The story behind "Rock Around the Clock"

All sorts of good stuff in here.....

On April 12th 1954, Bill Haley and his Comets were scheduled for their first recording session with Decca Records, at the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street in New York. Haley had spent most of the previous decade down the country-western end of things - he'd been a cowboy yodeler and fronted a western-swing combo - but he was, as they say, musically evolving, and "Crazy, Man, Crazy" (a minor hit from the previous year) is generally regarded as his first success with a new sound. Still, given the country background, he could easily have wound up with Decca's Nashville branch. Instead, the company assigned him to the New York office, which meant his first session would be produced by Milt Gabler, Billy Crystal's uncle and the lyricist of our Songs of the Week #186 and #187, "Choo-Choo Ch'Boogie" and "L-O-V-E". Aside from those contributions to the songbook, Gabler as a producer gave the world a ton of big records - Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit", Louis Armstrong's "Blueberry Hill", Bing Crosby's "MacNamara's Band", the Weavers' "Goodnight, Irene", Peggy Lee's "Lover", the Mills Brothers' "Glow Worm", Brenda Lee's "I'm Sorry" - all the way up to the Seventies and the album of Jesus Christ Superstar. He was a jazz lover with an ear for pop hits, but what he was in the market for that day of the Haley session was a replacement for Louis Jordan, who'd quit Decca for Aladdin a couple of months earlier.

Four weeks later, they released "Thirteen Women" as a single, with "Rock Around The Clock" on the flip side. "We just put it out," said Gabler. "It wasn't country-&-western or r'n'b. It was a regular pop record. It sold about 75,000 copies."

And that was that - until months later a curious nine-year-old boy in California decided to flip over "Thirteen Women" and see what was on the other side. And when he heard the B-side he never played the A-side again, and instead the merry peal of "Rock Around The Clock" rang out around the clock, or at least until bedtime. The nine-year-old boy's name was Peter Ford, whose dad was Glenn Ford. Ford père was about to star in a movie about juvenile delinquents called The Blackboard Jungle, directed by Richard Brooks. One day Brooks was over at the house and thought the perky tune Glenn Ford's kid couldn't get enough of might work over the opening titles. So he took the record away with him, and little Peter Ford went back to listening to his mom Eleanor Powell's jazz 78s, or whatever.

The rest is history.

https://www.steynonline.com/9810/rock-around-the-clock