WORDS BY JACK WATKINS
The owner of the most famous kiss-curl in music, Mr William John Clifton Haley
Silver Screen Collection/Getty
In April 1954, Bill Haley And His Comets entered the Pythian Temple, New York, to record a couple of songs for their new record label Decca.The first was a sauntering, atmospheric jazz-blues hybrid Thirteen Women (And Only One Man In Town), the other a brisk and noisy, crisply executed boogie (We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock. The result, it’s been decreed by historians, was history, the latter number providing the big bang moment marking the ultimate fusion of stepped-up country music and African-American rhythms that created commercial rock’n’roll.