Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.



Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

Unfortunately, there aren't many good books about Bill Haley available. There are two biographies which are long out of print -- one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley's sons. Another of Haley's sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. I relied on volume one of Fuchs' book for this post -- it's very good on the facts -- but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can't wholly recommend it.

This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the Jodimars track I excerpt here. Unfortunately it doesn't contain his great late-fifties singles "Lean Jean" and "Skinny Minnie", or the 1960s recordings I excerpt here (which are not in print anywhere that I know of) but it has everything else you could want.

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Transcript

A quick content note for this one – it contains non-explicit mention of infant death, alcoholism, and brain tumours, as well as a quote which uses a word which, while not a slur, is now no longer accepted as a polite term for black people in the way that it was at the time of the quote.

Sometimes, the very worst thing that can happen to a musician is for them to have a big hit. A musician who has been doing fine, getting moderate sized hits and making a decent living, suddenly finds themselves selling tens of millions of records. It's what everyone wants, and it's what they've been working up to for their whole career, but what happens then? Is it a fluke? Are they ever going to have another hit as big as the first? How do they top that?

Those problems can be bad enough if your big hit is just a normal big hit. Now imagine that your big hit becomes a marker for a whole generation, that it inspires a musical trend that lasts decades, that it causes actual rioting. Imagine that it's a record that literally everyone in the Western Hemisphere knows, that sixty-five years and counting after its release is still instantly recognisable. When your big hit is *that* big, where do you go from there? What *can* you do next?

For a while, before leaving Essex Records, Bill Haley had wanted to record a song called "Rock Around the Clock". It had been passed to him by Jimmy Myers, one of the song's two credited writers, but for some reason Dave Miller, Haley's producer, didn't want Haley to record it -- to the extent that Haley claimed that a couple of times he'd brought the sheet music into the studio and Miller had ripped it up rather than let him record the song.

According to John Swenson's biography of Haley, Miller and Myers knew each other and didn't get on, which might be the case, but it might also just be as simple as "Rock Around the Clock" being very derivative. In particular, the lyrics owed more than a little to Wynonie Harris' "Around the Clock Blues". Indeed, even the title "Rock Around the Clock" had already been used, four years earlier, by Hal Singer:

[excerpt "Rock Around the Clock": Hal Singer and Orchestra]

So, "Rock Around the Clock" was an absolutely generic song for its time, and whatever Dave Miller's reasons for not allowing Haley to record it, it wasn't like he was missing out on anything special, was it?

After "Rock the Joint" and "Crazy Man Crazy", Bill Haley was in a position to make a real breakthrough