“Rock Around The Clock” by Bill Haley And The Comets

Bill Haley & His Comets cut "Rock Around the Clock" for American Decca on April 12, 1954, two years after Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers (signing as Jimmy De Knight) wrote it. Myers claimed he'd tailored it for Haley all along, but legal tangles held the session back until that spring, and the Decca single carried the fuller name "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock".

It became a rallying cry for rebellious '50s kids, all the more once Blackboard Jungle put it on the big screen in 1955. It held number one for two months, was the first rock and roll disc to top the pop charts in both America and Britain, and is still widely seen as the record that, above all others, carried rock and roll into the mainstream worldwide. In 2018 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.