Holiday Records

Holiday Records was an American record label based out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania which was active in the early 1950s. Owned by Dave Miller, who also owned Essex Records, it is best known for releasing some of the earliest recordings widely identified as rock and roll, most notably "Rocket 88" by Bill Haley and His Saddlemen (later known as The Comets) in 1951.

Dave Miller owned a radio station based in Chester, Pennsylvania in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He also owned the record labels, Holiday and Essex Records. In 1947, he hired a young musician named Bill Haley to work at his radio station. Haley had a band called the Four Aces of Western Swing which disbanded in 1949-1950 to form the Saddlemen. The group acted as the radio station house band, playing country music live on air.

According to Miller, in a 1980 interview with Stuart Colman for BBC Radio, he took a business trip to the Southern United States in 1951, and obtained a copy of Rocket 88, a rhythm and blues record written by Ike Turner for his Kings of Rhythm and sung by the sax player of the band, Jackie Brenston. The track was recorded at Sam Phillips' Recording Service in Memphis and released on Chess Records of Chicago. Miller hit on the idea of a white singer recording a cover version of a black R&B song so that it could be sold in then-segregated record stores.

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