Bill Haley
William John Clifton "Bill" Haley
(July 6, 1925 – February 9, 1981) was one of the first American rock and roll
musicians. He is credited by many with first popularizing this form of music in
the early 1950s with his group Bill Haley & His Comets (inspired by
Halley's Comet) and million selling hits such as, Rock Around the Clock, See
You Later, Alligator, Shake, Rattle and Roll, Skinny Minnie, and Razzle Dazzle.
He has sold over 25 million records worldwide.
Biography
Early life and career
Bill Haley
was born in Highland Park, Michigan on July 6, 1925 to William and Maude Haley. The
couple's second child, Haley had a sister Margaret who was born two years
earlier.
The Haleys
had moved to Detroit from Firebrick, Kentucky, where William Sr. found work in
a nearby service station as a mechanic while his wife gave piano lessons in
their home for twenty-five cents an hour. Maude Haley, a woman of strong
religious convictions, had come to America with her family from Ulverston in Lancastshire, England before the First World War. Later
the family moved to Boothwyn, near the town of Chester, Pennsylvania.
Haley's
father played the banjo and mandolin. Though he couldn't read music he had an
ear for country music and was able to pick out any tune he wanted by ear.
At thirteen
Haley received his first guitar. His father taught him to play the basic chords
and notes by ear. It was at this time he began his dream of becoming a singing
cowboy like the ones he idolized every Saturday afternoon at the movie houses
in nearby Marcus Hook or Chester.
His first performances date from about
1938, when as a child he sang and played guitar at variety shows, put on by
local children to raise money for local causes. Haley was a shy child, perhaps
due to the fact that he had been blind in his left eye since infancy. This made him extremely self conscious about
his appearance.
In June of
1940, just before his fifteenth birthday, Haley left school after finishing the
eighth grade and went to work bottling water at Bethel Springs. This company
sold pure spring water and fruit flavored soft drinks in a three state area.
Here he worked for 35 cents an hour, filling large five gallon glass bottles
with spring water.
In his late teens, Bill found work playing
the local amusement parks, which featured live entertainment. His first break
came when he signed on with 'Cousin Lee's Band' who had a popular radio show.
Haley sang, played his guitar and yodelled. Because of his disability, he
avoided being called into the armed forces in WWII. At this time a group called
the 'Downhomers' was looking for a singing yodeler to replace their lead
singer, who had been drafted in 1944. Haley joined the group and even at this
early stage was talking about combining country and pop music. At the age of
22, Bill left the 'Downhomers', and returned to Chester to host a
local radio program on the newly formed station WPWA. In 1946, Haley married first wife Dorothy
Crowe and had two children with her.
The Four Aces of Western Swing
In 1948, Bill released his first records on
the 'Cowboy' label with his backing group the 'Four Aces of Western Swing',
made up of Al Constantine (Accordion), Barney Barnard (bass) and Tex King
(guitar).
The Saddlemen
The 'Four Aces' disbanded in mid '49 and
Haley formed a new band, 'The Saddlemen' which in turn was ultimately to become
the very first rock and roll band in history, the 'Comets'. Al Rex on bass,
Billy Williamson on steel guitar and Johnny Grande played piano and accordion.
Haley fronted this group wearing a ten-gallon stetson covering his trademark
kiss-curl, a hair style he developed to take attention away from his blind eye.
Bass player Al Rex would leave the group in 1951 to be replaced by 17 year old
Marshall Lytle.
Bill Haley &
His Comets
During the Labor
Day weekend in 1952, The Saddlemen were renamed Bill Haley with Haley's Comets
(inspired by a popular mispronunciation of Halley's Comet). During that same year, Haley married second wife, Barbara Joan
Cupchack, with whom he had two children, but only one survived through infancy.
In 1953, Haley's recording of
"Crazy Man, Crazy" (co-written by Haley and his bass player, Marshall
Lytle although Lytle would not receive credit until 2001) became the first rock
and roll song to hit the American charts, peaking at no.15 on Billboard and
no.11 on Cash Box. Soon after, the band's name was revised to Bill Haley &
His Comets.
In 1953, a song
called "Rock Around the Clock" was written for Haley. He was unable
to record it until April 12, 1954. Initially, it was relatively unsuccessful,
staying at the charts for only one week, but Haley soon scored a major
worldwide hit with a cover version of Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and
Roll", which went on to sell a million copies and became the first ever
rock 'n' roll song to enter British singles charts in December 1954 and became
a Gold Record. He retained elements of the original, but threw some country
music aspects into the song (specifically, Western Swing) and cleaned up the
lyrics. Haley and his band were important in launching the music known as
"Rock and Roll" to a wider, mostly white audience after a period of
it being considered an underground genre. When "Rock Around the
Clock" appeared behind the opening credits of the 1955 film Blackboard
Jungle starring Glenn Ford, it soared to the top of the American Billboard
chart for eight weeks. The single is commonly used as a convenient line of
demarcation between the "rock era" and the music industry that
preceded it; Billboard separated its statistical tabulations into 1890-1954 and
1955–present. After the record rose to number one, Haley was quickly given the
title "Father of Rock and Roll," by the media, and by teenagers that
had come to embrace the new style of music. With the song's success, the age of
rock music began overnight and instantly ended the dominance of the jazz and
pop standards performed by Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, Perry Como, Bing Crosby,
and others.
Success came at
somewhat of a price as the new music confused and horrified most people over
the age of 30, leading to Cold War-fueled suspicion that rock-and-roll was part
of a communist plot to corrupt the minds of American teenagers. FBI chief J.
Edgar Hoover attempted to dig up incriminating material on Bill Haley, who took
to carrying a gun with him on tours for his own safety.
"Rock Around
the Clock" was the first record ever to sell over one million copies in
both Britain and Germany and, in 1957, Haley became the first major American
rock singer to tour Europe. Haley continued to score hits throughout the 1950s
such as "See You Later, Alligator" and he starred in the first rock
and roll musical movies Rock Around the Clock and Don't Knock the Rock, both in
1956. Haley was already 30 years old and so he was soon eclipsed in the United
States by the younger, sexier Elvis, but continued to enjoy great popularity in
Latin America, Europe, and Australia through the 1960s.
As the years went
by, Haley’s popularity declined. The people who once loved Bill Haley and His Comets
turned their musical obsessions to musicians like Elvis Presley and Little
Richard. Haley began to have money problems and fled to Mexico in 1962. In that
same year he met and married third wife, Martha Velasco, who was a Mexican
dancer. Haley stayed out of the public eye and mostly spent time with his
family over the next few years.
Death and legacy
A self-admitted
alcoholic (as indicated in a 1974 radio interview for the BBC), Haley fought a
battle with alcohol into the 1970s. Nonetheless, he and his band continued to
be a popular touring act, benefiting from a 50s nostalgia movement that began
in the late 60s and the signing of a lucrative record deal with the European
Sonet Records label. After performing for Queen Elizabeth II at a command
performance in 1979, Haley made his final performances in South Africa in May
and June 1980. Prior to the South African tour, he was diagnosed with a brain
tumor, and a planned tour of Germany in the fall of 1980 was canceled.
The October 25,
1980 edition of the German paper Bild reported that Haley had a brain tumor. It
quoted British manager Patrick Maylan as saying that Haley "had taken a
fit and went over the seat. He didn't recognize anyone anymore" after
being taken to his home in Beverly Hills. It also reported that a doctor at the
clinic where Haley had been taken said, "The tumor can't be operated on
anymore."
"The
Berliner Zeitung" reported a few days later that Haley had collapsed after
a performance in Texas and been taken to the hospital in his home town of
Harlingen, Texas. However this account is questionable as Bill Haley never
performed in the United States in 1980.
Despite his ill
health, Haley began compiling notes for possible use as a basis for either a
biographical film based on his life, or a published autobiography (accounts
differ), and there were plans for him to record an album in Memphis, Tennessee,
when the brain tumor began affecting his behavior and he went back to his home
in Harlingen, Texas, where he died early in the morning of February 9, 1981.
Martha, Bill's
widow, who was with him in these troubling times, denies he had a brain tumor
as does his old, very close friend, Hugh McCallum. Martha and friends related
that Bill did not want to go on the road any more and that ticket sales for
that planned tour of Germany in the fall of 1980 were slow. According to
McCallum, "It's my unproven gut feeling that that [the brain tumor] was
said to curtail talks about the tour and play the sympathy card."
It was obvious
that his drinking problem was getting worse. According to Martha, by this time
she and Bill fought all the time and she told him to stop drinking or move out
so he moved out into a room in their pool house. Martha still took care of him
and sometimes he would come in the house to eat, but he ate very little.
"There were days we never saw him," said his daughter Martha Maria.
In addition to
the drinking problems, it had become obvious that he also was having serious
mental problems; Martha Maria said that, "It was like sometimes he was
drunk even when he wasn't drinking." After he'd been jailed by the
Harlingen Police, Martha had the judge put Haley in the hospital where he was
seen by a psychiatrist who said Bill's brain was overproducing a chemical, like
adrenaline. The doctor prescribed a medication to stop the overproduction but
said Bill would have to stop drinking. Martha said, "This is
pointless." She took him home, however, fed him and gave him his first
dose. As soon as he felt better, he went back out to his room in the pool house
and the downward spiral continued until his death on February 6, 1981.
Haley's death
certificate listed "Natural causes: Most likely heart attack" as the
'Immediate Cause' of death. The next lines, 'Due to, or as a consequence Of"
were blank.
Haley made a
succession of bizarre, mostly monologue late-night phone calls to friends and
relatives in which he seemed incoherently drunk or ill. Haley's first wife has
been quoted as saying, "He would call and ramble and dwell on the past,
his mind was really warped." A belligerent phone call to a business
associate was taped and gives evidence of Haley's troubled state of mind.
Media reports
immediately following his death indicated Haley displayed deranged and erratic
behavior in his final weeks, although beyond a biography of Haley by John
Swenson, released a year later, which described Haley painting the windows of
his home black, there is little information extant about Haley's final days.
Haley was
posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. His son
Pedro represented him at the ceremony. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of
Fame. The Comets were separately inducted into the Hall of Fame as a group
in 2012, after a rule change allowed the induction of backing groups (the
Comets were mass-inducted alongside several other groups such as Hank Ballard's
the Midnighters and Gene Vincent's Blue Caps.
Songwriters Tom
Russell and Dave Alvin addressed Haley's demise in musical terms with
"Haley's Comet" on Alvin's 1991 album Blue Blvd. Dwight Yoakam sang
backup on the tribute.
Haley's original
Comets still tour the world. They released a concert DVD in 2004 on Hydra
Records, played the Viper Room in West Hollywood in 2005, and performed at Dick
Clark's American Bandstand Theater in Branson, Missouri in 2006-07.
In March 2007,
the Original Comets pre-opened the Bill Haley Museum in Munich, Germany. On
October 27, 2007, ex-Comets guitar player Bill Turner opened the Bill Haley
Museum for the public.
"Many people claim
that Bill Haley is the “king of rock and roll” while others credit that title
to Elvis Presley. Despite people’s positions on who deserves that title,
everyone can agree that Haley has influenced music in such a way that his name
will never be forgotten."
