside that Chubby Checker released Do The Freddie in 1965, cashing in on singer Freddie Garrity’s renowned hyperactive stage antics” (Ian Shirley, Record Collector, 2013).

Freddie and the Dreamers “I’m Telling You Now”

633 The Four Seasons “Walk Like a Man” 1963

“Fans noticed the distinctive harmonies and, in particular, Valli’s trademark falsetto, forever cementing the group’s name as one of rock and roll’s most enduring entertainers. Unlike other acts in the 1960s, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons not only survived the British invasion and the Beatles, but continued to crank out hits along the way” (Louisville Magazine, Nov 2007).

The Four Seasons “Walk Like a Man”

632 The Five Du-Tones “Shake a Tail Feather” 1963

“Formed in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, around 1957…Originally a doo-wop group, the Five Dutones moved to Chicago in the early 60s. Their exhilarating single ‘Shake A Tail Feather’ was released in 1963. Later revived by James and Bobby Purify and Mitch Ryder, this definitive early version was a US top 30 R&B hit. James West died of a heart attack in 1963 and was replaced by David Scott. The Five Dutones recorded a total of nine singles, most of which were based on local dance crazes” (The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 2006). 

The Five Du-Tones “Shake a Tail Feather”

631 Bob Dylan (1941- ) “Masters of War” 1963

Dylan “begged and borrowed from the established ballad styles of the past…But the stories he told in his songs had nothing to do with unrequited Appalachian love affairs or idealized whorehouses in New Orleans…They went right to the heart of his decade’s most recurring preoccupation: that in a time of irreversible technological progress, moral civilization has pathetically faltered” (Younger Than That Now: The Collected Interviews with Bob Dylan, 2004). The album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is listed on the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

Bob Dylan “Masters of War”

630 Bob Dylan (1941- ) “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” 1963

“I agonized about making a record, but I wouldn’t have wanted to make singles, 45s—the kind of songs they played on the radio…I had no song in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drown their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers weren’t for radiophiles” (Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, 2004). The album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is listed on the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

Bob Dylan “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”

629 Bob Dylan (1941- ) “Blowin’ in the Wind” 1963

“I’m not sure people understood a lot of what I was writing about. I don’t even know if I could understand them if I believed everything that has been written about them by imbeciles who wouldn’t know the first thing about writing songs. I’ve always said the organized media propagated me as something I never pretended to be” (Bob Dylan, Inspirations, 2005). The album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is listed on the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

Bob Dylan “Blowin’ in the Wind”

628 Bob Dylan (1941- ) “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” 1963

“I’ll tell you how I come to write that [A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall]. Every line in that really is another song. Could be used as a whole song, every single line. I wrote that when I didin’t know how many other songs I could write. That was during October of last year and I remember sitting up all night with a bunch of people someplace. I wanted to get the most down that I knew about into one song, so I wrote that. It was during the Cuba trouble, that blockade, I guess is the word. I was a little worried, maybe that’s the word” (Jonathan Cott, ed., Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, 2006). The album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is listed on the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

Bob Dylan “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall”

627 The Drifters “On Broadway” 1963

“Faye Treadwell inherited the job of managing the group from her husband and fought numerous legal battles in order to hang on to the rights to a name that became, in effect, a franchise. In the 1960s, when the group’s reputation was riding high with such hits as Save the Last Dance for Me and Under the Boardwalk, several outfits calling themselves the Drifters toured the US and Europe…It was such apparent abuses of what would now be called intellectual property that Treadwell spent much of her life attempting to counter. The confusion was intensified by complicated bloodlines which entitled some of the splinter groups to a moral share of the trademark. Black vocal groups were frequent victims of this form of counterfeiting, and others to suffer included the Coasters, the Temptations and the Isley Brothers” (Richard Williams, The Guardian, 6/15/2011). 

The Drifters “On Broadway”

626 The Dave Clark Five “Glad All Over” 1963

“The DC5 began as a fairly ordinary American-styled 1950’s rock group in London that underwent a series of personnel changes before settling on the core quintet of Mike Smith (lead vocal and organ), Denis Payton (saxophones, harmonica, and guitar), Lenny Davidson (lead guitar), Rick Huxley (bass) and the leader on drums and vocal. While comparisons with the Beatles are inevitable, the musical style of the two groups was quite distinct” (John Clark, Notes, March 2015). 

The Dave Clark Five “Glad All Over”

625 Vic Dana (1942- ) “More” 1963

“As a young boy, Dana trained as a dancer, and at the age of 11 was spotted, performing in Buffalo, by Sammy Davis Jnr. Influenced by Davis, the Dana family moved to California, where young Dana worked on his dancing and also studied singing. In 1960, he toured as a solo act, appearing on the same bill as the Fleetwoods, and then signed for the same record company, Dolton” (The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 2006).

Vic Dana “More”

624 The Crystals “Then He Kissed Me” 1963

“Female pop culture had a particular trashiness all its own. In the early sixties, women who made it to the pop charts were expected to radiate a single overriding characteristic: innocence. Girl groups such as the Shirelles, the Angels, and the Crystals wore starched skirts and impeccably manicured do’s and came in convenient matching sets of three, four, or five…But the world changed. In 1963 the number-one crush of all time, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated, and American girlhood suffered a fierce collective heartbreak…Overnight, the girl groups grew up into swinging, single pop chicks with a wilder, woozier kind of bedroom angst” (Karen Schoemer in Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, 1997). 

The Crystals “Then He Kissed Me”

623 The Crystals “Da Doo Ron Ron (When He Walked Me Home)” 1963

“Production teams tinkered with a formula for mass-market success: Fewer moving parts onstage, lots of well-crafted hooks and cute, carbonated lyrics. The result: the girl-group sound. Not that it was bad; it was delicious. Girl groups offered the record bin equivalent of those heavily frosted Kellogg’s variety packs devoured by sixties pre-teens…Their ranks were drawn almost exclusively from high school girls in urban areas whose other options held little promise” (Gerri Hirshey, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock, 2001). 

The Crystals “Da Doo Ron Ron”

622 James Cleveland (1931-1991) and the Angelic Choir “Peace Be Still” 1963

“Cleveland joined the westward migration of gospel artists…Once in southern California, Cleveland opted not to enter the world of popular music or work to make gospel more contemporary-sounding. Instead, he looked back to a childhood spent singing in the choirs of Thomas Dorsey…He began recording with the First Baptist Church Choir of Nutley, New Jersey, using the massed voices of the choir as a single instrument. In 1963, Cleveland and the choir released Peace Be Still, a landmark live recording that would eventually sell more than a million copies” (Robert Darden, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music, 2004). Listed on the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir “Peace Be Still”

621 James Cleveland (1931-1991) and the Angelic Choir “The Lord Brought Us Out” 1963

“At on point in Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s prophetic The Future of the Race, the two great African-American historians present a short list of the ‘most profound black cultural products’ African Americans have given the modern world. This list includes John Coltrane’s sax solos, James Baldwin’s essay, and ‘James Cleveland’s gut gospels’” (Robert Darden, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music, 2004).

James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir “The Lord Brought Us Out”