TODAY IN HISTORY : 1964 “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals tops the U.S. pop charts" & 2005 Katie Couric makes network anchor debut

Music

1964
“House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals tops the U.S. pop charts"

the Animals

        To chart-topping American acts like Steve Lawrence (“Go Away Little Girl”) and Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs (“Sugar Shack”), 1963 had been a year filled with promise. 

And then came the Beatles, whose dramatic arrival in January 1964 clearly posed a commercial threat. By the middle of 1964, with Louis Armstrong (“Hello Dolly”) and Dean Martin (“Everybody Loves Somebody”) both having earned #1 pop hits, it may have seemed that the worst was over. But then came another blow in the form of the Animals, whose signature hit, “House of The Rising Sun,” reached #1 on the U.S. pop charts on this day in 1964. Steeped in a musical idiom very different from “She Loves You” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “House of The Rising Sun” hinted at an entirely new line of attack from the forces of the British Invasion.


While the Beatles traced their roots to early rock and roll, Eric Burdon, Alan Price and the other founding members of the Animals traced theirs to American R&B and blues—the same musical influences then shaping future members of the Rolling Stones, Cream and Led Zeppelin. Formed in their native Newcastle in 1962, the Animals got their big break playing as the opening act for Chuck Berry on his 1964 tour of England. While other bands tended to close their acts with hard-charging rock-and-roll numbers, the Animals made the idiosyncratic choice of closing theirs with a traditional song from the American south, reworked into a folk/blues/rock amalgam featuring Burdon’s growling lead vocal and Price’s pulsating organ line on the Vox Continental. “We were looking for a song that would grab people’s attention,” Burdon would later say, and it worked. Producer Mickie Most heard the Animals in 1964 and quickly arranged a recording contract. “House of The Rising Sun” was recorded in just 15 minutes in May 1964 and went on to top both the American and British pop charts just four months later.

While some have claimed that the Animals’ rendition of “House of The Rising Sun” was lifted fairly directly from the version Bob Dylan recorded for his 1962 debut album, Dylan himself appears to have lifted his from fellow Greenwich Village folkie Dave Van Ronk. In any event, it was the Animals’ version that topped the pop charts on this day in 1964 and made Dylan himself “jump out of his car seat” with enthusiasm when he first heard it on the radio.

Hollywood

2005

Katie Couric makes network anchor debut

On this day in 2005, Katie Couric makes headlines–and TV history–with her highly publicized debut as the first female solo anchor of a weekday network evening news broadcast, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.

 Couric, who served as co-anchor of The Today Show from 1991 to 2006, replaced Dan Rather, who anchored CBS Evening News from 1981 until his retirement on March 9, 2005, in the aftermath of a controversial story about the military record of President George W. 
Bush. (Bob Schieffer served as interim anchor between Rather’s departure and Couric’s debut.) Barbara Walters was the first woman to co-anchor the network evening news, when she was paired up with Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News from 1976 to 1978.

Couric was born on January 7, 1957, in Arlington, Virginia, and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979. 

That same year, she began her career in journalism as a desk assistant at ABC News in Washington, D.C. During the 1980s, she was a TV reporter in Miami and Washington, eventually becoming a Pentagon correspondent for NBC. On April 5, 1991, Couric became the permanent co-host, alongside Bryant Gumbel, of The Today Show, where she was known for her perky on-air personality as well as her hard-hitting interview style with politicians and other newsmakers. 

On April 5, 2006, after months of speculation in the media, Couric announced she would leave Today. That same day, CBS officially confirmed that Couric would become the anchor and managing editor of CBS Evening News. Her salary of $15 million per year–which made her TV’s highest-paid news anchor–reportedly remained the same. Couric said farewell to Today Show viewers on May 31, 2006. Meredith Vieira, a former co-host of Walters’ daytime chat fest The View, replaced Couric on Today starting in September 2006.


Couric’s heavily hyped September 5, 2005, debut on the CBS Evening News attracted large numbers of viewers, but the show’s ratings later dropped below those of competitors NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson. Some critics charged that Couric didn’t have the hard-news experience and gravitas of her CBS predecessors Rather and Walter .