THE ARTS | Reshaping ideas, expressing identity
29 July 2008
Profile: Bill Haley and “Rock Around the Clock”
A key rock 'n' roll popularizer
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
Bill Haley would seem an unlikely candidate for the first big rock ’n’ roll star, but in the early 1950s this leader of obscure western swing groups was seeking a style that would capture the enthusiasm of the growing audience of young listeners and dancers. He dropped his cowboy image, changed the name of his accompanying group to the Comets, and in 1953 wrote and recorded a song, “Crazy, Man, Crazy,” that offered a reasonable emulation of dance-oriented black rhythm & blues music. The record rose as high as Number 12 on the pop charts.
Bill Haley and the Comets recorded cover versions of rhythm & blues hits in the mid-1950s, notably “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” and “See You Later, Alligator.” But they attained their unique status in pop music history when “Rock Around the Clock” became, in 1955, the first rock ’n’ roll record to be a Number One pop hit. It stayed in the top spot for eight consecutive weeks during the summer of 1955 and eventually sold over 22 million copies worldwide.
“Rock Around the Clock” was actually recorded in 1954 and was not a big hit when first released. But the record was prominently featured in the opening credits of the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle and quickly achieved massive popularity. Bill Haley’s claim to have “invented” rock ’n’ roll deserves as little credibility as Paul Whiteman’s claim a generation earlier to be the “King of Jazz.” But Haley proved to be an important popularizer of previously marginalized musical sounds and ideas, and he paved the way for the widespread acceptance of more creative artists.
“Rock Around the Clock” demonstrated the unprecedented success that a white group with a country background could achieve playing a 12-bar blues song driven by the sounds of electric guitar, bass, and drums. It proved a portent of the enormous changes that were about to overtake American popular music and opened the floodgates for artists like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Buddy Holly. “Rock Around the Clock” also helped prepare a receptive mass audience for the sounds of rhythm & blues, and for black artists building on the rhythm & blues tradition. While the song was still at the top of the pop chart in 1955, Chuck Berry’s trailblazing “Maybellene” made its appearance on the same chart, and before long was itself in the Top 10.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
