Bill Haley

William John Clifton Haley (/ˈheɪli/; July 6, 1925 – February 9, 1981) was an American rock and roll musician. He is credited by many with first popularizing this form of music in the early 1950s with his group Bill Haley & His Comets and million-selling hits such as "Rock Around the Clock", "See You Later, Alligator", "Shake, Rattle and Roll", "Rocket 88", "Skinny Minnie", and "Razzle Dazzle". Haley has sold over 60 million records worldwide. In 1987, he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Haley was born July 6, 1925, in Highland Park, Michigan. In 1929, the four-year-old Haley underwent an inner-ear mastoid operation which accidentally severed an optic nerve, leaving him blind in his left eye for the rest of his life. It is said that Haley adopted his trademark kiss curl over his right eye to draw attention from his left, but it also became his gimmick and added to his popularity. As a result of the effects of the Great Depression on the Detroit area, his father moved the family to Bethel Township, Pennsylvania, when Bill was seven years old.

Haley's father William Albert Haley (1900–1956) was from Kentucky and played the banjo and mandolin, and his mother, Maude Green (1895–1955), who was a British immigrant originally from Ulverston, England, was a technically accomplished keyboardist with classical training. Haley told the story that when he made a simulated guitar out of cardboard, his parents bought him a real one.

One of his first appearances was in 1938 for a Bethel Junior baseball team entertainment event, performing guitar and songs when he was 13 years old.

According to the anonymous sleeve notes accompanying the 1956 Decca album Rock Around the Clock, Haley left home at fifteen with his guitar and spent the next few years poverty-stricken until he joined a group called the Down Homers while they were in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1947, Haley formed his own group, Four Aces of Western Swing, later renamed to the Saddlemen. The group subsequently signed with Dave Miller's Holiday Records and, on June 14, 1951, the Saddlemen recorded a cover of the Delta Cats "Rocket 88".

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.