Chart position: Did not chart
Category: Hillbilly boogie
Writers: Crafton, Keane, Bagby
Label and number: Essex 303, Chester, Pennsylvania
Flipside: "Icy Heart"
When and where recorded: February/March 1952, in Philadelphia
When released: Late March 1952
Why Important: Its freak success moved Bill Haley away from hillbilly
music and into recording rhythm and blues songs. And its use of slap-back echo
and the rattling of the bass strings as a percussive device established the
basis of the rockabilly sound.
Influenced by: "Rock the Joint" by Jimmy Preston and His Prestonians
(//6 R&B,
1949)
Influenced: "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets (//1
Pop,
1955)
Important cover version: Lola Ameche
Important remake: Bill Haley and His Comets (1957)
The story behind the record: Though rhythm and blues and country artists
sometimes covered each other's songs, they stuck to their own styles. Bill Haley
was perhaps the first hillbilly singer to violate the tradition in 1951 when
he and his band, the Saddlemen, recorded a lazy country-boogie cover of Jackie
Brenston's "Rocket 88." The song and the jumped-up performance were out of character
for Haley, who frankly preferred Hank Williams-style weepers. But a record pressing
plant operator in Philadelphia named Dave Miller had heard Brenston's "Rocket
88" during a trip through the South and was anxious to record it as a hillbilly
crossover tune for a new label he was starting up. He called his friend Jack
Howard, an announcer at radio station WPWA, and asked him if he knew of any
white bands around town that could cover an R&B song. Howard didn't have
to look far. The station had its own hillbilly band, led by Bill Haley, and
Howard told Miller that he had personally seen them joking around with another
R&B song called "Rock the Joint" at the Twin Bars, a country nightspot in
nearby Gloucester, New Jersey.
William John Clinton Haley, Jr., was born in Highland Park, Michigan, on July 6, 1925, and raised in tiny Boothwyn, Pennsylvania, near the Delaware River town of Chester, an industrial suburb of Philadelphia. Despite his shy nature and a dead left eye that made him self-conscious, Haley began singing and playing the guitar at a local auction mart while he was still a boy. He made his first recording with the Four Aces of Western Swing in 1948, covering a Hank Williams song, and gained local fame as "Yodeling Bill Haley." A year later he formed his own group, the Saddlemen.
The Saddlemen's poorly recorded but instrumentally exciting "Rocket 88," featuring a barrelhouse boogie beat, became a favorite around eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but because of Miller's out-of-the-car-trunk distribution, it didn't sell anywhere else. So Bill Haley went back to singing his hillbilly dirges and laments.
Then Jack Howard suggested that they record that little joke song, "Rock the Joint," which the Saddlemen played to warm up the crowd. Haley agreed, the band agreed and Miller agreed, and they went into WPWA's studio and cut it, along with a rip-off of Hank Williams's "Cold Cold Heart" called "Icy Heart."
As Bill Haley remembered it, "I did a live country show on WPWA, and just before my show there was a show called `Judge Rhythm's Court,' which was a two-hour disk jockey show by a guy named Jim Reeves. Jim was white, but he played all race music. I used to listen to this show while I was getting ready and that probably influenced me a lot too. He used a tune called `Rock the Joint' as a theme, and I started to use it in the show, and every time I would do it I would see this tremendous reaction. So I rewrote some of the lyrics, released the record and it became a big smash hit for us," he told writer Ken Terry.
Haley's cover of "Rocket 88" had remained pure corn 'n' country, complete with a car horn. Not so his version of "Rock the Joint." With that, he and the Saddlemen crossed over into new territory. The original "Rock the joint" was released on Gotham Records by another Chester homeboy named Jimmy Preston, and charted high as an R&B record in September 1949 [see #14]. Preston and Haley were only a couple of years apart in a relatively small town, but Preston was black, so it's possible that the two men didn't know each other.
Though Haley stuck close to Preston's "we're gonna rock, rock this joint" refrain, he made up whole verses of his own to appeal to his country audience. His first verse, which begins on the song's opening downbeat, bears some resemblance to the last verse in Preston's recording, but not much: "We're gonna tear down the mailbox, rip up the floor, smash out the windows and knock down the door, we're gonna rock . . . "Preston's final verse is "We're gonna blow down the walls, and tear up the floor, until the law comes knockin' at the door." For the rest of the record, Haley is freestyling: "Six times six is thirty-six, I ain't gonna hit for six more licks." Then, like Preston, he suggests various dance steps. But whereas Preston sang about the jitterbug, the buckle-buck and the jelly roll, Haley shouts out instructions for his white country audience: "Do the Sugarfoot Rag, side by side, a-flyin' low and a-flyin' wide . . . Do an old Paul Jones and a Virginia reel, just let your feet know how you feel, we're gonna rock . . . " The "flyin' low and a-flyin' wide," incidentally, came from Arkie Shibley's "Hot Rod Race" [see #22] as a description of two cars barreling across the desert at high speed.
There was also quite a difference in instrumentation between the two records. Preston got a lot of action out of a basic rhythm section and a screaming tenor saxophone, with no guitar. Haley, on the other hand, had three guitars-acoustic (his own), electric (Danny Cedrone) and steel-and a honky-tonk piano, but no sax or drums. One of the most stunning features of Haley's "Rock the Joint" was a blazing Les Paul-inspired solo by Danny Cedrone-which he would duplicate note for note two years later on "Rock Around the Clock." To establish the song's rhythm, which had been accentuated by hand-clapping on Preston's original, Al Rex slapped the hell out of his stand-up bass and engineer Dave Miller mixed it high in the balance. "I was the instigator of rock 'n' roll," Rex modestly told Haley's biographer, John Swenson. "I had this old bass fiddle that did not have a sound post. When I used to slap it you didn't hear no tone, all you used to hear was clickety-clickety-clickety-click. Dave Miller said, 'That's what I want to hear!' He said, 'Put the microphone on that bass. Let's get that sound.' That was the start of it."
Well, not quite. Granted, the sound of those Saddlemen and Comets records inspired the coming generation of rockabilly artists who depended so much on the so-called slap-bass, but the technique of slapping, popping and plucking the large bass fiddle, or double bass, or string bass or "doghouse," was nothing new. Some experts believe that slap-bass playing began in New Orleans at least ninety years ago, when back alley and street corner musicians fashioned homemade bass instruments out of an upside-down washtub with a hole in the bottom, a broomstick lodged in the hole and a cord tightly strung from the tub to the top of the stick. In order to get any resonance from the tub, a player had to vigorously pluck or slap his single string. When these musicians transferred their craft to the double bass, which has four strings, they could sound almost like one-man bands. An early proponent of this style was New Orleans jazzman George "Pops" Foster. The acoustic megaphone horn, or "tin ear," that was used for recording before the advent of the electrical microphone in 1926, could barely pickup the double bass's low frequencies. So even though bass players were common on live gigs, they had to sit out on recording sessions while tuba players filled in for them. But by the late '20s the technology had improved enough that bandleader Paul Whiteman was able to feature his bass player conspicuously in the balance, and within a few years Duke Ellington's bassist, Wellman Brand, popularized the New Orleans slap style of playing.
When Dave Miller released "Rock the joint," Bill Haley's faith lay in his own song, "Icy Heart," on the flipside-but not for long. "I went out on the road promoting 'Icy Heart' and got to Nashville with hopes of going on the 'Grand Ole Opry,' " he told writer Ken Terry, "and I got a phone call from Dave Miller in the hotel room that evening telling me to get off `Icy Heart' and get on 'Rock the Joint,' because that was hitting." Haley obeyed, but he was faced with a new problem. "Here I was with the sideburns, cowboy boots and almost ten years of promoting myself as a country and western singer. You have to remember that the public in general wasn't ready to accept this!"
The record sold 75,000 copies, impressive for Miller's tiny Essex label. "Rock the joint" became such a hit in Chicago that Haley was hired to play for a week in a black jazz club, following Dizzy Gillespie. The audiences walked out on his gigs and he had to cut the engagement short, but he realized that he was on to something. Bill Haley would never be a hillbilly singer again.