July 4th 1964 The Beach Boys score their first #1 hit as "I GJet Around" tops Billboard's Hot 100 chart, where it stays for two weeks.
 

July 5, 1954 — Elvis Presley's first professional recording session is held at Sun Records in Memphis, resulting in his first single, "That's All Right," a cover of a 1946 R&B Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup record. The Presley version is ranked number 113 on the 2010 Rolling Stone magazine list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time".
                2004 — On the 50th anniversary of Elvis' first record, a CD single version is issued in several countries. In England, it enters the singles chart at #3.

July 6, 1957 — Paul McCartney and John Lennon meet for the first time at the Village Fete in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where Lennon's group, the Quarrymen, are performing. When they meet again, Lennon asks McCartney to join his band.

July 8, 1954 — Disc Jockey Dewey Phillips at WHBQ in Memphis becomes the first to play an Elvis Presley record when he spins "That's All Right" on his evening Red Hot & Blue show. The switchboard lights up, so Phillips keeps playing it. When he calls Elvis' home to invite him for an interview, his parents pull him out of a movie theater and drive the nervous lad to the studio.
                1908 — Bandleader Louis Jordan, considered the father of rhythm and blues, is born in Brinkley, Arkansas. His innovative jump blues style and humorous themes make him the most popular R&B artist of the 1940s and help pave the way for rock 'n' roll, influencing Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, and many others. However, rock eclipses him and many other popular R&B artists of the post World War II era.

July 9, 1955 — Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" becomes the first rock 'n' roll record to reach #1 on the Billboard pop chart. It had languished when originally released in 1954, but its choice as the theme for the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle propels it to the top, where it remains for eight weeks, igniting the rock revolution in earnest.

               1956 — Dick Clark takes over as emcee of the Philadelphia teen television dance show Bandstand from longtime host Bob Horn, fired by WFIL-TV after a drunk driving arrest. The show goes nationwide on the ABC network the next year retitled American Bandstand with Clark as host until 1989.

July 10, 1941 — Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, whose "Jelly Roll Blues" in 1915 is considered the first published jazz composition, dies in Los Angeles at age 50 of heart failure. Born in New Orleans, Morton is a ragtime and pre-boogie woogie pianist, composer and self-described Originator of Jazz, Stomps, and Blues. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts him in 1998 in the Early Influence category.
                  1979 — Chuck Berry is sentenced to jail for tax evasion, his last of three imprisonments. He serves four months.
                  1987 — John Hammond, one of the most influential figures in 20th century popular music and scion of the New York Vanderbilt railroad family, dies at 76 after a series of strokes. A civil rights activist and Benny Goodman's brother-in-law, Hammond promoted racial integration in music and produced the important 1938 From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City, which greatly influenced the broader acceptance of blues, jazz, boogie woogie, and gospel music with a bill that included rock 'n' roll forerunners Big Joe Turner, Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons, Meade "Lux" Lewis, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Big Bill Broonzy. He discovered a teenaged Billie Holiday in the 1930s and later at Columbia Records, brought aboard Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen.