July 25, 1956 — Composer Mike Stoller, half of the famous Lieber-Stoller songwriting team, survives the collision between the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria and the Swedish liner Stockholm, which kills 52 people and sinks the Italian boat. When Stoller (photo, right) is safely off the Italian boat, partner Jerry Leiber (photo, left) greets him on the dock and reveals that they have a hit with "Hound Dog." Stoller asks, "Big Mama Thornton?" (who recorded the original version in 1953). "No," Leiber replies, "Some white kid named Elvis Presley."

July 27, 1976 — Tina Turner files for divorce from her husband Ike after 16 years of marriage. It is granted two years later. In her 1986 autobiography, I, Tina, she claims Ike was physically abusive to her. She goes on to a successful solo career while he dies of a cocaine overdose in 2007.
 

July 28, 1957 — Jerry Lee Lewis makes his U.S. national TV debut on NBC-TV's Steve Allen Show. The piano survives.



July 29, 1916 — Pioneering electric guitarist Charlie Christian is born in Dallas, Texas. Playing an amplified Gibson acoustic guitar with Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, and others, he helps create the style of jazz he names bebop and inspires untold numbers of jazz, blues, and rock guitar players with his heavy, front-loaded attack underlining an aggressive beat. He dies of tuberculosis in 1942 at age 25 after years of abusing his body with alcohol, lack of sleep, and promiscuous behavior.
                   1959 — The Drifters record the samba-styled "Dance With Me" (#2 R&B, #15 pop), a composition by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Lewis Lebish that heralds the Latin influence on future Drifters hits and those by others.

July 30, 1954 — Elvis Presley makes his first professional appearance. Billed in ads as "Ellis Presley," he is the opening act of a country music concert starring Slim Whitman at a park in his hometown, Memphis, Tennessee. As he sings tunes from his just-released first record, his nervous leg shakes incite screams and applause from teenaged girls in the audience.

July 31, 1959 — English rocker Cliff Richard charts his first U.K. #1 hit with "Living Doll," which becomes Britain's top-selling single of 1959.
                  2003 — The Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee — the early recording home to Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Roy Orbison — becomes a national historic landmark one day after the death of founder Sam Phillips at age 80. Interior Secretary Gale Norton says, “You cannot tell the story of America in the 1950s without the history of rock ’n’ roll, and you cannot tell the story of rock ’n’ roll without Sam Phillips and Sun Records