Bill Haley Jr. & The Comets

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 If  only for the impact of “Rock Around the Clock”,  Bill Haley would  deserve a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (He was inducted in  1987)!  Yet his impact in the early days of Rock and Roll went  well beyond that milestone!  Two years earlier he’d put out “Crazy, Man,  Crazy” an original amalgam of country and R&B that arguably became  the first rock and roll record to register on Billboard’s pop chart!  For  most of the Fifties, Bill Haley was a presence on the record charts,  and he appeared in several rock and roll movies aimed at teenagers.  It  is estimated that Bill Haley and His Comets have sold 60 million records  worldwide. 

How important was “Rock Around the Clock”?
“Before  it became a hit in summer 1955 - more than a year after it was recorded  - Rock ‘n’ Roll was virtually an underground movement, something kids  listened to on the sly,” wrote journalist Alex Frazer-Harrison. “This  changed after ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ The music was everywhere!”  Bill  Haley has been called “The Father of Rock and Roll” and “Rock ‘n’  Roll’s first star!”  “We premiered it,” he told Rolling Stone in 1967.  “We put country & western together with rhythm & blues, and that  was rock.  The first three years were ours, all ours, till [Elvis]  Presley came along.”  Bill Haley even helped give Rock and Roll its  name!  Bill Haley penned a song called “Rock-A-Beatin’ Boogie” - whose  chorus went “Rock, rock, rock everybody/Roll, roll, roll everybody” -  that was recorded by the Treniers in 1953 and adopted by disc jockey  Alan Freed on his Cleveland-based Moondog radio show!

Now  his Son, Bill Haley Jr. & The Comets, recapture the heyday of his  famous father and The Comets and carry on the tradition his father  started!