Bill Haley and His Comets
Entry updated 1 May 2024. Tagged: Music.
US rock-n-roll band, founded and fronted by Bill Haley (1925-1981); also listed on releases as Bill Haley and The Comets and Bill Haley's Comets. Haley's former group The Saddlemen performed an early (July 1951) cover version of what many historians of popular music consider the first true rock 'n' roll song, "Rocket 88" (1951) by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (actually Brenston with Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm) – the title refers to the Oldsmobile car, not a Spaceship – but it was the global success of the Comets' "Rock Around the Clock" (1954) that launched rock as a popular-cultural idiom. In fact, and notwithstanding its subsequent prodigious success, "Rock Around the Clock" was first released only as the B-side to a science-fictional single, "Thirteen Women (and Only One Man in Town)" (1954), a jaunty post-nuclear Holocaust song (see Atomic Platters) about the erotic adventures of the only male to survive an H-bomb attack. [AR]
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