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WHO PUT THE BOMP (IN THE BOMPBAH-BOMPBAH-BOMP)?
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Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” raised the curtain on the age of rock, a jarring (for its time) but highly danceable tune featured in the film Blackboard Jungle in 1955. With the release of the movie, the song vaulted to number one on the Top 40 and stayed there for eight weeks.
It pulsated urban rhythm, a perfect accompaniment to the movie’s lurid depiction of juvenile delinquency — the “teenage savages who turn big-city schools into a clawing jungle,” as the narrator intoned in the trailer.
The sound was raw, primal. It hardly mattered that Haley with his trademark spit-curl hairstyle grew up in small-town Pennsylvania and the band performed in matching sport coats.
So it is no surprise that even today “Rock Around the Clock” is often cited as America’s first rock ’n’ roll song. With its launch, “a dam had burst,” wrote in a 2015 story marking the song’s 60th anniversary.
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