Bill Haley was 30 in 1955, a family man with several children and a job as leader of a mildly popular band, the Comets. With his spit curl and paunch he looked like a salesman or, maybe, a disc jockey -- which, indeed, had been one of his previous jobs.

He'd had a couple major chart hits but didn't think much of rock 'n' roll; it was simply the hot thing at the time, something popular with the kids that got the dance halls jumping and paid the bills. Haley's background was in Western swing, a la one of his influences, Bob Wills.

So he may have been destined to be a musical footnote if it weren't for a movie, "Blackboard Jungle," and the song that blasted over the opening credits: "Rock Around the Clock."

Fifty years ago Saturday, "Rock Around the Clock" hit No. 1, a position it held for eight weeks on the Billboard charts. "Rock 'n' roll," an expansive term coined a couple years earlier by DJ Alan Freed, had now been to the pop mountaintop, a position it would never quite relinquish.

Within six months, a trickle of rock 'n' roll hits -- by artists such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Carl Perkins -- would become a flood as the king of them all, Elvis Presley, emerged with a hip-shaking frenzy and changed the course of pop music for good.

Posted by Lawren at July 8, 2005 07:21 AM | Trackbacks (0)

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