Good morning. It is September 9, and we are going back to a Sunday night in 1956.

Nine o'clock. The dishes are done. Somebody in the house has claimed the good chair.

The set warms up, and it is the Ed Sullivan Show. Except Ed is not there.

He had been in a car accident in August, and he was still mending. So the actor Charles Laughton stood in for him that night.

Laughton was in New York. The young man everybody had tuned in for was three thousand miles away, in a studio in Hollywood.

And then there he was. Twenty-one years old, in a checked jacket, grinning at the camera.

Elvis Presley sang "Don't Be Cruel." He sang "Love Me Tender," which nobody had heard yet, because the picture had not opened.

He sang "Ready Teddy," and a piece of "Hound Dog," and the girls in the studio made a sound the microphones could barely hold.

About sixty million people watched him. That was better than eight out of every ten television sets in the country, all on the same young man at once.

Think about that for a moment. Eight sets out of ten. There has never been another night quite like it.

And if you had the radio on that same week, you already knew every word. "Don't Be Cruel" was the number one record in America.

It sat up there with "Hound Dog" on the other side of the same disc, and it stayed at number one all autumn.

Now. Some of you were not thinking about Elvis on September 9 at all.

One year later, in 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act. It was the first civil rights law Congress had passed since the 1870s.

It was written to protect the right to vote, and it was the beginning of a longer argument that filled the years after.

September 9 goes back further than that, too. In 1850, California became the thirty-first state.

For a hundred years after, Californians called September 9 Admission Day and took the day off for it.

Two birthdays this morning. Cliff Robertson was born on September 9, 1923.

He was on television all through the 1950s, and years later he won the Academy Award for "Charly."

And Otis Redding was born on September 9, 1941. He was younger than most of us in this room.

He sang "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," and he recorded it just weeks before the plane went down in December of 1967.

He was twenty-six years old. The record came out after he was gone, and it went to number one.

So that is September 9. A Sunday night with the whole country watching the same thing.

A president signing his name. A state joining the union. And two men born who could sing.

Let us talk about it for a few minutes, and then we will put some music on.

Questions

Where were you the first time you heard Elvis Presley, and who in your family did not care for him?

Sunday nights, everybody watched the same show. What did your house watch, and who got the good chair?

Is there a record you bought for one side and ended up playing the other side more?

Songs

"Don't Be Cruel" — Elvis Presley, 1956

"Hound Dog" — Elvis Presley, 1956

"Love Me Tender" — Elvis Presley, 1956

"(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" — Otis Redding, 1968

"Blue Suede Shoes" — Carl Perkins, 1956

Until tomorrow, take care of yourself.