Bill Haley

Bill Haley was one of the artists who first carried rock and roll to a mass audience, and his 1955 hit “Rock Around the Clock” is often described as the record that kicked off the rock era. Born William John Clifton Haley on July 6, 1925, in Highland Park, Michigan, he came up through country and Western swing before reshaping his sound into something faster and louder. With his band Bill Haley and His Comets, he scored a run of million-selling hits in the mid-1950s and sold more than 60 million records over his career, earning a place as one of the founding figures of the genre.

From cowboy songs to the Comets

Haley’s early career had nothing to do with rock and roll. A childhood operation left him blind in his left eye, and he is said to have grown his trademark spit curl to draw attention away from it. He started out as a yodeling, cowboy-styled performer, working as a disc jockey and leading Western swing groups, including a band called the Saddlemen. In 1951 he recorded a version of the rhythm-and-blues song “Rocket 88,” and the response convinced him there was an audience among teenagers for big-beat music. He dropped the cowboy image and, in 1952, renamed the group the Comets, a play on the pronunciation of Halley’s Comet.

The first rock and roll hits

In 1953 Haley’s self-written “Crazy Man, Crazy” became one of the first rock and roll records to reach the American pop charts. The following year, after signing with Decca and working with veteran producer Milt Gabler, the band recorded “Rock Around the Clock.” It was tucked away as a B-side and sold modestly at first. Everything changed in 1955, when the song was used over the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle, a film about teenage rebellion. The exposure sent it to number one, where it became the first rock and roll single to top the charts, eventually selling tens of millions of copies and becoming an anthem for a restless younger generation. He followed it with hits like “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “See You Later, Alligator.”

A pioneer overtaken

Haley broke ground in many ways: his Comets were among the first self-contained rock and roll bands, he was the first major American rock act to tour Europe, and he starred in early rock films like Rock Around the Clock. But he was already thirty when his biggest hit landed, a balding, middle-aged man in a plaid jacket, and the arrival of younger, more charismatic stars like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard soon eclipsed him in the United States. He remained hugely popular abroad, especially in Britain, Latin America and Australia, touring into the 1970s and once giving a command performance for Queen Elizabeth II.

Legacy

Haley’s later years were difficult, marked by money troubles and ill health, and he died in 1981 in Harlingen, Texas. His standing as a pioneer endured, though. “Rock Around the Clock” was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame and, decades later, to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, and Haley was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, with the Comets honored as a group in 2012. Whatever the debates about who made the very first rock and roll record, Haley is remembered as the man who put the music on the map.

The band and the sound

Part of Haley’s importance is structural. Bill Haley and His Comets were among the first self-contained rock and roll bands, writing, playing and performing as a unit rather than as a singer backed by session players. Working with Decca producer Milt Gabler, who had shaped earlier jump-blues hits for Louis Jordan, Haley borrowed the energy of rhythm and blues and aimed it squarely at white teenagers. The records crackled with showmanship: a thumping slap bass, a honking saxophone, and on “Rock Around the Clock” a sharp, staccato guitar solo by session player Danny Cedrone that became one of the most copied moments in early rock. The Comets were the first rock and roll band signed to a major label, the first to land a national hit, the first to place a song in a feature film, and among the first to appear on national television, a remarkable run of firsts for a single act.

The record that started a riot

“Rock Around the Clock” did not just sell; it unsettled people. Its appearance in Blackboard Jungle was so charged that the film was condemned by some civic groups, the city of Memphis banned it after it stirred trouble in a local theater, and the song became shorthand for teenage rebellion itself. Its life proved unusually long: it re-entered the charts in the 1970s when it was used as a theme for the nostalgia film American Graffiti and the television series Happy Days, introducing Haley’s signature record to yet another generation of listeners.

Most loved songs

The classics that started it all. Each title opens through the in-site player.

His biggest record helped open the door for everything rock and roll became. If “Rock Around the Clock” or another Haley tune is stuck in your head, type it into the search box above to find it.