On this day · 71 years ago · 1955
71 Years Ago Today: Rock Around the Clock Becomes the First Rock and Roll No. 1
Rock Around the Clock hit No. 1 on Billboard's pop chart on July 9, 1955, becoming rock and roll's first chart-topping record. The guitar solo that helped make it a phenomenon was played by a session musician who never lived to see the song reach the top.
By Axel, Classic-rock desk · Edited by Cadence ·
On July 9, 1955, Bill Haley and His Comets' Rock Around the Clock became the first rock and roll recording to top Billboard's pop chart, holding No. 1 for eight weeks. Its instrumental break, one of the most influential guitar solos in rock history, was played by session guitarist Danny Cedrone, who reused a solo from an earlier Haley single and died before the record's number-one run began.
The chart-topper that changed the rules
Bill Haley and His Comets had already been chipping at the mainstream for two years by the summer of 1955. Crazy Man, Crazy had cracked the pop charts in 1953, and Big Joe Turner's Shake, Rattle and Roll had reached No. 1 on the R&B chart in 1954. But on the Billboard pop chart dated July 9, 1955, per Wikipedia's account of the single's chart history, Rock Around the Clock became something new: the first rock and roll recording to hit No. 1 on the American pop charts, a feat it would repeat in the UK and elsewhere around the world. It held the top spot for eight weeks.
The song wasn't an instant hit. Decca had released it more than a year earlier, in May 1954, as the B-side to Thirteen Women (And Only One Man in Town), and it sold modestly at first. Everything changed in 1955, when the film Blackboard Jungle used the recording over its opening titles and four more times through the movie, introducing it to an audience of teenagers who turned it into a genuine phenomenon almost overnight.
The guitar solo that got there first
The instrumental break that helped sell the record belonged to Danny Cedrone, a session guitarist who wasn't a permanent member of Haley's band. As covered in more detail in CYS's piece on Bill Haley's own birthday, Cedrone missed rehearsal ahead of the April 1954 recording session and simply reused a solo he'd already played two years earlier on Haley's Rock the Joint. He was paid scale wages for the date and died two months later, in June 1954, just over a year before the record he played on became the biggest song in the country.
That solo has outlived nearly everything else about the session. Per Wikipedia's entry on Cedrone, guitarists including Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Brian Setzer, Chris Spedding, and Danny Gatton have all gone on record naming his Rock Around the Clock solo as an influence on their own playing. Pink Floyd's David Gilmour has said, separately, that hearing the record at age ten "probably had something to do with" his decision to pick up a guitar in the first place.
Why July 9, 1955 is the date that matters
Plenty of "first rock and roll record" candidates get argued over, Ike Turner's Rocket 88 (1951) and Chuck Berry's Maybellene (1955) both have serious cases. But Rock Around the Clock's claim is narrower and harder to dispute: it was the first record identifiable as rock and roll to reach No. 1 on the mainstream pop chart, the moment the genre stopped being a regional novelty and became something a national audience would buy in the millions. Wikipedia's own summary of the record's legacy puts it plainly: the recording is widely considered the song that, more than any other, brought rock and roll into mainstream culture around the world.
The number-one run lasted eight weeks, the song went to No. 3 on the R&B chart the same year, and it eventually notched a spot on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time at No. 159. In 2018, the Library of Congress inducted the original 1954 recording into the National Recording Registry.
Chase the tone, seven decades later
Nobody has a reliable record of exactly what guitar and amp Cedrone plugged into that day in 1954, long before today's major string brands existed in their current form. But if you're after that same twangy, cutting rock and roll attack on a Telecaster or hollow-body today, a straightforward nickel-wound electric set is still where most players start.
NYXL1046 Nickel Wound (.010–.046)
Why this one: A modern nickel-wound standard in the same gauge family as the era's rockabilly and early rock and roll setups, not a historical claim about Cedrone's own unrecorded gear.