December, 2

• 2000 Faith Hill and Tim McGraw perform in a benefit concert for the USS Cole Fund. Country’s super couple add the date at The Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Va., to help the families of the 17 American sailors killed in the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole on Oct. 12.

• 2000 Heather Kinley’s marriage to Mark Mendenhall goes off without a hitch, in front of celebrity guests that include Trace Adkins and Heather’s sister Jennifer and her husband, Adam Hughes.

• 1999 Jay-Z is arrested in Manhattan in connection with the stabbing one day earlier of music executive Lance “Un” Rivera at the city’s Kit Kat Klub.

• 1998 Brunette Shania Twain goes strawberry blonde in the video for her single, “That Don’t Impress Me Much” which debuts on CMT: Country Music Television.

• 1998 Bob Haggart, a jazz artist and arranger who played bass with bands for nearly 70 years, dies in Venice, Fla. He is 84.

• 1998 First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and country singer Garth Brooks light the lights on the Christmas tree in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center.

• 1997 Guitar virtuoso/composer Michael Heges is found dead in Mendocino, Calif. following a car crash that apparently occurred over the weekend.

• 1997 Third Street Jazz and Rock Holding Corp., a Philadelphia record store, files a class-action lawsuit against the six major U.S. record distributors. The suit claims that EMI, Sony, WEA, Universal, Bertelsmann Music Group and PolyGram conspired “to raise, fix, and maintain at artificially high and non-competitive levels the wholesale prices” of CDs.

• 1996 Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz severs a ligament and tears cartilage in his knee after he falls during a concert at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Duritz undergoes orthoscopic surgery during the band’s Christmas break.

• 1995 Actress Roxie Roker, mother of rocker Lennie Kravitz, dies in Los Angeles of an undisclosed illness at age 66. Roker was a star of the long-running TV comedy “The Jeffersons” as well as a stage actress.

• 1994 Rapper and actor Tupac Shakur is found guilty of sexually abusing a woman but acquitted of more serious sex and weapons charges. Two days earlier Shakur had been shot five times during a robbery outside a New York recording studio.

• 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Aaron Copland dies in Westchester, N.Y., at age 90.

• 1986 Jerry Lee Lewis checks into the Betty Ford Clinic to overcome a painkiller addition.

• 1983 MTV airs Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, directed by John Landis, for the first time.

• 1974 No. 1 Billboard Pop Hit: “Kung Fu Fighting,” Carl Douglas. The song originally was to be released as the B-side to “I Want to Give You My Everything.”

• 1963 No. 1 Billboard Pop Hit: “Dominique,” The Singing Nun. The song is written by Sister Luc-Gabrielle and eulogizes the founder of the Dominican order.

• 1960 Bassist Rick Savage of Def Leppard is born. The group’s biggest hit is the 1988 No. 1 song “Love Bites.”