Bill Haley & His Comets - Rock Around The Clock (1955) HD

The year was 1955 and Rock and Roll was just beginning I was 13 at the time and introduced to the music of the time... One of the cornerstones of Rock and Roll was Bill Haley and the Comets... for me it was the beginning of my love for R & R!!! I bring you back to that time in life when things seemed more fun and fancy free, at least for the teenagers of the Mid to Late 1950's!!! Many of you will not know of this era, So here is one of the first Rockers, Bill Haley and the Comets!

About Bill Haley and the Comets:
Bill Haley & His Comets was an American rock and roll band formed in 1947 by Bill Haley and continued until death in 1981. The band was also known as Bill Haley and the Comets and Bill Haley's Comets. From late 1954 to late 1956, the group recorded nine top 20 singles, one of which peaked at number one and three at the top ten. The single "Rock Around the Clock" remains a staple of the groups catalog and was the best-selling rock single in the history of the genre and maintained the position for several years.

Band leader Bill Haley had previously been a Western swing performer; after recording a rockabilly version of Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm's "Rocket 88", one of the earliest and first rock and roll recordings, Haley changed his band's musical direction to rock music.

Though the group was considered to be at the forefront of rock and roll during the genre's formative years, the arrival of more risqué acts such as Elvis Presley and Little Richard by 1956 led the more clean-cut Haley and his Comets to decline in popularity. Haley would remain popular in Europe and go on to have a comeback as a nostalgia act in the 1970s, along with many of his contemporaries. Following Haley's death, no fewer than seven different groups have existed under the Comets name, all claiming (with varying degrees of authority) to be the continuation of Haley's group. As of the end of 2014, four such groups were still performing in the United States and internationally.

Waning Popularity:
The band's popularity in the United States began to wane in 1956–57 as sexier, wilder acts such as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard began to dominate the record charts (although Haley's cover version of Little Richard's "Rip It Up", released in direct competition with Little Richard's original recording, outsold the original). After "Skinny Minnie" hit the charts in 1958, Haley had little further success in the United States, although a spin-off group made up of Comets musicians dubbed The Kingsmen (no relation to the later group of "Louie, Louie" fame) had a hit with an instrumental, "Weekend", that same year.