What was the first rock song to reach number one?
Rock and roll, being described as music for outsiders, may as well have been a badge of honour back in the genre’s infancy. No, it wasn’t meant to be listened to the same way that people listened to the crooners of yesteryear, and that was totally fine since most teenagers only wanted music to dance to and forget about their problems. But in an era that still treated the genre as a passing fad, people knew it wasn’t a flue when the genre started to reach the top of the charts in front of people like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.
But it’s not as cut and dry as most people might like to think. In the Big Book of Rock, it seems as if Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley came out of nowhere to set the genre on fire in its early days, and nobody looked back. That might be the romantic version of events, but rock got its chops from blues, and it took a while for people to jump on the bandwagon and realise what could be done once you put some conviction behind those bluesy riffs.
It’s never easy to invent a new genre from the ground up, but rockabilly may as well be the bridge between rock and roll and blues. It had the same kind of bounce of blues and even a little bit of country in there, but the fact that it wasn’t nearly as polished as everything is what the kids took notice of back when they wanted to hear party music.
And while Bill Haley was more than happy to entertain the kids with his music, it wasn’t until ‘Rock Around the Clock’ came out that people thought they were hearing something new. He had a long road to go before it was a major hit, but once kids saw the movie Blackboard Jungle with the song as one of its main features, it would have been the equivalent of pandemonium in the theatre.
The later generations had the hysteria that came with Beatlemania or Presley’s first TV appearances, but what made ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was just how strange it was. It’s second nature to see a song with guitars in the charts these days, but let’s take a quick look at the kind of singles that Haley was up against at the time.
How did ‘Rock Around the Clock’ become the first number one rock song?
There were certainly pop artists like Pat Boone who had parents’ approval when they came on the radio, but singing artists like Perez Prado and Frank Sinatra sharing airtime with Haley makes it feel like a completely different era. It took a while before TVs transitioned to colour from black and white, but everyone knew that there was a shot of energy to the way that Haley was playing whenever his song came on.
It may have still seemed like a novelty at the time, but it was clear that more than a few kids were listening. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones may have followed in the footsteps of what people like Little Richard and Elvis Presley were doing, but thanks to the blockbuster success of Haley, everyone else had a playbook for what rock and roll was supposed to be.
Was it the most tasteful thing for kids to be listening to? By 1950s standards, probably not, but that wasn’t the point. It was about giving teenagers their own voice, and since they had spent years with terrifying stories of World War II, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ gave them the perfect soundtrack for what the next generation was supposed to be. Parents could call it nothing but noise all they wanted, but where most people saw musical chaos, the rest of the world saw the future.
