Posted on 05/10/2005 3:34:17 PM PDT by kellynla
Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets is released. A year later, the song became the first rock and roll number to top the charts.
When the song was first released, it barely made the pop charts, spending only one week at No. 23. A year later, though, it became a hit after producer James Myers sent copies of the song to dozens of Hollywood producers and suggested they use it in a movie. The producers of Blackboard Jungle (1955), a controversial film about juvenile delinquency, selected the song as the movie's opening music. After the movie opened, sales of "Rock Around the Clock" skyrocketed, selling six million copies by the end of 1955. The song climbed to the top of the charts in July 1955, becoming the first rock and roll song to reach No. 1.
Although rock and roll had been around since the late 1940s, the sound didn't penetrate into the white American mainstream until Haley drew attention to the style, paving the way for future rock and roll artists of all races. He made his first record, Candy Kisses, when he was 18 and spent four years on the road with a series of country-western bands. He worked as a disc jockey under the name "The Ramblin' Yodeler" and performed regularly on the radio with his band the Four Aces of Western Swing, but the band's songs never hit it big.
In the early 1950s, Haley changed direction and began playing the new, upbeat style that came to be known as rock and roll. The group recorded a cover of Jimmy Preston's "Rock the Joint," which sold 75,000 copies. The following year, Haley's original "Crazy Man, Crazy" became the first rock and roll record to make the Billboard Top 10. In addition to being the theme song for The Blackboard Jungle, his song "Rock Around the Clock" was also featured on the television dance show American Bandstand.
By the mid-1950s, Haley was one of the world's most popular performers, and he racked up 12 Top 40 hits in 1955-56, including "See You Later, Alligator." His last Top 40 hit was "Skinny Minnie," recorded in 1958, but throughout the 1970s Haley and his band traveled with the "Rock 'n' Roll Revival" show, documented in the 1973 film Let the Good Times Roll. He had sold an estimated 60 million records by the time he died of a heart attack in 1981. Five years later, he became one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
I saw the film "Rock Around the Clock" when it came out in 1956. Some places banned it after teens started rioting in the theaters.
(I was a little kid at the time; that spit curl of his creeped me out for some reason...)
I thought folks would get a kick out of this post...
something light on a very serious day...
I was raised in Memphis and eventhough Elvis was king, I was a Jerry Lee Lewis fan and loved the most powerful station in Memphis and the first black owned radio station in America, WDIA! LOL
Where I learned about B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Little Milton, Rufus Thomas and many, many more...
Semper Fi,
Kelly
Love that song.
it's a Classic...
Jump blues and hepped up jazz had been around, even Texas Swing but there was no "rock and roll" in the 1940s. Close but not the magic formula. Too gentle. Too big of bands.
The words "rock and roll" had been in use. So what. It is a sexual expression.
As we get into 1951, there are some cuts that could indeed be called rock and roll.
Today's radio music, by the way, is not rock and roll (certainly no roll), and largely isn't even rock.
And rap isn't the new rock. It could be the new scat jazz, doo wop, blues, or poetry. But it ain't rock and roll.
I just saw BB King with Bobby Blue Bland opening for him two weeks ago. They've still got it.
where did you see them?
I remember as a teenager going down to Beale St. and listening from the streeet to BB and Little Milton and Rufus Thomas...those were the BEST! LOL
and to think I was there, right in the middle of the birth of Rock & Roll!
Weegee... have you lost your mind?!?!?!
"But it ain't rock and roll."
Well, you are starting to come to your senses!
Sighs...smile.
I've never gotten over Buddy Holly...
Good thread...thanks for the AM cheer!!
Wasn't rock called "Bop" back then?
BTW, I was born just a few months before this became number one. I don't remember it though...
"Wasn't rock called "Bop" back then?"
I don't recall...
I was born in '48 so I reeeeely didn't get into music until the late fifties and rock & roll was well on it's way...
i was born in 1949 and was hooked on music as long as i can recall. early into blues, big band and swing then rockabilly came along and all else paled until the beatles.
then the sonics and syndicate of sound gave me a taste of garage and hendrix was my taste of early heavy guitar psychedalia. been jammin on psych and garage ever since. but the rockabilly sound is as good as it gets. i tell people if they can listen to johnny horton doing hard wood honky tonk floor and not tap your feet, then call in a coroner.
hail hail rock and roll.
Actually there were attempts to push "rock and roll" out the door as a fad, rolling along with the hula-hoop.
There were definite efforts to replace it with bop jazz, folk music, and calypso music. All prominent music forms of radical leftists and drug users. Louis Farakhan got his start back then as Calypso Louie/Louis, Harry Belafonte has showed his pinko stripe, so did numerous folk singers. Rock and roll of the 1950s was completely devoid of politics.
Older people seemed to want to shove it out of the arena for more "mature" music even though the first rock and roll songs were party records for adults at home or bars.
Well, it DID have an evil jungle beat! 8^>
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