Buddy Holly

• 1. Introduction

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  Buddy Holly was 22 years old when he died in a cornfield five miles northwest of Clear Lake, Iowa, on the 3rd of February 1959. He had been performing for less than a decade. He had topped the charts on two continents. He had shaped the sound of rock and roll in ways that artists from Bob Dylan to the Beatles would spend entire careers tracing back to him. And yet, at the moment the plane went down, he was on the road not by choice but by financial necessity, forced back on tour because his money was frozen in a legal dispute he had not caused.

  The questions his life raises are not small ones. How does a kid from Lubbock, Texas, working in a genre that barely had a name, build something so durable that the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and Elton John all cite him as foundational? What was he actually trying to do before the crash cut everything short? And what does it mean that the band he inspired named themselves after an insect, in homage to the Crickets, which was itself a name chosen to get around a record label contract?

  His full legal name was Charles Hardin Holley, and the famous spelling -- Holly, without the e -- came from a clerical error at Decca Records. Even his name arrived at him sideways.

• 2. Lubbock Roots

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  Lawrence Odell Holley and Ella Pauline Drake had four children; Charles Hardin, born on the 7th of September 1936, was the youngest. The family moved frequently within Lubbock during the Great Depression as L.O. changed jobs. From early childhood, the youngest Holley was called Buddy.

  Music was woven into the household from the start. Every family member except L.O. could play an instrument or sing. When the elder Holley brothers entered local talent contests, a young Buddy once joined them on violin. Because he could not actually play, his brother Larry greased the bow so it would produce no sound. They won anyway.

  After World War II, Larry returned from the Pacific with a guitar he had bought from a shipmate. At eleven, at his mother's urging, Buddy tried piano lessons but quit after nine months. He switched to guitar after watching a classmate play and sing on a school bus. His parents first bought him a steel guitar, but he wanted one like his brother's. They eventually found him an acoustic guitar at a local pawnshop, and Travis taught him how to play it.

  Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and Bob Wills were among the early sounds that shaped his ear. At Roscoe Wilson Elementary, Holly became close with Bob Montgomery. The two listened together to Grand Ole Opry on WSM, Louisiana Hayride on KWKH, and Big D Jamboree, practicing songs by the Louvin Brothers and Johnnie and Jack. Later, sitting in his car at night with Sonny Curtis, Holly would tune to distant radio stations that could only be received after local transmissions ceased. Those late-night blues and rhythm and blues broadcasts began pulling his country instincts in a new direction.

• 3. The Decca Dead End

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  In October 1955, Pappy Dave Stone booked Bill Haley and His Comets and placed Holly as the opening act. Nashville scout Eddie Crandall was in the audience. Impressed, Crandall persuaded Grand Ole Opry manager Jim Denny to pursue a recording contract for Holly. Stone sent a demo tape, Denny forwarded it to Paul Cohen, and in February 1956 Holly was signed to Decca Records. The contract contained the clerical error that would define his public name: Decca misspelled Holley as Holly, and it stuck.

  On the 26th of January 1956, Holly attended his first formal recording session in Nashville, produced by Owen Bradley. Bradley was known for orchestrated country productions for artists like Patsy Cline. Holly attended two more Nashville sessions, but with Bradley selecting the musicians and arrangements, Holly grew increasingly frustrated at having no creative control. Decca released two singles -- "Blue Days, Black Nights" and then "Modern Don Juan" -- and neither made an impression.

  On the 22nd of January 1957, Decca told Holly his contract would not be renewed. They also insisted he could not record the same songs for anyone else for five years. It was a door closing. Holly recognized it as an opening.

• 4. Clovis and the Crickets

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  Inspired by the independent success of Buddy Knox's "Party Doll" and Jimmy Bowen's "I'm Stickin' with You", Holly visited producer Norman Petty, who had made both records, at his studio in Clovis, New Mexico. Holly brought along drummer Jerry Allison, bassist Joe B. Mauldin, and rhythm guitarist Niki Sullivan. Together they recorded a demo of "That'll Be the Day".

  The song's title had a specific origin: in June 1956, Holly, his brother Larry, Allison, and Sonny Curtis had gone to see the film The Searchers, in which John Wayne repeatedly used the phrase "That'll be the day." That line of dialogue became a song.

  Petty sent the record to Brunswick Records in New York. Because Holly was still technically under contract with Decca, the single could not carry his name. Allison proposed calling the band the Crickets, and Brunswick agreed to release it under that name. The maneuver was more layered than even Holly knew: Petty had reasoned that disc jockeys would play records from two separate acts where they would hesitate to play multiple new records by the same artist. In a 1957 radio interview with Dale Lowery, Holly said, "We have three records going out right now... there's one out, it's the same group but it's under my name -- I don't know why they did it that way." He was genuinely unaware of the strategy his own manager had built around him.

  "That'll Be the Day" topped the US chart on the 23rd of September 1957 and held the number one spot on the UK Singles Chart for three weeks in November. Three days before the US chart peak, Coral released "Peggy Sue", which reached number three on Billboard's pop chart and number two on the R&B chart. The album The "Chirping" Crickets, released on the 27th of November 1957, reached number five on the UK Albums Chart. Holly and the Crickets performed at New York's Apollo Theater on August 16-22 -- the first white act to play there -- and were not well received until they included "Bo Diddley" in the set.

• 5. New York and Maria Elena

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  In June 1958, during a visit to the New York offices of music publisher Peer-Southern, Holly met Maria Elena Santiago, a receptionist for executive Murray Deutch. He arranged for her to join a luncheon at Howard Johnson's, then asked her to dinner that night at P. J. Clarke's. On that first date, he proposed marriage. He brought out a red rose with a ring hidden inside and asked her to marry him. She later described the moment: "I melted." They married on the 15th of August 1958 at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Lubbock, less than two months after they met.

  Norman Petty had tried to talk Holly out of the marriage, believing it would damage his public image. Holly ignored him. In New York, the couple frequented venues including the Village Gate, the Blue Note, and Village Vanguard. Santiago later said Holly was learning fingerstyle flamenco guitar and regularly visited her aunt's home to play piano there. He had plans to record an album with Ray Charles and Mahalia Jackson and had enrolled in acting classes at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio.

  It was through Santiago and her aunt Provi Garcia, an executive in the Latin American music department at Peer-Southern, that Holly began to understand what Petty had been doing with the band's finances. Petty had been directing the band's royalties from Coral-Brunswick into his own company's account. At the recommendation of the Everly Brothers, Holly hired lawyer Harold Orenstein to recover those royalties. The money remained frozen, however, because New York promoter Manny Greenfield had sued Holly over a fee dispute, and under New York law the royalties could not leave the state until the case was resolved.

  On the 21st of October 1958, Holly held his final studio session at the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street, with Maria Elena in attendance. Known to Holly fans as "the string sessions", it featured an 18-piece ensemble of former NBC Symphony Orchestra members, produced and conducted by Dick Jacobs. The four songs recorded that day included "True Love Ways", written by Holly himself, and "It Doesn't Matter Anymore", written by Paul Anka. They were the only recordings Coral ever mixed in stereo, though only "Raining in My Heart" was released that way at the time.

• 6. Winter Dance Party

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  Holly ended his association with Petty in December 1958. The split was described as amicable -- Holly had decided to settle permanently in New York, and the rest of the Crickets preferred to remain in their home state. But with apartment rent due and his royalties still frozen, Holly was forced back on tour.

  For the Winter Dance Party, he assembled a new band: Waylon Jennings on electric bass, Tommy Allsup on guitar, and Carl Bunch on drums. Holly and Jennings arrived in New York City on the 15th of January 1959 and stayed at Holly's apartment near Washington Square Park before traveling by train to Chicago to join the rest of the band. The tour began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the 23rd of January.

  The tour was logistically chaotic from the start. The distance between venues had not been properly planned. The unheated buses broke down twice in freezing weather. Carl Bunch was hospitalized for frostbite to his toes, sustained while aboard the bus.

  On the 2nd of February, before a show at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly chartered a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza from Dwyer Flying Service in Mason City. His plan was to fly to Moorhead, Minnesota via Fargo, North Dakota, reaching the next venue early enough to rest and do laundry. After the Clear Lake show, Allsup flipped a coin with Ritchie Valens for one of the seats. Valens called heads, won, and reportedly said, "That's the first time I've ever won anything in my life." Waylon Jennings voluntarily gave up his seat to J. P. Richardson, the Big Bopper, who had influenza and said the bus was too uncomfortable for a man of his size.

  Pilot Roger Peterson took off in inclement weather despite not being certified to fly by instruments alone. Shortly after 1:00 a.m. on the 3rd of February 1959, the aircraft crashed into a cornfield. Holly was 22 years old. His funeral was held on the 7th of February at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Lubbock, officiated by Ben D. Johnson, who had presided at Holly and Santiago's wedding months earlier. The pallbearers included Jerry Allison, Joe B. Mauldin, Niki Sullivan, Bob Montgomery, and Sonny Curtis. Waylon Jennings could not attend because the Winter Dance Party tour was still running.

• 7. The Shape of the Influence

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  John Lennon and Paul McCartney first saw Holly perform on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. They studied his records, learned his performance style, and modeled their act around his persona. Inspired by Holly's insect-named Crickets, they chose the name the Beatles. Lennon's earlier band the Quarrymen covered "That'll Be the Day" in their first-ever recording session, in 1958. Paul McCartney eventually acquired the publishing rights to Holly's entire song catalog.

  On the 31st of January 1959, two nights before Holly died, a 17-year-old Bob Dylan attended Holly's performance in Duluth. Dylan described the moment in his Grammy acceptance speech for Time Out of Mind in 1998: "I was three feet away from him... and he looked at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was... with us all the time we were making this record."

  Mick Jagger saw Holly live in Woolwich, London. Keith Richards modeled his early guitar playing on "Not Fade Away", and the Rolling Stones took the song to a hit version in 1964. Richards later said, "He's in everybody." Eric Clapton bought The Chirping Crickets as his very first album purchase, and later recalled seeing Holly's Fender Stratocaster for the first time: "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven... it was like seeing an instrument from outer space."

  Holly bought his own first Fender Stratocaster at Harrod Music in Lubbock. He played that 1954 model until it was stolen during a tour stop in Michigan in 1957, then replaced it with a 1957 model before a show in Detroit. He owned four or five Stratocasters during his career. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in its first class in 1986, noting that he had "pioneered and popularized the now-standard" lineup of two guitars, bass, and drums. Rolling Stone ranked him number 13 on its list of 100 Greatest Artists in 2010, and number 74 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time in 2023.

  Holly's signature horn-rimmed glasses, which teenagers across the United States began requesting after seeing him wear them, were presumed lost after the crash. They turned up in March 1980 in a Cerro Gordo County courthouse storage area, discovered by Sheriff Gerald Allen. They had been placed in an envelope dated the 7th of April 1959, along with the Big Bopper's watch, a lighter, and two pairs of dice, and had been misplaced when the county moved courthouses. The frames are now on display at the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, on Crickets Avenue, one street east of Buddy Holly Avenue.