In the music
- Legendary jazz musician Duke Ellington dies aged 74. Regarded as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, we wrote over 1,000 pieces of work during his career and won 11 Grammies.
- In Trinidad Lord Shorty, widely known as the Father Of Soca, experiments with altering the rhythm of calypso. His Endless Vibrations is the first soca LP and the first major soca hit worldwide.
- The industry-standard turntable, the Technics SL-1200 was first released.
- The first original 7-inch single to include extended mixes began to appear in the US.
- Barry White releases Can't Get Enough Of Your Love Babe taken from his third album Can't Get Enough and it's an instant smash hitting No 1 in the US RnB and Pop Charts.
- In Jamaica, after hearing some of King Tubby's early dub experiments, Lee 'Scratch' Perry rapidly puts out a number of dub releases and opens his own studio, Black Ark. It's here that he records and produces some of the early, seminal Bob Marley tracks.