(Credits: Far Out / Markus Spiske / Thea Hdc / Jeff Kingma)
The 1950s was an explosive decade for American popular culture. While the adults were obsessed with McCarthyist paranoia, the kids inherited a new age of unseen disposable income and the fruits of the country’s post-war economic boom. Spotting who had money to spend, both Hollywood and the record labels eyed up the Baby Boomers as a key target demographic, inventing the teenager and steadily pumping out features and 45s on the youth rebellion seizing the nation’s streets and suburbia.
Among the wave of B-movie horrors and invasion sci-fi that dominated the era’s drive-ins and theatres was the rock ‘n’ roll pictures, for many, their first introduction to the Black rock pioneers and their white imitators and the lasting visual image in the popular impression to this day.
Chuck Berry’s signature duckwalk was immortalised on 1959’s Go, Johnny, Go!. Long before his run of stodgy cinema vehicles across the 1960s, Elvis Presley’s turn as brooding convict Vince Everett in 1957’s Jailhouse Rock captured the music’s dangerous fervour that triggered panic among respectable society and conservative media.
The rock ‘n’ roll peak was arguably 1956, boasting three of the movement’s biggest pictures. Rock, Rock, Rock!, Shake, Rattle and Rock and The Girl Can’t Help It all served as major international rock ‘n’ roll beams across the world—the latter’s cameos from Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent The Beatles’ John Lennon would later credit as inspiring him to pursue a path in music when watching in Liverpool as a teen.
Rock ‘n’ roll had found its way onto the big screen a year before, however, for a feature that sought to depict the day’s youth subculture in a more complicated light.
So, what was the first rock ‘n’ roll song to feature in a movie?
While Black artists for years had been blasting a more raucous variant of R&B while singing about “rockin’”, it took Bill Haley & His Comets to appropriate the subversive underground artform and render it palatable to white America and the top of the charts both domestically and worldwide. Originally released as a B-side to the nuclear war innuendo of 1954’s ‘Thirteen Women And Only One Man In Town’, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ would endure as the well-played flipside for scores of rock-frenzied kids.
A young Peter Fonda was one of them. Obsessed with the B-side as a ten-year-old, his A-list actor father, Glenn Ford, was due to star in a hard-hitting drama exploring teen delinquency and mentioned the number to the upcoming picture’s director, Richard Brooks. Released in 1955, Blackboard Jungle‘s sensationalist depictions of inner-city wayward youths caused a critical stir, but it was ‘Rock Around the Clock’s placement over the introduction credits which saw rock ‘n’ roll’s first presence in Hollywood and subsequent association with danger and loose morals.
Rush released as an A-side to capitalise on the film’s success, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ topped the global charts and endured as the moment the rock ‘n’ roll revolution truly began. Before Presley, Little Richard or Berry ever graced the movie screens, it took Blackboard Jungle‘s cautionary drama to push the 1950s’ lightning bolt music moment to the widest audiences.
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