Buddy Holly

THE ROCK AND ROLL STAR NEXT DOOR
Buddy Holly was one of the key innovators of rock and roll’s early years, and a
crucial link between the music’s 1950s roots and the more electric direction
that it would take in the Beatles era. In his brief but incredibly productive career,
the Texas-bred singer/songwriter/guitarist/producer created a remarkable body of
work that permanently altered the face of contemporary music, leaving behind
the tantalizing potential of what else he might have achieved if he had not
died in at the age of twenty-two.

Although he attained international stardom and scored a string of memorable
hits, Holly’s impact far outweighs his record sales. What makes his
achievements all the more remarkable is that they took place during a mere
eighteen months, between his fi rst hit “That’ll Be the Day” in the summer of
1957 and his death in a plane crash on February 3, 1959.
A distinctive songwriter, compelling performer, inventive stylist, and innovative
sonic architect, Holly was instrumental in elevating rock and roll into
an art form and a vehicle for personal expression, broadening rock’s stylistic
range and compositional sophistication without diluting its raw energy. A
versatile craftsman who was equally adept at raucous rockers and gentle
ballads, Holly’s output balanced youthful exuberance, yearning romanticism,
and playful humor. His sound provided a bridge between the raw rockabilly
of Elvis’s Sun Records sides and the more sophisticated styles that would
follow.
Holly was also a strong-willed self-starter who possessed a clear musical
vision, as well as the technical skills to create his music on his own terms. In
his short life, he conquered the recording medium and achieved a remarkably
swift musical evolution. He was also the fi rst rocker to use his commercial
clout to gain artistic control over his musical output—and the fi rst with the
talent to take advantage of that freedom.
If Elvis Presley personifi ed rock and roll’s sexuality, Little Richard embodied
the music’s unpredictable edge, and Chuck Berry was the bard who chronicled
the rituals of teen culture, Holly’s innovations were more musical in
nature. With his band the Crickets, he pioneered the self-contained electric
guitar/bass/drums format that was adopted by avowed Holly acolytes the
Beatles and continued by the countless British and American combos who
followed in their wake, and which remains rock’s standard instrumental
lineup to this day. Holly’s guitar style, meanwhile, would provide the blueprint
for the guitarists of the British Invasion and subsequent generations of
pop rockers.
While Berry beat him to the honor of being the first major rock artist to
write most of his own material and double as his own lead guitarist, Holly
was the first to take charge of every stage of the creative process. In addition
to his singing, songwriting, and guitar work, Holly’s trailblazing experiments
with such innovations as echo, overdubbing, and vocal double-tracking introduced
enticing new sounds to the genre’s limited early palette. He was also the
first major rock and roll performer to move behind the scenes to produce and
promote other artists, activities that he was actively pursuing prior to his
death.
Where Elvis and most of his acolytes carried an enticing aura of danger, the
lanky, bespectacled Holly wasn’t a delinquent, an outlaw, or a sex symbol. His
persona was as earthy and accessible as Elvis’s was exotic and untouchable,
giving Holly an unpretentious everyman quality that was rare among 1950s
rockers.
Those who knew Buddy describe him as polite, unassuming, and down-toearth,
yet incredibly focused and driven to succeed, motivated to embrace
new musical challenges and pursue his abiding fascination with the recording
process.
Holly’s rise to prominence coincided with several of rock’s original stars
temporarily exiting the spotlight. In late 1957, Little Richard abandoned popular
music for the ministry, and the early months of 1958 saw Elvis enter the
army and Jerry Lee Lewis all but blacklisted after marrying his thirteen-yearold
second cousin. The resulting void offered opportunities for new artists,
and Holly was in the vanguard of a second wave of rock and rollers that kept
the music vital in the late 1950s.
Buddy was born Charles Hardin Holley (he would drop the “e” after it was
misspelled that way on an early contract) on September 7, 1936, in Lubbock,
Texas, the youngest of Ella and Lawrence Odell Holley’s four children. L.O.,
as Buddy’s dad was known, had worked as a carpenter, cook, tailor, and
boxing-ring timekeeper to support his family amid the privations of the Great
Depression, and had moved with Ella to Lubbock from Vernon, Texas, in
1925, in search of the work which the town’s cotton economy and its new
Texas Technological College might provide.
Lubbock was a conservative city in the vast expanses of west Texas fl atlands,
whose preponderance of devout Christian sects had earned the town its
nickname of the “City of Churches.” At the time, it was illegal to serve liquor
in Lubbock’s public places (it would remain so until 1972), although a string
of liquor stores and honky-tonks awaited just outside of town. When Buddy
was born, Lubbock had only been a city for forty-fi ve years. Its population
numbered just 21,000, but was rapidly growing with the infl ux of new additions
who, like Buddy’s parents, had migrated from smaller towns and farming
communities.
By all accounts, Buddy (who received his nickname from his parents during
early childhood) was raised in a stable, loving household, and a musical one.
Even when times were hard, Ella and L.O. managed to pay for music lessons
for their children. Buddy’s big brothers Larry and Travis each played multiple
instruments, and often teamed up to play country-and-western songs at social
functions and talent contests. Sister Pat often sang duets with her mother at
the living room piano. And the entire Holley family sang hymns when attending
Sunday services at the local Baptist church.
At the age of fi ve, Buddy, and his brothers, had won a $5 prize singing
“Down the River of Memories,” a song his mother had taught him, at a local
talent show. Although he wouldn’t take an active interest in music until his teens,
he began taking piano lessons, at his mother’s urging, at the age of eleven. He
quickly showed a natural musical aptitude, but quit after nine months. He
then took a few lessons in steel guitar before switching to acoustic guitar.


He learned his fi rst guitar chords from his brother Travis, and took to the
instrument immediately. He quickly mastered the guitar and was soon the
best musician in the Holley family.
BUDDY AND BOB
By the time Buddy entered J.T. Hutchinson Junior High School in 1949, he
was already profi cient on guitar, banjo, and mandolin. He soon found a kindred
spirit in fellow seventh-grader Bob Montgomery, an avid country-andwestern
music fan who sang and played guitar. The two became fast friends
and musical partners, absorbing the repertoires of such country stars as Hank
Williams, Bill Monroe, and Flatt and Scruggs, and studying the live performances
they would hear on such regional radio broadcasts as Nashville’s
Grand Ole Opry , Shreveport’s Louisiana Hayride , and Dallas’s Big D Jamboree
.
Montgomery would be a strong infl uence on Buddy’s musical development,
and his budding songwriting efforts would encourage Holly to develop his own
writing skills. The pair’s tastes would soon expand to encompass blues and
R&B, thanks to the sounds they heard on the faraway radio stations whose
powerful signals would drift in at night. Lubbock, like most of the South, was
racially segregated, but Buddy, like many other white teenagers of the era, was
drawn to the energy and passion of black music, and soon began to integrate
it into his own work.
In addition to Montgomery, Holly played informally with various friends
during junior high and high school, including guitarist Sonny Curtis, drummer
Jerry “J.I.” Allison, and bassists Larry Welborn and Don Guess. While
many parents disapproved of the strange new music that their kids were listening
to, Ella and L.O. appreciated black music and recognized its connection
to their own favorite styles. They enthusiastically encouraged Buddy’s
musical pursuits, allowing him and his pals to conduct informal jam sessions
at their home.
Billed as Buddy and Bob and advertising themselves as a “western and
bop” combo, Holly and Montgomery initially patterned their act after such
country duos as the Louvin Brothers and Flatt and Scruggs. They became a
popular local attraction, playing country and bluegrass material at school and
church events, teen parties, and local business events. They became a trio with
the addition of Larry Welborn on standup bass, although they continued to be
billed as Buddy and Bob. In September 1953, they won a half-hour weekly
Sunday-afternoon slot on Lubbock’s KDAV, which had just become the
nation’s fi rst radio station to adopt a full-time country music format.
With KDAV disc jockey Hipockets Duncan serving as their manager, Buddy
and Bob eventually graduated to more formal gigs at such venues as Lubbock’s
Cotton Club, as well as playing live remote broadcasts for KDAV advertisers.
Initially, Montgomery handled most of the lead vocals, with Buddy singing
harmony, but the act’s sound and repertoire expanded as Buddy began singing
lead on more blues, R&B, and rockabilly numbers.
After graduating from high school in 1954, Holly and Montgomery took
steps to pursue their musical careers more seriously. They undertook their fi rst
formal studio sessions, cutting a series of demo recordings of their compositions,
and using their contacts with fellow musicians to try and get their demos
into the hands of anyone who might be able to steer them toward a record
deal.
The gradual cross-pollination of black and white musical styles that would
form rock and roll’s foundation was about to explode full-blown in the person
of Elvis Presley, who would serve as a key inspiration in Holly’s evolution
from aspiring country musician to pioneering rocker. In early 1955, Buddy
witnessed the young Presley’s fi rst Lubbock performance at a KDAV-spo
nsored show at the Cotton Club. The following day, Elvis played at the grand
opening of a local Pontiac dealership, an event at which Buddy and Bob also
appeared.
By all accounts, the experience of seeing Elvis on stage had a profound
effect on Holly. “Presley just blew Buddy away,” Sonny Curtis later recalled.
“None of us had ever seen anything like Elvis, the way he could get the girls
jumping up and down, and that defi nitely impressed Holly. But it was the
music that really turned Buddy around. He loved Presley’s rhythm. It wasn’t
country and it wasn’t blues; it was somewhere in the middle and it suited just
fi ne. After seeing Elvis, Buddy had only one way to go.” 1
At one point, Presley offered to get Buddy and Bob a spot on the popular
Louisiana Hayride radio show, on which he was a regular. Holly, Montgomery,
and Welborn impulsively drove all the way to Shreveport to take Elvis up
on his offer, but Presley was out on tour that week and the young hopefuls
were shown the door.
Buddy and Bob often served as opening act on local KDAV-sponsored
shows by touring country acts, and they had the opportunity to appear on the
bill the next time when Elvis performed in Lubbock in October 1955. By then,
the group had expanded to a quartet with the addition of Jerry Allison on
drums (Buddy had decided to add a drummer when Elvis did), and had begun
moving toward the rocking style that Holly would later perfect.
The day before they opened for Elvis, the Holly/Montgomery combo performed
at Lubbock’s Fair Park Coliseum on a KDAV bill that included early
rock and roll pioneers Bill Haley and the Comets. That night, Holly impressed
Nashville agent Eddie Crandall, who also managed country star Marty Robbins.
When Buddy and Bob opened a show for Robbins two weeks later, Crandall
offered to shop their demos around Nashville for a recording contract.
In early 1956, Crandall secured a deal with the Nashville division of the
prestigious Decca Records. But the company was interested in Holly as a solo
act, rather than Buddy and Bob as a team. Despite Holly’s initial misgivings,
Montgomery (who would subsequently have a long and successful career as a
Nashville songwriter and record producer) urged his friend to take advantage
of the opportunity. The contract for Buddy’s concurrent publishing arrangement
with Cedarwood Publishing mistakenly omitted the “e” from his surname,
and the artist adopted that spelling thereafter.
Buddy would make a smooth transition to his new solo status, but his stint
with Decca would be a frustrating one. Rock and roll had already exploded
as a commercial and social force, and Paul Cohen, A&R director of Decca’s
Nashville division, had signed Holly with the hope that he could appeal to
traditional country audiences as well as rock and roll–loving teens. But Cohen,
and Decca’s Nashville arm, had no practical experience with the new music,
and little experience making rock and roll records.
The confl icting agendas of artist and label became apparent at Holly’s fi rst
Decca session on January 26, 1956. While producer Owen Bradley was one
of Nashville’s foremost hit-makers, Buddy clashed with the respected studio
veteran, who wouldn’t him play guitar on the sessions and insisted on augmenting
his new band—Sonny Curtis, Don Guess, and Jerry Allison, who was
replaced by a session drummer—with country-oriented studio players.
The January Nashville session produced four songs. Two of those—“Blue
Days, Black Nights,” written for the occasion by KDAV announcer Ben Hall,
and the Holly original “Love Me”—appeared as Buddy’s fi rst Decca single,
released in April. The disc was an engaging enough effort, offering a promising
glimpse of the artist’s rockabilly-infl ected style as well as his trademark
vocal hiccup. But the collision between Holly’s rock and roll vision and Bradley’s
relatively staid approach kept the tracks from realizing the transcendent
exuberance that Buddy would subsequently achieve.
“Buddy couldn’t fi t into our formula any more than we could fi t into his—he
was unique, and he wasn’t in a pattern. It was like two people speaking different
languages,” Bradley later refl ected. “I think we gave him the best shot
we knew how to give him, but it just wasn’t the right combination, the chemistry
wasn’t right. It just wasn’t meant to be. We didn’t understand, and he
didn’t know how to tell us.” 2
Buddy’s new status as a major-label recording artist was big news in his
hometown, as an October 23 story in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal noted.
But the local hero would not achieve national prominence during his short
stint with Decca. A second Nashville visit in July spawned another underwhelming
single, “Modern Don Juan” and “You Are My One Desire,” which
Decca didn’t issue until December. Like its predecessor, it didn’t fi nd much of
an audience.
Although his recording career seemed stalled for much of 1956, Holly and
his sidekicks spent a large part of the year gaining valuable stage experience,
with touring slots on a couple of country package tours that traveled the
Southwest, playing their own set as well as backing up such country stars as
George Jones, Sonny James, Hank Thompson, and Faron Young.


In addition to polishing and sharpening his live act during this period, Holly
also wrestled with the question of whether to wear his eyeglasses on stage.
He’d briefl y tried contact lenses, but gave up on that idea after losing a lens in
mid-set. An attempt to perform sans eyewear proved impractical when he
dropped a guitar pick and couldn’t see well enough to fi nd it. He also had his
teeth capped, to disguise the hard-water stains that were common to those
who’d grown up in the Southwest at the time.
No one was particularly surprised when Decca dropped Buddy Holly from
its artist roster in January 1957. By then, Sonny Curtis and Don Guess had
moved on to other pursuits, and Buddy and Jerry Allison spent a period playing
locally as a drums-and-guitar duo. The two-man lineup allowed the pair
to refi ne their rhythmic chemistry, as well as giving Buddy a chance to develop
a distinctive, powerful lead/rhythm guitar style that would remain a touchstone
for rock guitarists for generations to come.
ROCKIN’ IN CLOVIS
Although his Decca tenure had been a disappointment, Holly’s drive and determination
were undiminished, and he soon devised a new route to revive his
profi le as a recording artist. The key to his future would be his discovery of
independent producer Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico. The
studio was close to the Texas border, but light years away from the conservatism
of the Nashville establishment.
Although he was only eight years older than Buddy, Norman Petty possessed
a wealth of recording experience that would, for a while anyway, make
him a useful mentor and father fi gure to the fl edgling artist. Petty was no rock
and roller, but he was an adept technician with an ear for what sounded good
on the radio. His own musical tastes were refl ected in the middle-of-the-road
cocktail jazz that he and his wife Vi played as members of the Norman Petty Trio.
The group had scored a minor 1954 hit with a version of Duke Ellington’s “Mood
Indigo,” and Norman had used the proceeds to fi nance his studio.
As a musician, Petty had long been frustrated by the hourly rates routinely
charged by studios. So when he opened his own facility, he adopted the artistfriendly
policy of charging by the song rather than by the hour, an approach
that was far more conducive to creativity and experimentation than the time
constraints imposed on conventional sessions.
On February 25, 1957, Holly went to Petty’s studio to record a pair of
tracks, the new original “I’m Looking for Someone to Love” and an energetic
reworking of “That’ll Be the Day,” an unreleased Holly/Allison collaboration
that had been cut during the Nashville sessions. Buddy had borrowed the title
from a catchphrase used by John Wayne in the Western classic The Searchers .
For the occasion, Holly assembled a new lineup of Lubbock chums, with
old cohorts Larry Welborn and Jerry Allison returning on bass and drums.
Sonny Curtis had moved on to gigs backing Slim Whitman and playing with
the Philip Morris tobacco company’s touring country show, so Buddy brought
in rhythm guitarist Niki Sullivan. Sullivan’s lanky, bespectacled looks would
have allowed him to pass for Buddy’s brother; in fact, the two subsequently
learned that they were distant cousins. Joe B. Mauldin, at the time still attending
high school in Lubbock, would soon replace Welborn on standup bass,
and the new lineup would come to be known as the Crickets.
Petty signed on as the group’s manager and took control of the publishing
rights to Holly’s songs. Buddy would soon come to regret surrendering control
of his business affairs, and Petty’s questionable business practices would
become a source of considerable consternation for him. But at the time, Petty’s
involvement was a godsend. The producer’s open-ended studio policy and
willingness to let Holly make music on his own terms offered an invaluable
opportunity for him to develop his sound and master the mechanics of the
recording process. And Petty’s New York music industry connections enabled
him to fi nd his client a new record deal.
Petty used his relationship with Murray Deutch, executive vice president of
the powerful music publisher Peer-Southern, to bring “That’ll Be the Day”
and “I’m Looking for Someone to Love” to the attention of Bob Thiele, head
of Coral Records. Ironically, Coral was a subsidiary of Decca, the company
that had recently given Holly the boot. Thiele, whose varied background
encompassed jazz, R&B, and big-band pop, recognized Holly’s commercial
potential, and persuaded his skeptical superiors at Decca to release the tracks
as a single on the company’s R&B/jazz imprint Brunswick.
Recognizing Holly’s capacity for delivering hits in multiple styles, Thiele
cannily signed him to two contracts, enabling him to record under his own
name for Coral and under the Crickets banner for Brunswick. Although the
Crickets would back Holly on both group and solo releases, ballads were
more likely to be credited to Holly while songs released under the Crickets’
name tended toward harder-edged rock and roll material.
The Crickets’ group moniker may also have initially been an attempt to
disguise Holly’s involvement in the new version of “That’ll Be the Day,” since
his old Decca deal prohibited him from rerecording songs he’d already cut for
the label. But the dual identities would prove useful in multiple ways. For one
thing, the situation allowed the prolifi c Holly to release a wealth of varied
material in a short period of time. It also allowed him to advance his musical
evolution at an accelerated pace, while giving him more stylistic leeway than
he might be granted otherwise.
The “That’ll Be the Day”/“I’m Looking for Someone to Love” single, credited
to the Crickets, initially stirred up little attention when it was released in
June 1957. But a DJ in Buffalo, New York picked up on “That’ll Be the Day”
and began playing it with unusual frequency (although he didn’t lock himself
in his studio and play the track nonstop, as the spirited but highly inaccurate
1978 biopic The Buddy Holly Story would claim). The song continued to break out in various regional markets, including Boston, Cleveland, and Philadelphia,
even winning substantial airplay on several black R&B stations.
By the end of September, it had hit number one on the Billboard sales chart.
It also reached the Top Ten on the rhythm and blues charts, demonstrating
how effectively Buddy had absorbed the infl uence of African American
music.
“That’ll Be the Day” had yet to take off in June, when Coral released
“Words of Love” under Buddy’s name. With a buoyant melody, swoony
romantic lyrics, and Holly’s distinctive double-tracked guitar and vocals, the
song demonstrated that Buddy’s skills were evolving at a rapid pace. It marked
Holly’s fi rst use of overdubbing which, in the days before multi-track recording,
was still an uncommon practice that had to be achieved through painstaking
trial and error. Despite the sonic uniqueness of “Words of Love,” a cover
version by vocal quartet the Diamonds beat the Holly disc to the marketplace,
stealing its chart thunder in the process.
One important factor in Holly’s musical development was the fact that
Thiele allowed him to continue to record at Petty’s studio, far from the prying
eyes and undue infl uence of record company personnel. This was highly
unusual at a time when it was standard practice for artists to cut their records
in their label’s own studios, overseen by the company’s A&R men, who usually
chose the songs and musicians. Those formal sessions typically operated
within the strict time restrictions imposed by record company policy and
musicians union rules. The looser atmosphere in Clovis gave Holly the freedom
to try new sounds and arrangement ideas, resulting in records that
sounded like no one else’s.
As he continued to experiment in the studio, Holly’s songwriting gained in
confi dence and variety. Where in the past he had often relied on friends and
bandmates to provide material, by now he was writing most of his own. That
issue was blurred somewhat by Petty’s tendency to add his name to the writing
credits of Buddy’s songs—including several that Holly is known to have
recorded and/or performed before he’d even met Petty.
While Holly’s dual recording deals allowed him to release a prodigious
quantity of material within a short period, his chart successes made he and his
band—billed for live dates as Buddy Holly and the Crickets—an in-demand
live act. For most of its existence, the group maintained a punishing touring
regimen that allowed them to hone an exciting live show that maintained the
raw energy of their recordings.
The quartet’s mettle was tested in August 1957, when they were booked for
a package tour of East Coast theaters in African American neighborhoods,
alongside such prominent R&B acts as Clyde McPhatter, the Cadillacs, and
Lee Andrews and the Hearts. According to popular legend, they’d been hired
by an unsuspecting agent who’d assumed “That’ll Be the Day” to be the work
of a black act. The tour culminated in a well-received week-long run at New
York’s Apollo Theater.

“That’ll Be the Day” was still a hit in September when Coral released a
second Buddy Holly “solo” effort, “Peggy Sue.” The song was an exuberant
embodiment of Holly’s rock and roll vision, driven by his hiccupy vocal and
infectious guitar line, Allison’s rolling, echo-laden drumbeat, and a minimalist
lyric that was as insistent as the music. It had originally been titled “Cindy
Lou” after a former girlfriend, until Allison prevailed upon Buddy to retitle it
in honor of his fi ancée, Peggy Sue Gerron. The irresistible rocker became
Holly’s second smash single, climbing to the number three slot on the Billboard
chart. Meanwhile, “Peggy Sue”’s B-side, “Everyday,” revealed a knack
for gentle, heart-tugging balladry that Holly would continue to refi ne.
Following their run at the Apollo, Buddy and the Crickets appeared on
Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in Philadelphia and spent a week and a half
performing in Alan Freed’s all-star show at New York’s Paramount Theater,
alongside Little Richard, the Del-Vikings, the Diamonds, Mickey and Sylvia,
the Moonglows and Larry Williams. They then hit the road as part of the Biggest
Show of Stars for 1957, spending much of the next three months touring
the United States and Canada with a racially mixed all-star bill that included
Paul Anka, Lavern Baker, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, the Drifters, the Everly
Brothers, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.
The package tour allowed Buddy and the Crickets to interact with many of
their musical heroes, but it also forced them to confront the viciousness of
racism once the tour hit the deep South. Although they’d grown up in segregated
Lubbock, they were unprepared for such indignities as the tour’s black
and white acts being prohibited from staying in the same hotels or eating in
the same restaurants. At shows in Memphis, New Orleans, Birmingham,
Chattanooga, and Columbus, Georgia, the Crickets and the tour’s other white
acts did not perform because local laws forbade black and white entertainers
from appearing on the same stage.
One positive aspect of the Biggest Show of Stars tour was that it gave
Holly the chance to bond with the Everly Brothers, who shared his countryand-
western roots but were considerably more worldly. The impeccably
groomed duo had a signifi cant impact on Buddy’s sense of style, instilling a
taste for tailored suits. Phil Everly is also often credited for suggesting that he
trade his half-frame glasses for the black horn-rim frames that would soon
become his trademark. Holly and Bob Montgomery would later write and
demo a pair of songs, “Wishing” and “Love’s Made a Fool of You,” for the
Everlys, but the siblings’ commitment to only record songs controlled by the
powerful publisher Acuff-Rose prevented them from cutting those tailormade
tunes.
A second Crickets single on Brunswick appeared in October 1957, the playful,
urgent “Oh Boy,” by Petty-associated Texas rockabilly singer Sonny West
and his songwriting partner Bill Tilghman. The B-side was the equally impressive
Holly original “Not Fade Away,” which infused a blunt Bo Diddley–style
beat with an unmistakable Texas twang. “Oh Boy” occupied the Top Ten simultaneously with “Peggy Sue,” giving Buddy and company their third Top
Ten hit in January 1958.
CHIRPING UP THE CHARTS
November 1957 saw the release of the Crickets’ fi rst LP, The “Chirping”
Crickets , consisting of the four Brunswick singles sides plus eight new tracks.
At a time when rock and roll LPs routinely comprised one or two hits padded
with inferior fi ller, it was a consistently dynamic set that ranks as one of rock’s
most compelling debut albums.
The “Chirping” Crickets is divided between Holly compositions and Pettycontrolled
outside material. Not surprisingly, the originals—including “Maybe
Baby,” which Brunswick would release as a single the following February—
are the strongest, but Holly’s performances and the Crickets’ solid, subtly
inventive rhythmic support assured that even the least impressive material
was delivered with bracing conviction.
Buddy and the Crickets closed out 1957 with an appearance on Ed Sullivan’s
hugely infl uential TV variety show, at the time one of the few national
prime-time outlets for rock and roll acts. The quartet played two songs, and
Sullivan gave his offi cial thumbs-up by informing his mom-and-pop audience
that the visiting Texans were “nice boys.”

Show Biz Kids: Rock in the Mainstream
By the time Buddy Holly died, rock and roll had been integrated into the mainstream
of American show business. The changes that had occurred during the
previous fi ve years are evident from a look at the Top Five on the Billboard Pop
chart for a single week in February 1959—the month of Holly’s fatal plane
crash.
The number one song was “Stagger Lee” by the black rhythm and blues
singer Lloyd Price. He had recorded steadily since 1952, but this was his fi rst
release to reach the Pop chart. Price’s early hits, beginning with the R&B number
one “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” appeared on the independent Specialty label.
Now he was signed to ABC-Paramount, the fi rst major label created after the
start of the rock and roll era.
Other songs and artists in the Top Five during this particular week included
“Sixteen Candles” (number two) by a white doo-wop group, the Crests, and
“Donna” (number three), by the Chicano rock and roller Ritchie Valens, who
died in the same crash that killed Buddy Holly. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”
(number four) was a new version of an old standard (written in 1933) by the
Platters, the top-selling black vocal group of the 1950s. “All American Boy” by
Bill Parsons (number fi ve) was a drawling, guitar-driven story-song that parodied
Elvis Presley’s rise to stardom and subsequent induction into the army.
None of these songs had the raw excitement and untamed energy of “Lucille”
by Little Richard or “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins. But for teenage
music fans, this Top Five was a marked improvement over that of February
1956. During that year, three out of fi ve slots were held by non-rock artists:
Italian American crooner Dean Martin (“Memories Are Made of This”), pop
singer Kay Starr (“Rock and Roll Waltz,” which didn’t “rock” at all), and composer/
arranger Nelson Riddle (“Lisbon Antigua”).
Chart positions and record sales were not the only indicators of rock and
roll’s increasing (if often begrudging) acceptance by American show business
and society at large. In addition to American Bandstand , the music was represented
on television by various regional “dance party” shows hosted by local
disc jockeys. Ed Sullivan’s hugely popular CBS network variety show featured
rock and roll artists as early as 1955, beginning with an appearance that year
by Bo Diddley.

Four days after the Ed Sullivan appearance, Niki Sullivan left the Crickets.
Although the offi cial reason was exhaustion from the intense pace of the
band’s roadwork, many believe that the guitarist’s departure was precipitated
by Sullivan’s contentious relationship with Jerry Allison. The two musicians’
animosity had reportedly erupted into fi sticuffs while they were in New York
during the Apollo Theater engagement, resulting in Allison getting a black eye
that had to be airbrushed from the cover photo of The “Chirping” Crickets .
The fact that the group was able to continue as a trio—a format that was
unprecedented in rock and roll at the time—was a testament to Buddy’s guitar
skills.
Early 1958 saw Holly, Allison, and Mauldin embark on their fi rst overseas
excursion. In January, following a pair of shows in Honolulu, they undertook
a week-long tour of Australia, on a bill that also included Jerry Lee
Lewis and Paul Anka, along with Australian acts Johnny O’Keefe and Jodie
Sands.
Buddy and the Crickets then spent most of March touring in England,
where they played fi fty shows in twenty-fi ve days. Since the British touring
circuit was not yet geared toward rock acts, the band found itself touring with
a bill comprised of clean-cut mainstream pop performers.
Despite the inappropriate bill, the Crickets’ visit was greeted as a major
event by English fans. Buddy was even more popular in Britain than in the
United States; indeed, his impact there rivaled that of Elvis Presley, who never
performed in Britain. Additionally, Buddy and the Crickets were only the second
major American rock act (after Bill Haley and the Comets) to tour Britain.
The shows were greeted by unprecedented fan pandemonium, and would
continue to resonate in the consciousness of the young fans that would soon
mount the next decade’s British Invasion. That impressionable audience included the future Beatles, who would choose their combo’s entomological
moniker in honor of the Crickets.
It was easy for U.K. listeners to relate the Crickets’ country-rooted sound to
that of skiffl e, the do-it-yourself folk-country style that had seized the imagination
of young Brits who’d yet to gain access to electric instruments. Unlike
such bigger-than-life fi gures as Elvis, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent, Buddy
struck young British teens as a regular guy who’d succeeded on the strength
of his musical abilities rather than looks or mystique. His relatively low-key
image resonated strongly with British kids, who saw in Holly an idol whom
they could actually emulate. His U.K. tour was also the fi rst chance that British
audiences had to see an electric guitar—specifi cally Fender Stratocaster,
reputedly the fi rst Strat to arrive in England—in action.

Pioneers of Rock and Roll Guitar
The electric guitar was not the predominant solo instrument of 1950s rock
and roll. The tenor saxophone held that position into the early 1960s, with
guitar and piano vying for second place. But with the decline of the big bands
and their multiple soloists, the role of the guitar expanded within the new
small group format.
T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and Muddy Waters all used a call-and-response
pattern between voice and electric guitar that became a cornerstone of urban
blues. In country music, skilled Nashville pickers like Hank Garland and Grady
Martin enlivened countless sessions with their fl uid, jazzy fi lls and solos. The
guitar work of Scotty Moore was crucial to the sound and success of Elvis Presley’s
early hits: “Mystery Train,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and
many more.
Only a few of the lead 1950s rock and roll singers were accomplished instrumentalists.
Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were two notable exceptions,
while Link Wray, and Roy Buchanan were known for their singular six-string
skills.
On “C’mon Everybody” and “Summertime Blues” (both 1958), Eddie Cochran
(1938–60) overdubbed multiple acoustic and electric guitar parts to
create a primitive but powerful “wall of sound” that was highly advanced for
its time. He unleashed some intense guitar choruses on the instrumental
“Eddie’s Blues,” and played inventive Chuck Berry–style solos on up-tempo
rockers like “Pink Pegged Slacks.” Singer, songwriter, producer, engineer, and
guitarist: Eddie Cochran seemed to have it all together when he was killed in
a one-car accident while on tour in England. Nearly twenty years later, former
Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious paid tribute to his legend with a punk rock
version of the Cochran classic “Somethin’ Else.”
Link Wray (1929–2005) couldn’t match Eddie Cochran for versatility, popularity,
or good looks. But his signature 1958 instrumental hit “Rumble” was
a seminal infl uence on successive generations of rock and roll guitarists.
The North Carolina native (who was part Shawnee Indian) created the power
chord—the essential building block of hard rock and heavy metal. He expanded
rock’s sonic palette with his pioneering use of fuzz, feedback, and
distortion, achieving some of these effects simply by puncturing the speaker
cone of his amplifi er. Link Wray’s raw, rocking style was exposed to a new
generation of fans when his 1950s songs were used in such fi lms as Pulp Fiction
(“Ace of Spades”) and Twelve Monkeys (“Comanche”). Wray was seventy-four
years old, still touring, and still capable of igniting a fi restorm of high-volume
rock and roll when he was named one of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All
Time by Rolling Stone magazine in 2003.
Roy Buchanan (1939–88) was a “musician’s musician.” Long before the invention
of the wah-wah pedal and the distortion booster, he was coaxing such
effects from his Fender Telecaster with nothing more than six strings, ten fi ngers,
and a medium-sized amplifi er turned up to maximum volume. Buchanan
could make his instrument sustain like a pedal steel guitar, or sound like
two instruments (guitar and bass) played simultaneously. Throughout the
1960s, this dazzling innovator toiled for workman’s wages in a series of anonymous,
unrecorded groups on the bar circuit of suburban Washington, DC. In
1971, “The Best Unknown Guitarist in the World” (as he was billed) starred in
a public television special that included scenes of Roy expertly playing both
country music with Merle Haggard and rhythm and blues with Johnny Otis.
This national exposure led to the release of Buchanan’s self-titled major label
debut album in the following year and launched a solo career that continued
until his untimely death.


Buddy Holly , the artist’s fi rst offi cial solo LP, was released in the United
States in February 1958. Beyond its dreamy cover photo (atypically depicting
Buddy without his glasses), the disc featured such soon-to-be-classic rockers
as “Peggy Sue,” “Rave On,” and “I’m Gonna Love You Too” along with an
assortment of ballads, most notably the lilting “Listen to Me.” The album
also found Holly paying tribute to Elvis and Little Richard, respectively, with
high-energy covers of “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care” and “Ready
Teddy.”
Upon their return from Britain, Holly and the Crickets continued their grueling
tour schedule with a forty-four-day run on Alan Freed’s Big Beat Show,
kicking off with a show at the Brooklyn Paramount. Other artists on the tour
included Chuck Berry, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Frankie
Lymon and the Teenagers, the Shirelles, and Larry Williams.
The fact that Coral and Brunswick were subsidiaries of Decca didn’t keep
the parent company from competing with Holly’s new releases, exploiting its
cache of Holly recordings cut the previous year. In April, the company released
That’ll Be the Day , an LP comprising the tracks Buddy had cut in Nashville with Owen Bradley. The collection’s title confused purchasers, who expected
to hear the familiar hit but got the inferior original instead.
On their way home from the Alan Freed tour, Buddy, J.I., and Joe B. stopped
off in Dallas and purchased a trio of new motorcycles, riding them home to
make a splashy return to Lubbock. The fact that they now felt comfortable
making such an impulsive purchase hinted that their commercial successes
and overseas adventures had enhanced their sense of independence—and that
they might be outgrowing the paternalistic infl uence of Norman Petty, who
still tightly controlled the group’s fi nances.
For the band’s session in Clovis in May, Buddy relinquished lead guitar
duties to Tommy Allsup, a talented twenty-six-year-old from Oklahoma with
a background in western swing. Allsup contributed a distinctive lead on the
fl uid rocker “It’s So Easy” and added a Latin fl ourish to the sweet ballad
“Heartbeat,” impressing Holly enough to invite Allsup to join up and make
the Crickets a quartet once again.
In June, Holly visited Manhattan and—without Norman Petty or the Crickets—
recorded a pair of Bobby Darin numbers, the splashy, gospel-fl avored
“Early in the Morning” and the upbeat pop tune “Now We’re One.” The session,
on which Holly was backed by an assortment of New York jazz/R&B
players, was done at the behest of Coral Records, which wanted the tracks
out as a single after Darin’s version had to be withdrawn from release for
contractual reasons. Although “Early in the Morning” rose no higher than
number thirty-one on the Billboard singles chart, the session provided Holly
with valuable experience working in a different musical mode—and confi rmation
that he could make compelling music outside of the creative comfort
zone provided by his usual producer and band.
While visiting Peer-Southern’s Manhattan offi ce, Holly met Maria Elena
Santiago, Murray Deutch’s receptionist. He fell in love with the Puerto Rico–
born beauty immediately, asking her out within thirty seconds of their fi rst
meeting and proposing marriage on their fi rst date. Buddy and Maria (whose
aunt, Provi Garcia, ran Peer’s Latin division) were married on August 15,
1958, less than two months after their fi rst meeting. Following a quiet wedding
ceremony at Buddy’s parents’ house, they honeymooned in Acapulco
with fellow newlyweds Jerry and Peggy Sue Allison.
A disapproving Norman Petty reportedly advised that the nuptials be kept
quiet, to keep Buddy’s female fans from being alienated by his new status—
and, perhaps, to keep less enlightened observers from taking offense at his
“mixed” marriage. It has also been theorized that Petty may have been threatened
by Maria’s knowledge of the music business, or by her access to Peer-
Southern fi les that might reveal irregularities in Petty’s handling of her
husband’s affairs.
Whatever his reasons, Petty’s attitude toward Buddy’s marriage—and his
condescending attitude toward the new bride—couldn’t have done much to
bolster Holly’s diminishing regard for his mentor. The father fi gure who’d once seemed so knowledgeable and well connected had begun to seem unimaginative
and provincial, and his vague accounting practices caused Holly to
question the trust he’d placed in Petty when he’d handed over control of his
career. Holly, Allison, and Mauldin also resented the fact that, despite their
status as international rock and roll stars, they still had to go to Petty any time
they needed cash.
Despite his growing reservations, Holly continued to record at Petty’s studio.
In September, he brought renowned R&B saxophonist King Curtis in
from New York to play on a pair of tracks, “Reminiscing” and “Come Back
Baby.” At the same session, Buddy produced a debut single, the classic Cajun
tune “Jole Blon,” for his old Lubbock friend Waylon Jennings. Jennings, a
promising singer and sometime DJ on Lubbock’s KLLL, would emerge more
than a decade later as one of country music’s most infl uential stars.
While he continued to make fi rst-rate music, Holly’s record sales had begun
to slip somewhat. “It’s So Easy” is now considered a classic, but it failed to
make Billboard ’s Top 100 when it was released in September 1958. The
breathy ballad “Heartbeat,” co-written with old pal Bob Montgomery, stalled
at number eighty-two when it was released under Buddy’s name two months
later.
In October 1958, Buddy and the Crickets embarked on another edition of
the Biggest Show of Stars, this time sharing the bill with the Coasters, Bobby
Darin, Dion and the Belmonts, and Clyde McPhatter.
If Holly was demoralized by his recent disappointing sales, he didn’t show
it, continuing to forge ahead with new challenges. He relocated to Manhattan,
where he and Maria bought an apartment in Greenwich Village. Buddy
enthusiastically embraced life in New York, enjoying being at the center of the
entertainment business and the creative community—and relishing the opportunity
to absorb new styles of music. He went to coffeehouses and enjoyed
jazz gigs at the Village Vanguard, and developed an affi nity for Latin music
and fl amenco guitar. He formulated plans to establish his own record label
and build a recording studio in Lubbock, discussed the possibility of cutting
gospel and Latin-style albums, and took steps to pursue his interest in writing
and producing for other artists.

Rock and Roll in the Movies
Rock and roll also found a place in Hollywood movies. Most were of the “teen
exploitation” variety, with fl imsy plots, awkward acting, and low-budget production
values. One of the fi rst and best of the genre, The Girl Can’t Help It
(1956), was a funny, fast-paced fi lm with memorable appearances by Fats
Domino, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and Eddie Cochran. Don’t Knock the
Rock (1957), on the other hand, was an excruciating hour of ersatz rock and
roll according to a review in Hollywood Rock: A Guide to Rock ‘n’ Roll in the
Movies .
Let’s Rock! (1958) also may have been simply another rock movie with a
non-rock lead and formulaic plot—an attempt to appeal to all ages. But a few
choice lines of dialogue show just how far the new sound had come in a few
short years. “When are you gonna come to the party?” manager Charlie (Conrad
Janis) lectures recalcitrant singer Tommy Adano (Julius LaRosa). “Rock and
roll’s been around a long time. It’s gonna be around a lot longer.”

In New York, Holly recorded a quartet of ballads—“True Love Ways,”
“Raining in My Heart,” the Norman Petty composition “Moondreams,” and
the Paul Anka–penned “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore”—featuring lush string
arrangements. The direction of those songs—his last formal recordings—have
led some fans to speculate that Buddy was abandoning rock and roll in favor
of a sophisticated adult pop style. But it seems more reasonable to assume
that this was a one-off experiment by an adventurous artist exploring his
options.
In early November, Holly informed Norman Petty that he was severing
their business and creative relationship. He had initially convinced Allison
and Mauldin to join him in breaking away from Petty and joining him in New
York. But Petty managed to persuade the drummer and bassist that their prospects
would be brighter if they’d stay with him and continue to record as the
Crickets.
Although he was hurt and disappointed by his bandmates’ decision to stick
with Petty, he gave them his blessing, granting them the rights to the Crickets
name. More troubling was Petty’s announcement that he would be withholding
Buddy’s record and publishing royalties until their disputes were
resolved.

COLD WINTER
Although Holly was exhilarated by his new prospects and relieved to be free
of the grind of touring, Petty’s refusal to pay his royalties put him in a fi nancial
bind. With Maria pregnant, his immediate priority in late 1958 was providing
support for his growing family. So when he was offered the chance
to headline the Winter Dance Party, a three-week tour of Midwestern onenighters,
he reluctantly accepted.
With Allison and Mauldin back in Texas attempting to relaunch the Crickets,
Holly assembled a new set of musicians to accompany him and double as
backup for the Winter Dance Party’s other acts. In addition to tapping latterday
Cricket Tommy Allsup to play guitar, he hired his protégé Waylon Jennings
to play bass, despite Jennings’s unfamiliarity with the instrument; Buddy
bought his friend an electric bass and gave him two weeks to learn to play it.
The lineup was completed by another Texan, drummer Carl Bunch. Despite
his agreement to allow Allison and Mauldin to keep the Crickets name, Buddy’s
new touring band was billed as the Crickets.
Unlike some of the epic, star-studded package tours he’d done previously,
the Winter Dance Party was a rather modest affair. Aside from Buddy, the bill
featured three up-and-coming acts. Along with soulful Bronx doo-wop foursome
Dion and the Belmonts, the show featured Ritchie Valens (née Valenzuela),
a seventeen-year-old singer/guitarist from Pacoima, California, who’d
become the fi rst Hispanic rocker to hit the charts with his then-current Top
Ten single “Donna,” and the Big Bopper, aka J.P. Richardson, a garrulous
songwriter and disc jockey from Beaumont, Texas, who’d recently scored a
million-selling novelty smash with “Chantilly Lace.” Rounding out the bill
was now-forgotten crooner Frankie Sardo, who opened the shows with renditions
of other artists’ hits.
Even by the primitive standards of late 1950s touring, conditions on the
Winter Dance Party were spartan. Rather than the big-city theaters that were
the destinations of larger tours, most of the shows were booked into ballrooms
in smaller, out-of-the-way markets, where the crowds consisted of
music-starved teens—who rarely got the chance to see big-name rockers on
stage. The performers traversed the frozen expanses of the upper Midwest in
a series of cramped, worn-down, poorly heated school buses, which regularly
broke down and had to be replaced by equally rickety vehicles.
To make matters worse, that winter was one of the most brutal in recent
memory, with bitterly cold temperatures that sometimes dipped to −30°F,
causing dangerously icy road conditions. It didn’t help that the itinerary’s
convoluted routing forced the tour party to travel as far as 500 miles between
shows. The schedule was so tight that the performers usually had to sleep on
the bus as it traveled to the next night’s venue, with little time for such niceties
as laundry or showers.
By February 2, when the bedraggled troupe arrived at the Surf Ballroom in
Clear Lake, Iowa, to perform their eleventh show in as many days, the tour
had already been through six different buses. By then, drummer Carl Bunch
had had to leave the tour after being hospitalized for frostbite, forcing Holly
and Belmonts member Carlo Mastrangelo to take over drumming duties.
Following the Surf Ballroom performance, Buddy sought a respite from the
miserable traveling conditions by chartering a private plane to carry himself
and his sidemen to Fargo, North Dakota, the closest airport to the next tour
date in Moorhead, Minnesota. The post-show fl ight would give them enough
time to do their laundry and get a decent night’s sleep in actual hotel room
beds. At the last minute, the Big Bopper, who’d been suffering from the fl u,
talked Jennings into giving up his seat, while Allsup surrendered his seat to
Valens after losing a coin toss.
In the snowy early morning hours of February 3, 1959, shortly after taking
off from the airport in nearby Mason City, the four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft carrying Holly, Valens, and Richardson crashed into a soybean fi eld.
All three passengers were killed instantly, as was twenty-one-year-old pilot
Roger Peterson.
In the day’s news coverage, the event was overshadowed by another, deadlier
plane crash, which took sixty-fi ve lives at New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
But the emotional impact of the Clear Lake crash registered immediately with
young people on both sides of the Atlantic. Not only was it many teenagers’
fi rst exposure to fatal tragedy, it was also the fi rst time that the young rock
and roll genre had been forced to confront the specter of mortality. No major
rocker had ever died before, so for three of them to perish in such an abrupt
and random manner was particularly shocking. In the ensuing decades, the
crash would retain a potent mythological resonance, symbolizing the music’s
loss of innocence and offering a premonition of the turbulence and loss that
would dominate the next decade.
Buddy Holly’s funeral took place in Lubbock on the following Saturday.
His pallbearers were six of his closest musical associates: Jerry Allison, Joe B.
Mauldin, Niki Sullivan, Sonny Curtis, Bob Montgomery, and Phil Everly. An
estimated 1,800 mourners packed the Tabernacle Baptist Church for the
memorial service, which was performed by the same pastor who’d presided
over Buddy and Maria Elena’s wedding ceremony just fi ve months earlier.
Although the pregnant widow fl ew in for the funeral, she couldn’t bring herself
to attend the service or visit her late husband’s grave; she had a miscarriage
soon after.
The deaths of Holly, Valens, and Richardson cast a veil of darkness over the
rock and roll world, and the pall wouldn’t completely lift until the Beatles’
arrival on the scene a few years later. The three fallen heroes were widely
eulogized in song; perhaps the most poignant tribute was “Three Stars,” written
by Bakersfi eld, California, disc jockey Tommy Dee and recorded by Eddie
Cochran, among others.
Two years after the crash, eccentric but innovative English producer Joe
Meek and singer Mike Berry delivered one of the better tribute discs with
“Tribute to Buddy Holly” which borrowed its subject’s musical style to offer
a melancholy musical epitaph. Meek would later claim to be in contact with
Buddy, and that the deceased icon was giving him songwriting help from the
spirit world; in 1967, Meek committed a violent murder/suicide on the anniversary
of Holly’s death. Somewhat less obsessive were Manchester-based admirers
Allan Clarke, Tony Hicks, and Graham Nash, who were so affected by Buddy’s
work that they named their popular British Invasion combo the Hollies.
Meanwhile, Holly’s record company, with Norman Petty’s help, would
continue exploiting the departed star’s recorded legacy for years to come.
Petty cobbled together a motley series of “new” Holly LPs from an assortment
of outtakes, demos, and early tapes of varying quality, often with awkward
new instrumental overdubs provided by New Mexico combo the Fireballs,
who made several notable Petty-produced records of their own.

Many of the posthumous Holly releases were top sellers in Britain, where
Buddy’s profi le remained high. It was a different story in America, though. By
the end of the 1960s, Holly had been largely forgotten in his home country,
where none of his essential releases remained in print. But his Stateside reputation
would undergo a major resurgence in the 1970s. By the end of that
decade, Holly had become the fi rst rock and roll artist to be honored with a
major U.S. box set retrospective.
One early factor in the revival of interest in Holly was Don McLean’s 1971
hit “American Pie,” which used “the day the music died” as the departure
point for a metaphorical journey through the musical, social, and political
changes of the 1960s.
In 1975, longtime Holly fanatic Paul McCartney’s company MPL Communications
purchased Buddy’s publishing catalog from a nearly bankrupt Norman
Petty. The deal initially did little to benefi t Holly’s survivors and
collaborators, who had long ago accepted meager cash settlements from Petty
rather than attempt to sort out his tangled fi nancial records. But McCartney’s
patronage proved to be a boon, for Buddy’s posthumous prestige as well as
the income of his heirs, bandmates, and co-writers, since McCartney’s savvy
exploitation of the Holly songbook (including an annual week of Holly tributes
in London) did much to restore the artist and his songs to prominence.
Also helping to make Holly a household name in America again was 1978’s
The Buddy Holly Story . The fi lm was wildly inaccurate, romanticizing and
simplifying Holly’s life to the point where Buddy’s ultra-supportive parents
were reduced to disapproving caricatures, as well as replacing the real Crickets
with fi ctional characters, and leaving Norman Petty out entirely. Despite
the movie’s blatant disregard for historical accuracy, Gary Busey’s impassioned,
Academy Award–nominated performance captured Holly’s vibrant
essence, establishing the movie’s subject as a living, breathing, rocking presence
rather than an arcane oldies act.
The city fathers of Lubbock eventually awakened to the commercial benefi
ts of promoting its status as Holly’s hometown. In the 1980s, Lubbock
unveiled a bronze statue of Buddy, followed by a park bearing his name,
a memorial concert celebrating the fi ftieth anniversary of his birth, and a
Walk of Fame honoring notable Lubbock-born musicians. Lubbock’s Texas
Tech University now houses one of the world’s largest collections of Holly
memorabilia.
When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was established in 1986, Buddy
Holly was among the fi rst group of inductees. A 1990 auction of Holly memorabilia
in New York raised over $703,000, with Gary Busey paying $242,000
for one of his guitars and the Hard Rock Café purchasing a pair of his eyeglasses
for $45,100. The 1990s saw the debut of Buddy , a successful stage
musical documenting his career; the show ran for seven years in London’s
West End. And alt rockers Weezer invoked Holly’s name as the title of their
1994 debut hit.

In Buddy’s absence, the Crickets, in various confi gurations, have maintained
a remarkably durable recording and performing career. As of 2007, the band
continues to keep the Holly songbook alive on stage, with Allison, Mauldin,
and Sonny Curtis still anchoring the lineup.
The crash in Clear Lake ended the life and career of an artist whose musical
potential, perhaps more than any other rock and roll performer of his era,
seemed limitless. There’s no telling what Buddy Holly might have achieved if
he’d lived. Whatever direction he would have taken, it’s hard to imagine that
the clear-eyed, level-headed Holly wouldn’t have had a long and productive
career.
Buddy Holly’s musical legacy retains the same youthful freshness and
unpretentious energy that fi rst engaged listeners in the late 1950s. His songs
continue to be covered by a wide variety of artists, while his musical and technical
innovations have become deeply woven into the fabric of contemporary
music.

TIMELINE
September 1, 1953
Buddy Holly and Bob Montgomery audition for Lubbock radio station KDAV, and
are given a half-hour Sunday afternoon show, on which they perform country and
bluegrass material.
October 14, 1955
Buddy and Bob, with Larry Welborn on bass, open for Bill Haley and the Comets in
Lubbock and are seen by Nashville agent Eddie Crandall.
October 15, 1955
Buddy, Bob, and Larry open for Elvis Presley in Lubbock.
January 26, 1956
Buddy Holly’s fi rst offi cial recording session, with veteran country producer Owen
Bradley at Decca Records’ Nashville studios. The session yields four tracks, including
“Blue Days, Black Nights” and “Love Me,” which will be released by Decca as
Holly’s Decca debut single.
February 25, 1957
Buddy Holly and the Crickets record “That’ll Be the Day” at Norman Petty’s studio
in Clovis, New Mexico. The single, credited to the Crickets, will become the Holly’s
fi rst single on the Brunswick label.
September 1, 1957
The band begins its fi rst major tour with a four-night run at the Brooklyn Paramount
Theater, launching the three-month Biggest Show of Stars tour.
September 23, 1957
“That’ll Be the Day” becomes the number one single on Billboard ’s pop chart.
November 27, 1957
The Crickets’ fi rst LP, The “Chirping” Crickets , is released by Brunswick Records.
January 25, 1958
“Oh Boy!” becomes Buddy Holly’s third Top Ten hit.
January 30, 1958
Buddy Holly and the Crickets begin a seven-date tour of Australia.
February 20, 1958
Buddy’s fi rst offi cial solo album, Buddy Holly , is released by Coral Records.
March 1, 1958
Buddy Holly and the Crickets begin a month-long tour of England.
August 15, 1958
Buddy Holly marries Maria Elena Santiago in a quiet ceremony at Buddy’s parents’
house in Lubbock.
January 23, 1959
The Winter Dance Party, headlined by Buddy minus the Crickets, kicks off with a
performance at the Million Dollar Ballroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
February 3, 1959
After performing at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly charters a small
private plane to get him to the tour’s next show in Fargo, North Dakota. The plane
crashes shortly after takeoff, killing Holly and tourmates Ritchie Valens and the Big
Bopper, as well as pilot Roger Peterson.
March 9, 1959
“It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” recorded at Holly’s last studio session, becomes a posthumous
hit.
July 1, 1976
Paul McCartney purchases Buddy’s entire publishing catalog from Norman Petty.
Two months later, McCartney will stage the first annual Buddy Holly Week in
London, celebrating the artist’s music.
May 18, 1978
The Buddy Holly Story , a fi ctionalized fi lm biography starring Gary Busey as Holly, is
released. The fi lm will become a hit, with Busey’s performance getting an Academy
Award nomination .