Buddy Holly

Buddy Holly: The Blueprint for Every Band After

In August 1957 four white kids from Lubbock, Texas walked onto the stage of Harlem's Apollo Theater — the first white act the venue had ever booked — and met a wall of indifference. They broke the room open by playing Bo Diddley. Within weeks "That'll Be the Day" was number one. Eighteen months later Buddy Holly was dead in an Iowa cornfield at twenty-two, having cut roughly fifty tracks, most of them his own songs, in a working career of barely two years.

A Lubbock Apprenticeship

Charles Hardin Holley was born on 7 September 1936 in Lubbock, the youngest of four children of L. O. Holley, a tailor and salesman, and Ella Pauline Drake. The Depression kept the family moving around town as his father changed jobs; everyone in the house except his father sang or played something. He made his stage debut at five, singing "Down the River of Memories" for five dollars. Piano lessons at eleven lasted nine months; he switched to guitar instead.

The music he absorbed was country — Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Bill Monroe, Bob Wills, the Carter Family — but late at night he tuned into rhythm-and-blues stations, and by his teens he was quietly welding two traditions that Texas radio kept strictly apart. With schoolfriend Bob Montgomery he held down a slot on KDAV's Sunday Party from 1953, while studying printing and drafting at Lubbock High.

The Nashville Failure

In 1955 he opened three times for Elvis Presley in Lubbock. That settled it: a country-western act became a rock and roll act. Decca signed him in February 1956 — misspelling "Holley" on the contract, which is how he became Holly. Producer Owen Bradley put him through the Nashville machine, orchestrated and controlled, and Holly chafed at the lack of creative say. "Blue Days, Black Nights" and "Modern Don Juan" sold nothing. Decca declined to renew on 22 January 1957. He was twenty, and finished.

Clovis, New Mexico

Ninety miles away, an independent producer named Norman Petty ran a studio in Clovis that charged by the song rather than by the hour — the most consequential pricing decision in early rock and roll, because it meant Holly's band could camp there for days. With Jerry Allison on drums, Joe B. Mauldin on bass and Niki Sullivan on rhythm guitar, he recut a song wasted in Nashville, its title lifted from a line John Wayne kept repeating in *The Searchers*.

Still bound to Decca, they released it under a band name: the Crickets. Britannica's verdict on that room is unambiguous — they were "the first rock and rollers to approach the recording process" as something to experiment with, working up unusual microphone placements, echo-chamber effects and overdubbing. On "Words of Love" Holly double-tracked his own voice, a technique the Beatles would later make a house style.

Inventing the Band

Released on 27 July 1957, "That'll Be the Day" topped the American best-sellers chart that September and spent three weeks at number one in Britain. "Peggy Sue" reached number three pop and number two R&B; "Oh, Boy!" made the top ten with "Not Fade Away" on its flip. Then it ran very fast: *American Bandstand*, two *Ed Sullivan* appearances, Australia with Jerry Lee Lewis, and fifty British shows in twenty-five days in March 1958 — the tour where a teenage Mick Jagger watched him at Woolwich and Eric Clapton, seeing him on television, thought "it was like seeing an instrument from outer space."

What mattered more than any single record was the shape of the thing. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame credits Holly with pioneering the configuration standard ever since: two guitars, bass and drums, writing and playing its own material. Before him, singers fronted hired bands and A&R men chose the songs. His Fender Stratocaster carried both chunky rhythm and high lead lines, while his voice did something nobody had done — the hiccup, the vault into falsetto, the stutter set against percussive downstrokes. The horn-rimmed glasses were Don Everly's suggestion; teenagers soon started asking opticians for "Buddy Holly glasses."

New York and the String Session

In June 1958 he met María Elena Santiago, a receptionist at the Peer-Southern publishing house, and proposed on their first date, producing a ring inside a red rose. They married on 15 August in Lubbock. That December he parted from Petty and the Crickets on logistics — Holly wanted New York, where the publishers were; the band wanted Texas. Petty withheld his money, which is why he was back on a bus in January.

The New York months show where he was heading. He enrolled at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, wanted to learn flamenco fingerstyle, and talked about pairing gospel and soul singers with rock and rollers — Ray Charles, Mahalia Jackson. On 21 October 1958, at the Pythian Temple, conductor Dick Jacobs put eighteen players drawn from the NBC Symphony behind him for four songs, among them "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" and Holly's own "True Love Ways." It was his last studio session, and it sounds like a man of twenty-two calmly opening a second career.

The Winter Dance Party

The tour that killed him was a badly organised midwestern package with unheated buses that broke down twice in sub-zero weather; drummer Carl Bunch was hospitalised with frostbite. After the Clear Lake, Iowa show on 2 February 1959, Holly chartered a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. Tommy Allsup lost a coin toss for a seat to Ritchie Valens; Waylon Jennings gave his up to J. P. Richardson. Shortly after 1 a.m. on 3 February, pilot Roger Peterson — not certified to fly on instruments alone — took off into weather he could not read and went down in a cornfield five miles out. All four died. Holly was buried with his Stratocaster carved into the headstone.

Why Buddy Is Called a Genius

The case is not that Holly was a virtuoso. He wasn't, and his guitar playing has been outclassed by thousands who learned it from him. The case is architectural. In roughly twenty-four months of professional work he assembled the template — a self-contained four-piece writing and arranging its own material, treating the studio as an instrument rather than a stenographer — that popular music has run on ever since. AllMusic calls him "the single most influential creative force in early rock and roll," and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducting him in its first class in 1986, states flatly that "rock & roll as we know it wouldn't exist without Buddy Holly." The testimony is concrete: Keith Richards, who built his early playing on "Not Fade Away," said simply, "He's in everybody"; Bruce Springsteen plays Holly every night before going on, "to keep me honest."

The honest counter-case is that the songs are slight — two minutes, a handful of chords, teenage love and heartbreak with no reach toward profundity — and that he died before anyone could test whether he had a second act. The myth of the crash has done real work in inflating him. Don McLean, who built that myth, offered the fairest defence: Holly "would have the same stature musically whether he would have lived or died, because of his accomplishments." Genius here means synthesis and design, not depth.

Legacy

The Beatles named themselves in echo of his Crickets; Bob Dylan, seventeen and three feet from the stage in Duluth days before the crash, invoked the memory when he accepted a Grammy nearly forty years later. Don McLean's "American Pie" turned 3 February 1959 into "the day the music died." Holly entered both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986, took a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, and received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star on what would have been his seventy-fifth birthday. Lubbock has a statue, a Buddy Holly Center and a performing arts hall in his name. He was famous for eighteen months and influential ever since.

Achievements

• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — 1986
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1997
• Educated at Lubbock High School
• Worked as guitarist, singer and songwriter