Invasive Musical Species: The British Take on the Black American Sound

On December 10, 1963, a Maryland teenager named Marsha Albert sat glued to her television as Walter Cronkite introduced America to four mop-topped young men from Liverpool—the Beatles. The brief CBS News segment left her captivated. “Why can’t we have music like that here in America?” she wrote in a letter to her local radio station, WWDC.