Bill Haley & Booth's Corner: The Daddy of Rock 'n Roll Was Ours First
BOOTH'S CORNER, PA — Before there was a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, before Elvis, before the word "rock 'n' roll" meant anything to a parent in Delaware County, a shy, half-blind kid from Booth's Corner walked into the farmers market in a red cowboy suit and got paid one dollar to sing. His name was William John Clifton Haley. The world knows him as Bill Haley. Around here he is simply ours.
Haley was born in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1925, but his family settled in Boothwyn when he was a boy, and this is where the music started — country-western songs on a borrowed stage, then Cousin Lee's band, the Down Homers, his own Range Drifters, the Four Aces of Western Swing in 1947, and by 1950 the Saddlemen, the outfit where he began fooling with what he called "cowboy jive." In late 1952 he renamed the band. Bill Haley and His Comets were born a few miles from where you are reading this.
What followed has never been equaled. "Rock the Joint." "Crazy, Man, Crazy" — the first rock 'n' roll record to crack the Billboard pop chart. "Shake, Rattle and Roll." And in the spring of 1954, a two-minute-and-change B-side called "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock," which sat quietly for a year until it opened the film Blackboard Jungle and detonated. It went to number one in 1955, became the first rock 'n' roll record to sell a million copies in Great Britain, and has sold something north of forty million copies since. Over a 37-year career Haley wrote 154 songs, recorded 460, released more than 670 records and played over 10,000 shows. When he toured England in February 1957 the crowds jammed Waterloo Station to meet his train — the first international rock 'n' roll star, and he came from Foulk Road.
He never really left. Through the hit years Haley lived at Melody Manor, the house he bought in Boothwyn — it is still standing, right out the road — and ran his publishing companies and record label from this corner of Delaware County while the Comets played the world. Bill Haley died in Harlingen, Texas, on February 9, 1981. He was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, as the board at Booth's Corner records it. The memorial board that hangs at Booth's Corner Farmers Market — the source of these photographs — puts it plainly: the shy, half-blind country boy from Boothwyn became the Father of Rock 'n' Roll.
Local heroes
Haley is the first name on a list this station intends to keep. Charlie Gracie — South Philadelphia's own, whose "Butterfly" went to number one in 1957 and whose guitar playing Paul McCartney and Graham Nash spent decades praising — worked right up until his death in December 2022 at 86. Rudy Pompilli, Marshall Lytle, Johnny Grande and the rest of the Comets were Delaware Valley musicians. This region did not receive rock 'n' roll. It shipped it.
WPHL-dB will be building out the local-heroes series through the fall. If you have photographs, posters, tickets or stories from the Haley or Gracie years — or a hero of your own we should know about — send them to the station. Verified, credited, and kept in the archive where they belong.
Photographs: Bill Haley memorial board, Booth's Corner Farmers Market, Boothwyn, PA — photographed by the U-Rock® Network, 2016. Board photos credited on-board to Bill Griggs, Kenn Petzke and Denise Gregoire. Owner-supplied; provenance verified.
