The 7th Day of July, 1777-- King Diamond
“By May the 10th, Richmond had fell” - The Band, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”
Maybe not popular music as the OP had in mind, but a pretty well-known song in folk and bluegrass circles, and done by Donovan and Bob Dylan, is “The Cuckoo.”
The cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies
But she never sings cuckoo 'til the fourth day of July
With numerous variations typical of folk music.
October 31st that is my date of birth
Beastie Boys, The New Style
“First of May” - Bee Gees
I could have sworn that The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald mentioned the date but I don’t see it in the lyrics. Hmm.
In the dark of the moon on the 6th of June with a Kenworth haulin’ logs.
Convoy, CW McCall.
It was the dark of the moon on the sixth of June
Convoy, C.W. McCall
Do parodies count? Because here’s a two-fer:
*Oh buy the corned beef if you must,
The pickled herring you can trust,
And the lox puts you in orbit AOK.
But that big hunk of liverwurst
Has been there since October First,
And today is the Twenty-Third of May.*
– Allen Sherman, “Shticks Of One Kind And Half A Dozen Of The Other”
Fairfield Four (why are there five of them) cite “the twenty-fifth day of December” in “When was Jesus Born”.
Tom Paxton’s “The Subway Song” has “You go in one end in the middle of June and come out on the fourth of July.”
“1915, on Christmas Day” … Christmas, 1915, Celtic Thunder
1940 Xmas evening with a full moon over town
– Grateful Dead, “Stagger Lee”
Irish songs:
Jan 30: Cruachan - Bloody Sunday: “Remember well the 30th of January”
June 23: Spancil Hill. Covered by a lot of people.
July 12 (observed date for Battle of the Boyne): Lots, e.g. Loyalist versions (The Sash/12th Day of July)
And of course a lot of songs reference the Easter Rising, but it was 7 days so it’s hard to nail down.
Rufus Wainwright - April Fools
(lyric page alludes to, but narrowly avoids mentioning Valentines Day.)
Also, the original incarnation of Jefferson Starship had a song called Hijack that mentions a date…
Deodato has a tune named September 13, but it’s an instrumental…
August 8, by NOFX commemorating the death (on Aug. 9 :smack: ) of Jerry Garcia.
February 3, death of Buddy Holly, if dates certain but unspecified are allowed. (“February made me shiver … Something touched me deep inside the day the music died”)
It’s cool. In the song mentioned in post #2, Brad says “April 26, 1992.”
We can check off May 24 thanks to the Go-Betweens song “Bye Bye Pride.” A pretty catchy little band, the Go-Betweens.
You won’t be able to squeeze it onto the calendar but…
It was April the forty first.
Being a quadruple leap year.
Wet Dreams - Kip Addotta