"Rock Around the Clock"

Haley, Bill and His Comets

album cover

The Dawn of the Rock Era

The song many consider the one to permanently establish "rock and roll" in American culture began as a B side. After Bill Haley and His Comets were signed to Decca in 1954, producer Milt Gabler convinced Haley to release a futuristic little song called "Thirteen Women" as a first single. "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" was an afterthought, recorded hurriedly at the end of the session. Neither track electrified a huge audience ("Rock Around the Clock" peaked then at twenty-three), and Haley went on to record other singles—including a spirited version of Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll."

Almost a year later, the film star Glenn Ford was working on a teen movie called Blackboard Jungle. The producers asked if anyone knew a good song to open the film. Ford brought in a stack of 45-RPM singles owned by his son, Peter, including Haley's minor hit. The producers liked its brash, buoyant feel, and grabbed it immediately. After the film's premiere, "Rock Around the Clock" went berserk. It became the first rock and roll song to top the Billboard charts, and it stayed at number 1 for eight weeks in the summer of 1955. And it was one of the first rock songs to incite riots: In both the U.S. and England, there was chaos among teenagers in theaters when the song played before the film started. Since then, Haley's little tune has figured prominently in all kinds of pop-culture artifacts—notably the film American Graffiti and the TV series Happy Days, renewing its popularity over several generations.

Because the song has so much rhythm and blues in it, Haley has been lumped in with Pat Boone and others as just another white appropriator of African American styles. The comparison has merit (Haley was crazy for R&B), but is unfair in one respect: Unlike Boone, who diluted every rhythm, Haley and his hard-charging crew understood the music well enough to execute it respectfully, right down to the careening solos and whomping stop-time breaks. Some credit for this goes to producer Gabler, who'd worked with Louis Jordan and others, and communicated to the Comets the fine points of the danceable backbeat. They obviously learned quickly, burning this high-spirited jump blues—recorded before Elvis Presley ever registered a chart hit—into the very source code of rock and roll.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1955, Decca
Appears On: Rock Around the Clock
Next Stop: Jerry Lee Lewis: Twenty-five All-Time Greatest Sun Recordings
After That: Eddie Cochran: Somethin' Else! The Fine-Lookin' Hits of . . .
Book Pages: 335–336

Buy this Recording

Share this page: