- In 1956: In the United States Elvis Preseley`s Heartbreak Hotel was Bill Board`s #1 hit for the year.
- In 1956: In the United States Elvis Preseley's Heartbreak Hotel was Bill Board's #1 hit for the year.
- In 1956: It was Elvis's first RCA release. The song went to #1 on the US Pop Charts in April for seven weeks. Elvis made his national TV debut Jan. 28th on The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show.
- In 1956: Rocky Marciano retired as the only undefeated Heavyweight Champion of the world with a perfect record.
- In 1956: New York City vocal group the Teenagers, featuring 13 year old lead singer Frankie Lymon, had a smash hit with "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?". The song hit #1 R&B, #6 US Pop and #1 in the UK.
- In 1956: Popular television shows included "As The World Turns" and "The Price is Right".
- In 1956: The first regularly broadcast nationwide rock and roll show on the radio was Alan Freed's Rock and Roll Dance Party.
- In 1956: Norfolk, VA rockabilly band Gene Vincent & The Blue Caps had a #7 US Pop hit, #16 UK with "Be Bop A Lula" which sold two million copies.
- In 1956: On Philadelphia's afternoon music show, American Bandstand, host Bob Horn was replaced by Dick Clark after Horn was fired due to a drunk driving arrest.
- In 1956: The movie "The Girl Can't Help It" features bombshell Jayne Mansfield along with great rock performances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent.
- In 1956: IBM introduced the first computer with a hard drive, the IBM 305 RAMAC. The machine weighed about one ton, measured about 16 square feet,
- ... and stored about 5 megabytes of data. (A 16GB iPhone stores 16,000 megabytes.)
- The hard drive allowed users to immediately retrieve the data they needed without the use of punch cards.
- In 1956: Movie star Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco.
- In 1956: Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis enjoyed an impromptu jam session at Sun Studios - the Memphis newspaper dubbed it "The Million Dollar Quartet".
>In 1956: Cuban revolutionaries including Fidel Castro landed in Cuba at the start of the Cuban Revolution.- In 1956: On his way to New York City to appear on the Ed Sullivan show, Carl Perkins was seriously injured in a car accident, spending several months in the hospital. Otherwise, he might have been the "next Elvis".
- In 1956: In June Elvis performed "Hound Dog" on the Milton Berle TV show and created a national stir with his suggestive hip movements. Soon he was nick-named "Elvis the Pelvis".
- In 1956: Leiber and Stoller wrote the song "Hound Dog", a big hit for Elvis, in 12 to 15 minutes. In the black parlance of the 50s, a 'hound dog' was a man who "sought a woman to take care of him".
- ... So the song was really the tale of a woman throwing a gigolo out of her house and her life.
- In 1956: The smash hit musical comedy "My Fair Lady" debuted on Broadway. Its original run continued until September of 1962 with a total of 2,717 performances, making it the longest running musical at that time.
- In 1956: 1956 goes down in history as "the year of Elvis". Presley appears 18 times on national TV, has 3 number one singles, two number one albums, and appears in his first movie -
- ... Love Me Tender. He breaks chart records with nine singles in the Hot 100 chart at once. This record would stand until the Beatles break it in 1964.
