Special Guest Blogger: Bill Haley

When the youth of 1950's America was looking for a soundtrack to lead their revolution, a one eyed, hillbilly country and western singer and champion yodeler would not have been top of their agenda but our song, Rock Around the Clock, ushered in the the era known as Rock n Roll but it almost never happened at all and the history of music would have taken a very different direction.
During the 1940s i was known as Silver Yodeling Bill Haley and considered one of the top cowboy yodelers in America and was in a band called Bill Hayley's Saddlemen and we had a few country and western songs knock about the low ends of the charts but everything changed when we recorded a swing number called Thirteen Women about the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb that leaves just one man and 13 women alive but we took so long over the song that we only had 40 minutes left of studio time so we dashed off a song for the B Side.
Thirteen Women. Know it? Of course not, nobody does because the B-side song we dashed off was a speeded up rhythms and blue version of a Sonny Dae and His Knights song called 'Rock Around the Clock' and on its release it barely touched the lower reaches of the charts before quickly disappearing and that's where the story would have ended if one of the few people who bought Thirteen Women hadn't been a boy named Peter Ford whose father was Glenn Ford who was about to star in a film called Blackboard Jungle and the producers deciding that they needed some music in the film that represented what the kids were listening to and Rock Around The Clock fitted the bill perfectly, and they set the opening and closing credits to the song.
Now going under the name Bill Hayley and his Comets, the film and our song was a smash with the kids and the radio DJ's flipped the record and our song re-entered the charts at number one and Rock 'n' Roll was born and became associated with youth and rebellion and we became the first rock 'n' roll superstars as a result.
We rattled off a few more up-tempo songs, one of them 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' which was a filthy, innuendo filled song about sex which we changed into a song about sending our woman to the kitchen to rattle some pots and pans but while our version was concerned with making dinner, the original was more concerned with using the table and worktops surfaces for doing something far less edible.
The line 'I'm like a one-eyed cat, peepin' in a seafood store' was kept intact as a nod to the original and certainly was nothing to do with a half-blind cat wandering into a fishmongers.
Younger and more relatable singers pushed us to the margins but we kept plugging away through my alcoholism, three marriages and years of cranking out the same old songs until i was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died aged 55 but i may not have had the coolness of Elvis, the guitar skills of Chuck Berry or the voice of Tony Williams and been as edgy as a pool ball, but i was the musical father of them all.