Bill Haley

Vintage 1956 promotional card featuring Bill Haley and His Comets, signed by Bill Haley in blue ballpoint. The flip side lists their repertoire of singles, LP album, movie and stage show. In excellent condition, with four tape marks on the verso, and curious blue check marks next to many of the song names (assuming those a one-time collector had acquired).

Bill Haley (1925-1981) 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 and their hit song “Rock Around the Clock”.

The band was founded in 1952 and continued until Haley’s death in 1981. Also known by the names Bill Haley and The Comets, the band 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 the end of 1954 until the end of 1956 the group would place nine singles into the Top 20, one of those a number one and three more in the Top Ten.

Bandleader Bill Haley had previously been a country performer; after recording a country and western-styled version of “Rocket 88”, a rhythm and blues song, he changed musical direction to a new sound that came to be called rock and roll.

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 in theirs. Haley was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, along with Eddie Cochran and other legends.

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