January 5 – Renato Carosone and his band start their American tour in Cuba.
January 6 – Elvis Presley makes final appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.
January 16 – The Cavern Club opens in Liverpool, England
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel name themselves Tom and Jerry and begin their recording career, signing with Sid Prosen of Big Records. Their first single, “Hey, Schoolgirl”, backed with “Dancin’ Wild”, hit #49 on the Billboard pop charts. Garfunkel was Tom Graph (so called because he like to write the pop charts out on graph paper) and Simon was Jerry Landis, a pseudonym he used during his early 1960s solo recordings. They toured for eighteen months before retiring to become college students and then reforming in 1963 as Simon and Garfunkel.
February 8 – Bo Diddley records his songs “Hey Bo Diddley” and “Mona” (aka “I Need You Baby”).
March – Chicago’s Cardinal Stritch bans all rock and roll and rhythm and blues music from Catholic-run schools, saying that “its rhythms encourage young people to behave in a hedonistic manner.”
March 19 – Elvis Presley purchases a mansion in Memphis, Tennessee and calls it Graceland.