Sonny Dae and his Knights originally cut the song, but it flopped. The recording that would make the song famous was by a Pennsylvania cowboy music act that was going through rites of conversion. The leader of the group, Bill Haley (1925-1981), had just changed his group’s name in 1952 to the Comets from the Saddlemen. His sense of the changing times also extended to his music, for the group was now recording covers of African-American “rhythm & blues,” for example, Jackie Brentson’s “Rocket 88” (also chosen, no doubt, for its Space Age title).
When the Comets first released “Rock Around the Clock” in 1954, it only made a modest entry on the hit parades. After it was included as the title music for Blackboard Jungle a year later, a jarring and highly successful film about juvenile delinquency in the inner city schools, the song was re-released…and the rest is history. It stayed for weeks as number one on the pop charts, and went on to sell an estimated 25 million copies. Even John Lennon testified to the power of the song—he said that hearing it motivated him to become a musician.
In the ensuing half a century, we have seen many variations on the popular style that is still called rock. After the first “rock’n’roll” craze of the mid to late 1950s, when Elvis reigned as King and kids danced their parents’ jitterbug to the rock’n’roll beat, a new wave that came to be called just “rock” entered onto the music scene with the so-called “British Invasion” of the mid-1960s, with The Beatles and Rolling Stones leading the way with both stylistic continuities and innovations, including the marriage of classical musical elements into rock, and the crazy, free-for-all dancing that has come to be associated with modern rock. Then came “heavy metal” in the late 1960s and 1970s, followed by punk, new wave, grunge, and so-called “alternative,” all recognized as variants of some underlying stylistic continuum.
“Rock” is a popular
musical style…
that explodes onto the North American scene in the economically and culturally
heady years following World War II."
Along the way, rock has been challenged, and paralleled, by neighboring styles of pop, including soul, funk, disco, reggae, techno, and most recently, hip-hop and even “world music.” Strangely, perhaps, the term “rock” and its associated style seems to have held on as the still-dominant popular musical style, at least of the Western world, to the present.
Now we can recall The Coasters and the search for rock’s real origins. The cauldron out of which rock’n’roll emerged was the mixture of Old World (European, African, other) and New World musical cultures that came together in the middle to later 19th century in the United States, and that rapidly evolved in the time since ragtime and jazz.
Why not look back even further? I often like to remind my students that we can look back many thousands of years, and to Africa, for the roots of our popular musical habits. Some of the essential elements of rock music—youth, song, rolling rocks (small pebbles banging inside of a calabash rattle), exciting rhythms, all in the context of an exuberant dance gathering—still survive today in traditional African music, not far, perhaps, from our original musical forms. In that sense, rock music has long been with us. Long live rock’n’roll!
— Andrew L. Kaye, Ph.D. is assistant
professor of music. His talk “Who Put the Bop
in the Bop Shu Wop” is a popular topic of
Albright’s Speakers
Bureau.