Bill Haley & His Comets was an American rock and roll band that was founded in 1952 and continued until Haley’s death in 1981. The band, also known by the names Bill Haley and the Comets and Bill Haley’s Comets (and variations thereof), was the earliest group of white musicians to bring rock and roll to the attention of white America and the rest of the world. From late 1954 to late 1956, the group placed nine singles in the Top 20, one of those a number one and three more in the Top Ten. Although several members of the Comets became famous, Bill Haley remained the star. With his spit curl and the band’s matching plaid dinner jackets and energetic stage behavior, many fans consider them to be as revolutionary in their time as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones were a decade later. (More from Wikipedia)
Everyone knows about “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets, the 1954 classic that is likely regarded by the general public as the first rock and roll record. The inclusion of the song in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle (starring a young Sidney Poitier) is what truly made it a hit. However, Bill Haley’s rock roots actually go much deeper and much earlier than that.
Sometime in the 1949 to 1952 period, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen were formed; this was the band that would later evolve into Bill Haley and His Comets.
The changing nature of Bill Haley’s music made the band name “Saddlemen” increasingly incongruous, and by the fall of 1952, the band had changed its name to Bill Haley and His Comets. The idea for “the Comets” came from the common mispronunciation of Halley’s Comet that persists to this day. (Edmond Halley’s surname actually rhymes with “Sally”; Halley concluded that three especially bright comets that had been observed over the preceding two centuries were actually the same object that appeared every 76 years and correctly predicted the return of the comet in 1758).
In 1953, “Crazy Man, Crazy” by Bill Haley and His Comets became the first rock and roll song to be televised nationally when it was used in the soundtrack of an episode of the CBS anthology series Omnibus called Glory in the Flower that starred James Dean. “Rock Around the Clock” was their next record, and the band continued with a string of hits in the mid-1950’s that included “Shake, Rattle and Roll”, “See You Later, Alligator”, “Skinny Minnie”, and “Razzle Dazzle”.
Following Bill Haley’s death in 1981, there were at least six bands using the name The Comets that claimed (with varying degrees of authority) to be the continuation of Haley’s band. Three were still touring as late as 2008 according to Wikipedia.
