The Short Life And The Enduring Influence Of Buddy Holly
Richard Evans medium.com
Writing and composing original music for guitar, bass, and drums. Then recording the basic track, overdubbing more guitars, maybe some horns or backing vocals or strings. Double tracked lead vocals…
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Writing and composing original music for guitar, bass, and drums. Then recording the basic track, overdubbing more guitars, maybe some horns or backing vocals or strings. Double tracked lead vocals.

Taking tools like the mixing board, and effects like reverb and echo, and going beyond merely using them to re-create sound environments. Using the studio musically, as another instrument.

Working as a band in the studio way into the night, revising, doing alternate takes. Collaborating with the sound engineers to splice together the best parts from different takes to get that perfect three minutes. Mix it down to a master copy.

If you’re like me, and you’ve seen too many episodes of Classic Albums or Behind the Music on VH1, then you recognize this as the creative process for a Rock album — from The Beatles to Led Zeppelin, from U2 to Nirvana.

Buddy Holly invented that process.

And more. He took composition techniques from classic tunesmiths like George Gershwin and Duke Ellington, things like tempo and key changes, breaks and bridges, and he adapted them to Rock songs.

And he was the first American rocker to conquer Great Britain. Except for a handful of dates in Canada, Elvis never played live outside the US. Buddy’s records outsold Elvis in the UK, and when the Crickets toured the UK for 26 shows in March of 1958, it was a national sensation.

In The Beatles Anthology interview, released in 2000, Paul McCartney said he and John Lennon started writing their own songs because of Buddy Holly.

The Beatles. The Crickets.

Yeah. We can safely say John, Paul, George and Ringo were heavily influenced by Buddy Holly.

Graham Nash was in a band called, uh, The Hollies. The Rolling Stones’ first American single was “Not Fade Away.”

Buddy Holly left giant musical footprints all over the British Isles.

“To guys of my age at the time, if you were the least bit interested in music, Buddy was the one, because he sang and was very self-contained.”

That’s a Keith Richards quote from “According to the Rolling Stones,” published in 2003.

In the first episode we called Rock N Roll an infant, then an unruly toddler. When we get to Little Richard and Chuck Berry, we can call it a precocious, hyperactive kid.

With Buddy Holly, Rock N Roll steps out into the world as a confident young adult, something self-contained, somebody fully realized.

. . .

Dion and the Belmonts, tagging along as the opening act on the Winter Dance Party tour, took Doo Wop singing and set it to a beat. Throw in lyrics full of teenage angst about unrequited love, and you’re gonna sell some records.

Dion DeMucci, the handsome kid from the Bronx with the sweet pipes, would go on to move a lot more vinyl.

At some point early in the evening, Buddy asked Dion if he wanted a seat on the plane he had just chartered.

36 bucks.

“At the time it just seemed like a lot of money to me,” Dion recalled years later in an interview on VH1.

The single-engine 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza 35, chartered through the Dwyer Flying Service, had four seats, including the pilot.

Waylon Jennings had just hired on with the Crickets, playing bass. He gave his seat to the flu-stricken Big Bopper, who was feeling half-dead after sweating through his set.

Buddy and the Crickets took the stage at the Surf Ballroom to close out the show. For the encore they were joined onstage by Ritchie, Dion, and the Bopper for a rousing cover of Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.”

In the dressing room right after the show, Ritchie Valens and Crickets guitarist Tommy Allsup flipped a coin for the last seat.

Ritchie won the toss.

So it was all set. Carroll Anderson, the manager of the Surf, would drive Buddy, J.P. and Ritchie one town over, to the small airstrip in Mason City, Iowa.

. . .

Cotton country. The base of the panhandle. Dust bowl, Bible Belt, got more churches than trees, to steal a line from the Chicks song “Lubbock or Leave It.”

That frozen tarmac in Mason City, Iowa was a long way from the long hot summers Charles Hardin Holley knew growing up in Lubbock, Texas.

Charles — well folks ‘round Lubbock all called him “Buddy” pretty much right from the start — was born on September 7th, 1936.

Buddy’s two older brothers Larry and Travis taught him guitar, mandolin, and banjo, and the kid took right to it.

By 15 Buddy was a lanky, nearsighted musical prodigy, and he and his childhood pal Bob Montgomery were working as a duo composing and performing original country tunes.

In early ’55 Buddy and Bob opened the show for Elvis Presley in Lubbock. Some Nashville talent scouts took notice, but more important to our story: the rockabilly sound he heard from Elvis and the boys made a big impression on Buddy.

He immediately started incorporating the percussive slap bass, jittery backbeat, and strong rhythm guitar into his own compositions.

Buddy Holly had gone Rock N Roll.

The 1978 film “The Buddy Holly Story” has a scene where Buddy (played by Gary Busey) gets into a fistfight with a producer in Nashville.

Call it dramatic license. The fight never happened, but Buddy definitely bristled at what he felt was a rigid, stodgy approach to his songs.

Those three Nashville sessions, done for Decca Records in the spring and summer of 1956, yielded two singles that failed to catch on. The rest of the recordings, including an early, slower version of “That’ll Be the Day,” were shelved. In January of 1957, Decca informed Buddy they no longer required his services.

He may not have thrown any punches over it, but the other musicians who worked with Buddy agree that he was fierce about making records his way, with full creative control. He knew what he was after.

He headed back to Lubbock.

Northwest of Lubbock, about a hundred dusty miles away, in Clovis, New Mexico, Norman Petty had a recording studio. Petty charged by the song instead of by the hour. Buddy went back to work, and a few months later he took on Petty as his manager.

They spent the fall and winter of 56–57 working out tighter, tougher versions of Buddy’s most promising songs.

On the strength of those recordings Norman Petty got Buddy not one, but two, recording contracts: one with Brunswick Records as The Crickets and a solo deal with Coral Records. Ironically, both small record companies were subsidiaries of Decca, the company that had dumped Buddy just a few months earlier.

“We got close because it was almost as if he had the premonition that he wasn’t going to be around…He was trying to…teach me about music as we went along….I learned that…when you do a song, you’ve got to remember you are going to be doing that song for the rest of your life. You better make sure you like it.”

Waylon Jennings said that about his friend Buddy Holly in a 1996 interview.

Buddy had been a musical mentor to Waylon growing up in Lubbock. Nobody had been more thrilled at Buddy’s success. In late 1958, Buddy offered Waylon Jennings a job: playing bass on tour for The Crickets. Right after the first of the year, the two Texans rode a train together from Lubbock to Chicago.

As they packed up after the show in Clear Lake, in the early hours of February 3rd, Buddy learned that Waylon had given up his seat to the Big Bopper, J.P. Richardson.

“Well I hope your ol’ bus freezes up,” he told Waylon.

“Yeah, well I hope your ol’ plane crashes,” Waylon shot back, giving his friend the business.

Buddy, J.P., and Ritchie piled into Carroll Anderson’s sedan for the ride to the airstrip.

. . .

Government documents make for dry reading. The Civil Aeronautics Board report filed on September 15th, 1959 about the February 3rd incident outside Mason City, Iowa is no exception.

The Time magazine article is also unadorned, pretty straightforward:

The three musicians boarded the red and white single-engine Beech Bonanza around 12:30 on Feb. 3. Fans flocked to the tarmac, waving and crying and asking for autographs. The musicians waved back and then climbed onto the plane. Snow blew across the runway but the sky was clear.

The Time article is not entirely accurate about the weather. According to the CAB report:

The Mason City weather was reported to the pilot as: ceiling measured 6,000 overcast; visibility 15 miles plus; temperature 15 degrees; dew point 8 degrees; wind south 25 to 32 knots; altimeter setting 29.96 inches.

That was at 11:30 pm. By 12:55 am, the time of takeoff, the altimeter had dropped to 29.85, and the ceiling had dropped to 3000 feet. A strong front was moving in.

It happened fast, that’s one indisputable fact.

From the CAB report:

The Board concludes that pilot Peterson, when a short distance from the airport, was confronted with this situation. Because of fluctuation of the rate instruments caused by gusty winds he would have been forced to concentrate and rely greatly on the attitude gyro, an instrument with which he was not completely familiar. The pitch display of this instrument is the reverse of the instrument he was accustomed to; therefore, he could have become confused and thought that he was making a climbing turn when in reality he was making a descending turn.

More simply put: five miles out from the airport, instead of accelerating and climbing to a cruising altitude above the low-hanging clouds, Roger Peterson thought up was down, and ran the plane into the ground at about 170 miles an hour.

Nobody saw the crash. There was no distress call, no response to hails, just silence.

The owner of the charter service, Hubert Dwyer, started an aerial search at daybreak and spotted the wreckage at about 9 am.

The coroner’s report indicates massive, immediately fatal injuries to all four men. There’s a link in the show notes to Buddy’s autopsy. If that sort of thing is disturbing to you, you might want to skip that link.

Maria Elena Santiago Holly heard the news on a television report — she went into deep psychological shock, and miscarried the next day. She did not attend the funeral and has never visited the gravesite. Authorities now withhold names of air-crash victims from the media until family can be notified.

Waylon Jennings spent twenty years haunted by the flip, sarcastic remark he made to his friend after the show that night. He eventually made his peace with it, but only after years of drinking to numb the pain.

Buddy’s funeral was held on February 7th in Lubbock. Phil Everly attended and sat with the Holley family. Don Everly took to his bed, deep in grief, and did not attend.

. . .

I’ve always been a fan, but as I put this show together, I developed a real affinity for Buddy. To be expected, I suppose. Listening to all those great songs, reading about his life, watching the McCartney documentary, it turned the guy into a friend. All these decades later, all these miles away, as we bring this story to its abrupt and tragic conclusion, like Don McLean, I feel the sharp pain of losing a friend.