Friday 13 th  2026 CDST USA

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Sweeper From Evelyn Laurie Records 

Origins and Founders

Laurie Records was founded in March 1958 by Robert and Gene Schwartz and Allan I. Sussel, with arranger Eliot Greenberg joining as a minority partner in the early 1960s. The label’s name came from Sussel’s daughter, Laura “Laurie” Sue Sussel. Sussel had previously run Jamie Records, and Laurie became his more successful second act.

🎵 Breakthrough Artists and Sound

Laurie quickly carved out a niche in the late‑1950s/early‑1960s New York pop scene. Its roster included:

• Dion & The Belmonts — the label’s first major hitmakers with “I Wonder Why” (1958).

• The Chiffons — girl‑group staples with a polished Brill Building sound.

• The Mystics, The Jarmels, Bobby Goldsboro, and The Royal Guardsmen.

• Laurie also served as the U.S. outlet for Gerry & The Pacemakers, linking the label to the British Invasion.

A key creative force was songwriter Ernie Maresca, who penned several of Dion’s biggest hits and became part of the label’s internal engine.

🏢 Business Evolution and Subsidiaries

Laurie operated several subsidiary labels—Rust Records, Legrand Records, and others—allowing it to diversify its catalog and distribution footprint. The company maintained steady output through the 1960s and 1970s, typically anchored by one major act at a time.

By the early 1980s, Laurie rebranded as 3C Records, and its master recordings eventually came under the Capitol Records division of Universal Music Group.

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Legends Remembered & Celebrated — Gold Star Oldies  Tributes

March 14, 1958 — The Recording Industry Association of America, established in 1952, awards its first official Gold Record to Perry Como for the sale of 500,000 copies of “Catch A Falling Star." (Previously, gold records were issued occasionally to hit performers by their record companies.)
                      1964 — Billboard magazine reports that Beatles records make up 60 per cent of all singles sold.
 

March 15, 1929 — Alabama-born blues pianist Clarence "Pinetop" Smith is shot and killed in a Chicago dance hall at age 24. His influential 1928 hit "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie" on the Vocalion label is the first record to use the term that comes to identify the rolling piano style that prefigures rock 'n' roll. Tommy Dorsey's swing band covers the tune in 1938 as "Boogie Woogie" and it becomes his most famous instrumental record, reaching #3 in the U.S. Billboard chart — reappearing at the height of the boogie woogie craze in 1944 at #5 and again in 1945 at #4.
                       1945 — Billboard publishes its first album chart. The King Cole Trio is #1. The list has only five positions, but eventually grows to 200 by 1967, where it remains today.
                      1954 — The Chords record "Sh-Boom," the first Top 10 pop hit by an R&B vocal group.

March 16, 1968 — Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay" reaches #1 and remains on top for four weeks, the first posthumous #1 hit for a performer. He had died in a plane crash three months earlier.
                      1970 — Motown singer Tammi Terrell, known for a string of hit duets with Marvin Gaye, dies of a brain tumor at age 24.

March 17, 1956 — Carl Perkins (below) makes his first television appearance, singing his rockabilly hit "Blue Suede Shoes" on the country music program The Ozark Jubilee.
 
                      1958 — The first "Greatest Hits" album compilation is released, a Johnny Mathis LP on Columbia. It is very popular and the format catches on quickly. The disc stays on the Billboard album chart for more than nine years, a record unbroken until Pink Floyd's 1973 release, "Dark Side Of The Moon," which enjoyed more than 18 years on the list.

March 18, 1911 — "Alexander's Ragtime Band" by Irving Berlin is published. The pseudo-ragtime composition sells millions of copies of sheet music and popularizes a heretofore unheralded syncopated black piano style that prefigures stride piano, boogie-woogie, jazz, R&B, and rock 'n' roll. Berlin later says, "The melody...started the heels and shoulders of all America and a good section of Europe to rocking."


1958 — Jerry Lee Lewis becomes the first performer to sing three songs on an episode of ABC-TV's American Bandstand. He actually sings, not lip-syncs as the show's guest acts normally did.



March 19, 1957 — Elvis Presley buys the 13.8 acre Graceland estate on the outskirts of Memphis for $102,500 from the daughter of the prominent local surgeon who had a mansion built on it in 1939. Named for the seller's great aunt Grace, the estate rivals the White House in Washington, D.C., in the number for tourist visits.

Sources:
Eight Days a Week (Ron Smith)
On This Day in Black Music History (Jay Warner)
Chronology of American Popular Music, 1900-2000 (Frank Hoffman)

Birthdays Singers and Song Writers 

Early Beatles News

Visual Archive