On May 4, 1965, San Francisco Giants outfielder Willie Mays hits his 512th career home run to break Mel Ott’s National League record for home runs. Mays would finish his career with 660 home runs, good for third on the all-time list at the time of his retirement.  Find Willie Mays and baseball at the library, on hoopla and in OverDrive (Avalon & Consortium)

 If rock and roll has a lexicon of clichéd lyrics, it probably includes “Baby” and “Maybe”—a rhyming pair made most famous in the smoldering early-rock classic “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” which was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, by the rockabilly legend Gene Vincent on May 4, 1956. It wasn’t the obvious brilliance of “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” but rather the uncanny resemblance between Gene Vincent’s voice and Elvis Presley’s that explains the speed with which Capitol snapped Vincent up and got him into the studio. In fact, when Vincent and his Blue Caps recorded “Be-Bop-A-Lula” on May 4, 1956, it was as a “B” side to a now largely forgotten tune called “Woman Love.” As soon as disk jockeys began “flipping” Vincent’s debut single, however, “Be-Bop-A-Lula” became a smash, rising to #7 on the pop charts and selling more than 2 million copies in its first year of release. Be-Bop-A-Lula on hoopla and Freegal.