The Sony Walkman went on sale for the first time in 1979. Kurt Russell played Elvis in a TV movie. Sweeney Todd won the Tony Award as the year's best musical; and moviegoers looking for music had their choice of The Ramones (Rock 'n' Roll High School), Bette Midler (The Rose), or Kermit the Frog (The Muppet Movie).

But perhaps the best way to sum up the pop music landscape of 1979 is this: Ethel Merman made a disco album. Merman sang songs by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin, and she sang them exactly the way she'd been singing them for 50 years; the disco band was laid in behind her vocals by the producers after she'd finished. Even if Merman wasn't making many attempts to actually sing in a modern style, the fact that the 71-year-old queen of Broadway was attaching her name to disco was a sign of how dominant the genre was. But when your grandmother's favorite singer was trying to cash in on that dominance, you began to sense that there was a backlash on the way. And indeed there was.

Take a look at the #1 pop hits for the first half of the year, and they're almost all disco. The chart was filled with songs from the genre's dominant figures—The Bee Gees ("Tragedy"), Gloria Gaynor ("I Will Survive"), Donna Summer ("Hot Stuff" and "Bad Girls"), Chic ("Le Freak" and "Good Times")—and its one-hit wonders—Amii Stewart ("Knock on Wood"), Anita Ward ("Ring My Bell"). Even the songs by acts we don't really think of as disco groups were leaning in that direction, from Blondie's "Heart of Glass" to The Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool Believes."

Move over to the R&B charts and, not too surprisingly, it's more of the same. The year's R&B chart-toppers included Cheryl Lynn ("Got to Be Real"), McFadden & Whitehead ("Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now"), Kool & the Gang ("Ladies' Night"), and Sister Sledge ("We Are Family").

But there were rumblings, both among music fans and in the radio industry, that disco was musically boring and too flashy, and wouldn't it be nice to have some good old fashioned rock songs on the radio again? It wasn't hard to see signs of racism and homophobia in at least some of those rumblings. Most of disco's biggest stars were people of color, and the music had gotten its start in gay dance clubs. Peter Shapiro's Turn the Beat Around (e-book | print) explores the history of the rise and fall of disco.

Those rumblings became a roar on July 12, when the Chicago White Sox hosted "Disco Demolition Night" at Comiskey Park. Sponsored by a local radio station where the hosts had been very vocal about their dislike of disco, the event invited fans to bring their disco records to the stadium, so that they could be destroyed in a ceremony between the games of a doubleheader.

For decades, the White Sox had a history of attention-grabbing publicity stunts, but this one backfired. The stadium was packed, with estimates as high as 50,000 people in a stadium with an official capacity of about 45,000. When the crate of records was blown up between games, fans began throwing records onto the field like Frisbees, and several thousand people charged onto the field, leaving it in such bad shape that the White Sox were forced to forfeit the second game of the doubleheader.

Disco Demolition Night may not have caused the demise of disco; it's more likely that it just picked up on, and maybe accelerated, a shift in the national mood. But whatever the cause, the decline of disco was swift. The week of the stunt, the top six songs on the pop charts were all disco; two months later, there was no disco in the top ten, and the #1 song was a good old fashioned rock song—The Knack's "My Sharona," which was the year's best-selling record.

Disco didn't disappear entirely, of course; Donna Summer would be back with her third #1 hit of the year, "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)," a duet with Barbra Streisand (almost as unlikely a disco queen as Ethel Merman). But the last few months of the year were dominated by ballads from Robert John ("Sad Eyes"), The Commodores ("Still"), and Styx ("Babe"); a foot-stomping rocker from The Eagles ("Heartache Tonight"); and the more sedate pop-rock of Rupert Holmes ("Escape (The Pina Colada Song)").

There were corners of the musical world that weren't paying much attention to the decline of disco. Billboard gave its "Easy Listening" chart a new name, "Adult Contemporary," and you could find all manner of mellow there. Al Stewart's "Time Passages" offered jazzy mellow; Maxine Nightingale's "Lead Me On" was sultry mellow; J. D. Souther's "You're Only Lonely" brought country-rock mellow; and Engelbert Humperdinck ("This Moment in Time"), as he had so often done, somehow managed to be bombastically mellow.

Jazz fans were listening to new music from Anthony Braxton (Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979), Weather Report (8:30), Pat Metheny (American Garage), and Art Pepper (Straight Life).

In the classical world, the minimalist movement was at its peak with Steve Reich's Octet (later revised and re-named "Eight Lines") and Philip Glass's Mad Rush; other composers were exploring unusually large orchestras—George Crumb's Star-Child had so many musicians that a performance required four conductors—and durations—Morton Feldman's String Quartet lasted for 75 minutes. (Feldman was just getting started; he later wrote a quartet that was six hours long).

The musical world bid sad farewells in 1979 to jazz greats Charles Mingus and Stan Kenton, film composers Nino Rota and Dmitri Tiomkin, bluegrass guitarist Lester Flatt, symphonist Roy Harris, and R&B singers Donny Hathaway and Minnie Riperton, both only in their early 30s.