Buddy Holly: The Day the Music Died

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He was not an obvious heartthrob like Elvis, nor an early guitar hero like Chuck Berry. His professional musical career didn’t even last two years, yet his legacy is enormous. He is considered one of, if not the most influential artists of the early rock and roll years. This is the story of Buddy Holly and his stellar rise to the top.

Buddy Holly was born Charles Hardin Holly in Lubbock, Texas, on September 7, 1936, to parents Ella Drake and L.O. Holly. His mother insisted that all her kids play an instrument from an early age. The family’s little orchestra included Larry, born in 1925, Travis in 1927, and Patricia in 1929. As the youngest child, Charles became known as Buddy to his parents and siblings alike.

On paper, Lubbock in the 1930s made for the perfect setting in a grim Steinbeck novel; it had been hit hard by the Great Depression. However, Buddy’s early years were nothing to get depressed about. He was spoiled and indulged by his parents and siblings, especially Larry and Travis, whom he worshipped as heroes. When Buddy was five, his older brothers took him to perform at a local talent show. Buddy was given a toy violin smeared with grease so that it wouldn’t make a sound. The judges were so taken with the cute kid playing alongside his big brothers that the Hollies won a $5 prize.

Not long after that success, the war took Larry and Travis away from Lubbock. They both enlisted in the Marines and fought in the Pacific, with Travis being one of the lucky ones who stormed Iwo Jima and survived. At the end of the war, both big brothers were safely back home, and Travis brought a present back for Buddy: an acoustic guitar. Travis taught him the basics, and before long, Buddy was outplaying and correcting his teacher. From then on, he would hardly be seen without a guitar in his hands, learning and mastering his three favorite styles.

First was country western, heavily influenced by Hank Williams and his yodeling vocals. Then there was bluegrass, a style he discovered thanks to his best friend Bob Montgomery. The final influence was rhythm and blues, which at that time was played entirely by Black artists for the enjoyment of mostly Black audiences. R&B was not considered respectable for decent young white boys to listen to. Lubbock was a segregated town in the 1940s, a result of a 1928 ordinance that prohibited persons with more than one-tenth Negro blood from living west of Avenue D. Yet Buddy and Bob would sneak into their parents’ cars to listen to R&B shows on the radio. As they grew older, they frequented clubs east of Avenue D to listen to Black artists.

By 1951, Buddy was performing steadily with his friends, plucking a banjo or mandolin and providing background vocals. He had recently turned 15, and his hormones, hair, and acne were in full bloom. The last thing Buddy needed was poor results from an optometrist appointment, where he was told that what most people saw from 800 feet away, he saw from 20 feet away. In other words, Buddy Holly was legally blind and would need to wear glasses.

Buddy had also started experimenting with dating several girls, which in Lubbock may simply have meant that they belonged to another congregation. One of these girls was Buddy’s first love, Echo McGuire, whose family was part of the Church of Christ, a sect so strict that it regarded music as the work of the devil. Girls who shaved their legs were regarded as fallen women, and dancing was strictly forbidden. Buddy and Bob both fancied Echo and asked her out, but Buddy was the more insistent. Echo’s mom thought her daughter was too young to go steady, so she agreed for Buddy and Echo to go on dates, but only if she dated Bob too.

By spring of 1953, Buddy had eventually convinced the Maguires to let go of the awkward deal. Echo dumped Bob, and she and Buddy became a permanent item. Buddy had been drifting more towards R&B while Bob was still rooted in bluegrass. Buddy now sought a new friend to strum with and found one in Jack Neal, a young carpenter working with Buddy’s dad. As they played together, Buddy ditched his mandolin and banjo and switched to lead guitar.

After a year of successful performances, Buddy had greatly improved his guitar skills and switched from acoustic to electric, wielding a Gibson Les Paul Gold Top. Around that period, Jack married and moved to New Mexico, prompting Buddy to recruit his old pal Bob Montgomery as lead singer. The two were joined by bassist Larry Welborn and Sonny Curtis, a jazz guitarist and composer who greatly expanded Buddy’s musical vocabulary.

Buddy and his band were a few weeks away from the greatest epiphany of their lives. On January 2, 1955, KDAV organized a live show with a couple of young musicians you may have heard of: Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. Elvis’s performance hit Buddy like an H-bomb. He dared to record a country single with an R&B piece on the B-side. Elvis made the girls ecstatic with his soulful vocals and energetic beats, while he horrified parents with his gyrating pelvis and love of Black music. Buddy wanted a piece of that action, and this was when he decided to ditch bluegrass once and for all and focus his talents on R&B and rock and roll.

The other guys in the band were game; they did not dig the music 100%, but surely enjoyed the effect it had on the ladies. Bob’s voice was ill-suited for rock and roll, so the young Holly was promoted to lead vocalist. In this new role, Buddy abandoned his usual gentlemanly restraint and went wild—well, at least in front of his audience. Offstage, he remained his usual self: outwardly shy but quietly confident.

Now Buddy and Bob needed a drummer. Country and bluegrass ensembles could work perfectly without a drummer, but if you wanted rock and roll, you needed someone to hit those skins. In June of 1955, they found someone who could hit them good: teenage drummer Jerry “JJ” Allison. He wasn’t yet old enough to legally enter clubs, yet he had more experience playing live than his older bandmates. Moreover, he could handle jazz, pop, country, and R&B with ease. Jerry would prove to be Buddy’s most valuable musical ally.

That summer, while his girlfriend Echo was away getting ready for college, Buddy developed his signature finger-picking style, allowing him to play rhythm and lead parts simultaneously. Buddy perfected this technique while rehearsing with Jerry for hours on end. The two developed a symbiotic musical style, each able to guess what the other was going to play next. After rehearsing by day, the band played increasingly crowded gigs. As a frontman, Buddy had become so popular in Lubbock that every girl wanted to stamp lipstick on his face, and their boyfriends wanted to stamp a right hook on his jaw.

There are stories of such boyfriends wanting to jump Buddy and his mates, only to be foiled by the intervention of their bodyguards—Buddy’s older brothers, Larry and Travis. It gives you a powerful sense of security when your bodyguards have stormed Iwo Jima. The year 1955 had more gifts packed for young Buddy. On October 14th, Bill Haley and the Comets came to play in Lubbock. Their hit “Rock Around the Clock” had been the first rock and roll record to reach number one on the charts, and Buddy and Bob had the honor to open for the Comets. That’s when they were noticed by Eddie Crandall, a talent scout from Nashville.

The following night, Buddy and Bob were at KDAV playing a set with Elvis. Crandall was there again and suggested to Elvis’s manager, Colonel Parker, that he sign them up. Parker liked those kids but was too busy with Presley, so why didn’t Crandall put them under contract? Developments began happening very quickly for Buddy Holly—faster than a roller coaster. A few weeks later, on December 7th, Buddy and the band recorded a demo of his original compositions and sent it to Nashville. They were waiting for a small label, Cedarwood, to get back to them, but they didn’t hear from them. Instead, they heard from a major label, Decca. These were the big guys, and Buddy was about to make it big time.

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On January 6, 1956, Buddy and the band were in Nashville for a recording session with a big changing lineup. Decca wanted to sign a solo artist, yet the act was called Buddy and Bob. Buddy protested, saying that if Bob was not billed, then he would not sign any contract. It was Bob who actually solved the impasse by quitting the band. He went on to have his own successful career as a solo artist. That Nashville recording session produced Buddy’s first single, “Blue Days, Black Nights.” Decca was happy with the single and put Buddy under contract. The Decca typers dropped an “e” in the document, and that’s how Buddy Holly, with an “e,” became Buddy Holly without the “e.”

However, if Decca was happy about the record, they didn’t exactly show it. They barely promoted it and sold only 18,000 copies. In general, Buddy felt a little shortchanged by these major label types. The biopic “The Buddy Holly Story” has a scene in which the protagonist punches a Decca producer meddling with his own recording sessions. None of that ever happened, but it’s nonetheless an accurate representation of the strained relationship Buddy had with the label. Even after the first session, Decca would frequently utilize their own studio musicians over Buddy’s pals. They would ask him to change his singing style to a more traditional one and even forbid him from playing the guitar on record.

That’s why, between February and April, Buddy and the band drove to Clovis, New Mexico, for some self-funded sessions in a studio owned by musician and producer Norman Petty. It was at this studio that Buddy and Jerry composed a great track, “That’ll Be the Day,” inspired by John Wayne’s catchphrase in the western film “The Searchers.” The band proudly proposed the tune to Decca, but their producers spoiled what was a killer single with a bad mix. They placed their bet on another single, “Modern Don Juan,” which they set to fail by releasing on Christmas Eve. A month later, on January 26, 1956, Decca announced to Buddy that their one-year contract had expired and they had no intention to renew it.

That didn’t mean they were done with Buddy Holly completely, though. The crafty businessmen at Decca would still retain rights to his songs for five years after this disappointment. The band melted away; only Jerry stuck by his buddy. The two returned to Clovis for another recording session, and this time manager Norman Petty took notice of their talent. Here was the deal: Buddy and Jerry would return in February to record another version of “That’ll Be the Day,” and Petty would use his clout as a recording artist to have local DJs spin the single in exchange for Buddy listing Petty as a co-author, ceding 50% of royalties.

There was another snag to fix: due to the Decca contract, Buddy was not allowed to record that single with any other label for a period of five years. Norman Petty had a brainwave, though. The single would be issued under the name of a new band with Buddy listed as Charles Hardin, his real first and middle names. He reckoned the Decca lawyers would not notice. So how were they going to name the band? Buddy was a fan of an R&B band called The Spiders, so he looked for a similar-sounding name. He briefly considered “The Beatles,” but felt that was too silly for a band name. He settled on “The Crickets.” This whole kerfuffle is the reason why the same musicians over the same period issued songs under the names Buddy Holly or The Crickets and played live as Buddy Holly and The Crickets.

Now Norman had to find a label to press and distribute the single. He found a deal with a small shop called Brunswick Records, which was a subsidiary of Coral Records, which was a division of Decca. Buddy had to lay low and not sign anything lest the lawyers at Decca discovered their deception. In March of 1957, Holly recorded a new ballad in Clovis called “Words of Love.” Worth noting here for two reasons: Buddy recorded both the rhythm and lead guitar parts by himself using the technique of overdubbing, now commonplace. The technique had been pioneered by guitarist Les Paul and his wife Mary Ford, but Buddy used it for the first time in rock and roll, making it his own. The other reason is that the tune attracted the attention of the executives at Coral, who found out that Charles Hardin of The Crickets was in fact Buddy Holly. This led to a confrontation with the Decca lawyers, but Petty was able to negotiate a satisfactory conclusion: shared royalties on the sales of the new version of “That’ll Be the Day.” This new version, by the way, had already been released without Buddy even knowing, and it was slowly worming its way into the ears and hearts of American teenagers.

Buddy still saw very little return for his efforts, but he was on a songwriting roll, so he booked more time with Norman in the summer of 1957. The Crickets recorded “I’m Gonna Love You Too.” Buddy brought another composition, a slow piece with a Latin beat called “Cindy Lou.” Jerry improved it by adding a faster rolling tempo on his drums known as the paradiddles. It sounded great, but it was hard to maintain the beat, and Jerry was flagging him between takes. Buddy, though, knew how to motivate his friend: if he managed to record the track in one go, he would give him a songwriting credit as an added incentive. He would rename the song after Jerry’s often-girlfriend. Jerry’s girlfriend was called Peggy Sue, an unsuspecting teenager who ultimately lent her name to one of Buddy’s most immortal songs.

Now, after the Decca disappointment, Buddy and The Crickets were on an upward trajectory. “That’ll Be the Day” had sold more than 50,000 copies, and the guys had been booked for a tour on the East Coast. This was actually the result of a mix-up: the tour promoters were after an all-Black vocal group called The Crickets. Following the mix-up, they were stuck with four white boys from Texas opening for R&B acts at all-Black venues in New York, D.C., and Baltimore. In New York, Buddy and his pals had to play three nights after being booed off stage for the first two. Buddy wanted to change it up. He opened the third gig with a barnstorming rendition of “Bo Diddley” by blues guitarist Bo Diddley. The audience went wild. From then on, The Crickets would have little difficulty appealing to both Black and white audiences.

The next big tour was “The Biggest Show of Stars of 1957,” a sort of traveling circus of popular artists in the soul, R&B, and early rock and roll genres. Buddy had the opportunity to rub elbows with people like Paula, The Drifters, The Everly Brothers, and some dude called Chuck Berry. On October 18th, the show of stars reached Sacramento, where Peggy Sue, the girl, was now living with her mother. Jerry invited Peggy to the concert, and Buddy decided to close the show with a surprise. He announced they were going to play a new song dedicated to a special person in the audience. He then launched into “Peggy Sue,” the song. Backstage, Jerry and Peggy got back together for good, while Buddy taunted her, “Aren’t you glad your mother named you after my new hit song?” He was not exaggerating; it was a hit song, selling more than a million copies. But he was barely 21 and at the peak of his fame, and some bad news was right around the corner, ready to hit like a 1-2 from Floyd Patterson.

In December, Buddy and The Crickets were back in Lubbock for some well-deserved rest after months of touring. The first jab was the news that Echo, Buddy’s long-distance girlfriend, was in love with somebody else and was about to marry him. Not that Buddy had been saintly, having had a short relationship with an older married woman, along with an alleged threesome with Little Richard and his girlfriend. The right hook that followed Echo was the news that Buddy’s backing guitarist, Nick Sullivan, was quitting the band. He was exhausted from touring and couldn’t stand Jerry. When Sullivan went to Norman Petty to cash in his royalties, the final uppercut was delivered: it turned out that Petty had been mismanaging the band’s funds. Norman was already cashing in 50% of The Crickets’ royalties as co-author. In addition to that, he had collected all other royalties into a joint account from which he liberally dipped in for his own personal expenses. Buddy and The Crickets had also asked that 40