However, the phrase had been used in earlier songs. In 1919, Al Bernard recorded a song about gambling with dice with the same title, clearly evoking the action of shooting dice from a cup. The phrase is also heard in "Roll The Bones" by the Excelsior Quartette in 1922. While the phrase was undoubtedly passed along, neither of these songs is a direct ancestor of the 1954 hit.Stone stated that the line about "a one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store" was suggested to him by Atlantic session drummer Sam "Baby" Lovett.
Turner's version was recorded in New York on February 15, 1954. The shouting chorus on his version consisted of Jesse Stone, and record-company executives Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegün. The saxophone solo is by Sam "The Man" Taylor. Turner's recording was released in April 1954, and reached # 1 on the Billboard R&B chart on June 12, but its success did not cross over to the pop chart. In spite of this, "Shake, Rattle & Roll" came to be known as "The national anthem of Rock 'n Roll. Black teenagers weren't buying Bill Haley's version, but white teens were buying Turner's.
The song, in its original incarnation, is highly sexual. Perhaps its most salacious lyric, which was absent from the later Bill Haley rendition, is "I've been holdin' it in, way down underneath / You make me roll my eyes, baby, make me grit my teeth". [It may actually be "Over the hill, way down underneath.] On the recording, Turner slurred the lyric "holdin' it in", since this line may have been considered too risqué for publication. The chorus uses "shake, rattle and roll" to refer to boisterous intercourse, in the same way that the words "rock and roll" was first used by numerous rhythm and blues singers, starting with Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)" in 1922, and continuing on prominently through the 1940s and 50s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake,_Rattle_and_Roll
Bill Haley & His Comets' cover, recorded on June 7, 1954 featured : Johnny Grande (piano), Billy Williamson (steel guitar), Marshall Lytle (bass), and Joey Ambrose (sax). It is known that Danny Cedrone, a session musician who frequently worked for Haley, played lead guitar, but there is controversy over who played drums. Bill Haley's own stage drummer, Dick Richards, did not play on this record but may have provided backing vocals since he participated in the recording of the song's B-side, "A.B.C. Boogie". This was Cedrone's final recording session as he died only ten days later.
Gabler has explained that he would "clean up" lyrics because, "I didn't want any censor with the radio station to bar the record from being played on the air. With NBC a lot of race records wouldn't get played because of the lyrics. So I had to watch that closely"
Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock is generally regarded as the first Rock n Roll in the mainstream charts but in the uk, while Rock Around the Clock entered the UK charts reaching No17 in January 1955 in the NME charts, it didn't become a big hit until it re entered the charts in October 1955 when it was featured in the film Blackboard Jungle. Shake Rattle and Roll however reached No 4 in January 1955 and was the first genuine Rock n Roll hit.
Elvis Presley recorded the song twice in a studio setting: a 1955 demo recorded during his Sun Records tenure (which was not released until the 1990s), and as a 1956 single for RCA Victor, although it was not a major hit. Both versions by Elvis used Turner's original lyrics combined with a faster-paced version of Haley's arrangement. There is also footage of Elvis singing it on the Ed Sullivan Show on Youtube (it was his first ever appearance on TV). My favourite version is an alternate take with piano.
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