Revisiting Buddy Holly's Winter Tour from Hell

As happens every year about this time, the fever’s spreading – the Winter Dance Party fever. Immediately on the heels of Monday night’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, Clear Lake will put on its finest as it welcomes people from around the world for a one-of-a-kind celebration of the early days of rock and roll. That includes commemorating the deaths of three blossoming personalities – Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper – whose airplane crashed that fateful night near Clear Lake. Indeed, their memories and music will be a big part of the event that starts next Wednesday at the legendary Surf Ballroom. Source: globegazette.com

The former Mrs. Bowie says that she and David Bowie met through their mutual friend, record executive Dr. Calvin Mark Lee. In an interview with The Mirror, Angela Bowie actually recalls the first time she and Bowie slept together, when she was just a teenager:

"I remember exactly where and when David Bowie and I first slept together. It was in London in the summer of 1968 after an evening at the Speakeasy – the night King Crimson celebrated their new recording contract and Donovan got up and sang Buddy Holly songs with them. David came back to my little room above the Nomad Travel Club in Paddington. He was pretty drunk and we were both pretty exhausted when we fell into my little bed together." Source: heavy.com

BUDDY HOLLY: BABY I DON'T CARE / IT'S NOT MY FAULT (refurbished sound).

-Carl Bunch (drummer of Buddy Holly's band during the Winter Dance Party Tour in 1959): You can't really understand how bad the circumstances were under which we lived. We had broken down bus, after broken down bus, often without heaters, to be confined in for what seemed like forever between gigs. There were no superhighways back then. It was rare to get to stay in a hotel; at least it felt rare. I spent most of my time with Ritchie Valens. He knew I was more than just a little impressed with him as a performer. Ritchie talked about Donna a lot and got ribbed quite a bit about not going with the groupie girls after the gig. Ritchie, Bopper, and Buddy were all one-woman men. No matter what the temptation, they went to their rooms, when we had one, and not to the parties. We opened the tour at George Devine’s Ballroom in Milwaukee on the 23rd of January. I remember very clearly Buddy asking just as we pulled up, "What time is this eight o'clock gig going to get started?" At George Devine’s Ballroom in Milwaukee we were over an hour late due to problems with the bus and the weather. We had to set up on stage in front of an angry crowd and we ended up starting about two hours after we were supposed to. I was an absolute nervous wreck. Buddy kept talking to me backstage, telling me I'd be just fine. He said, "You're one of the Crickets now." 

Dion came out and did his latest hits, "Teenager In Love," "Runaround Sue," and the rest. The audience loved him. The Big Bopper absolutely sent the crowd into a frenzy with “Chantilly Lace.” Ritchie’s “La Bamba” had just hit number one on the charts and he whipped them into a frenzy on top of a frenzy with his performance. But when Buddy came out, it was almost like God had walked out on the stage. Buddy was a Christian and an honest man.

-Lance Monthly: In one of the Buddy Holly biographies it was theorized that Buddy fathered a child out of wedlock, which has prompted a lot of talk and speculation. Do you have any information?

-Carl Bunch: I've never before heard a single word about it and I don't believe it. It's totally out of character for Buddy to have been sexually involved with anyone but Maria Elena. That's one of the things that stood out so much to me on the tour. Buddy could have had any of hundreds of beautiful girls or women, but chose not to cheat on his wife, period. I can't imagine why anyone would spread such a vicious rumor about such a nice guy. Buddy was a Christian. He did not believe in adultery. Source: www.musicdish.com and musicdish.com/mag

Friday, January 30, 1959: About thirty miles west of Davenport, the Winter Dance Party bus stopped providing heat altogether. All nine heaters on the converted school bus had frozen. It would take several hours for them to thaw and be cleaned out. As mechanic Martin Young began defrosting the heaters, the singers scattered throughout the eastern Iowa town of about 2,100. Buddy Holly and several others remained in the Gaul Motor Co.'s showroom, many sitting on a bench near some new 1959 Edsels. Holly pulled a bucket-type tractor seat from a display and plopped down on it. “I’m a reindeer salesman,” he quipped to the amusement of his friends.

Ritchie Valens led another group across the alley to the tiny Meet and Eat Cafe, where Esther Wenck and Betty Murray were serving up hamburgers and hot beef sandwiches to a packed lunchtime crowd. Even though the cafe had just a handful of tables and a few seats at the counter, a jukebox was squeezed in against one wall. Valens stood at the jukebox and asked waitress Wenck: “Would you like to hear the song I made famous?” Says Wenck: “I thought he was kidding. I said yes.” Several Tipton residents then were treated to an impromptu performance as Valens sang along to “Donna.” “I still thought he was goofin’,” Wenck notes. “I still didn’t think it was him.”

The bus was late arriving in Fort Dodge. “We were worried,” says Dick Derrig, an assistant manager at the Laramar Ballroom. Eddie Simpson, a fan who attended the Laramar concert: “I can remember when they announced Buddy Holly and he stepped out on the stage. He had been standing back in the backdrop and everybody went nuts when he started singing.” Simpson and two friends stopped to use the basement restroom when they spotted the singers sitting in a booth: “They were stars, but they were as common as could be. They just sat and talked to us.” Holly called his pregnant wife in New York. “Buddy would call from the tour and say how unhappy he was,” Maria Elena later told the Chicago Tribune: “I’d say, ‘Why don’t you come home?’ He’d say, ‘you know me. I have to finish.’ Besides, we needed the money.” Bill McCollough, a local disc jockey at KWMT who was to emcee the Laramar show started a conversation with Holly: “He was complaining about the bus, he was going to catch his death of cold. I had been taking some flying lessons.” “Could you call somebody and get us a plane?” Holly asked. —"The Day the Music Died: The Last Tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens" (1997) by Larry Lehmer

Buddy Holly's ex-ante narrative: "The Winter Dance Party Murders"

The 3rd of February will mark the 57th anniversary of “The Day the Music Died”, again mourning the loss of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper, whose Beechcraft Bonanza plane crashed the night of February 3, 1959 in Clear Lake, Iowa. Hardly a consolation is Greek dramatist Menander’s claim: “Whom the gods love dies young.” However, we can commemorate their music and find a kind of solace by revisiting these three beloved characters — and many more from the rock and roll’s old guard — reading The Winter Dance Party Murders, a novel by Greg Herriges. As he is a great admirer of J.D. Salinger, it was a fortuitous meeting with the author of The Catcher in the Rye that inspired Herriges to write professionally.

The anti-hero of The Winter Dance Party Murders is Rudy Keen, an up-and-coming songwriter who bonds with Buddy Holly during the Midwest Dance Festival. Keen ends up becoming a target — alongside other 1950s icons like Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent and Sam Cooke — of a grand-scale conspiracy created by the record company’s honchos. The central plot, though, revolves around the compromises and disappointments faced by Keen’s new friends, the dangers of commercialism discouraging the artist’s individual creativity, and a final reconciliation with Buddy Holly’s tragic demise and his immortal memory.

Herriges adds a zany sense of ‘ex-ante’ narrative mixed with a decidedly outré sense of humor, making up a lot of disconcerting theories and inside jokes throughout his story. For example, in chapter six, “Buddy In The Sky With No Glasses,” Buddy Holly protests he’s geeky looking. Rudy protests he’s geekier than Buddy: “I swallowed hard, tried to look as convincing as I could, and told him he wasn’t geeky.” Buddy: “You call this handsome?” Rudy: “Well—in a way. In a very peculiar way. Almost.” Buddy: “Dion. He’s handsome, the girls love him, his records sell. I’m geeky.” Rudy: “Stop saying that. You’ve got something else going, that’s all.”

There are also acute sentimental moments, as reflects a disillusioned Buddy Holly in the chapter 13 “True Love Ways”, when Rudy’s hero reneges on his commitment to rock ‘n’ roll. Buddy: “That’s just vinyl spinnin’ under a needle.” Rudy: “That’s all any of us ever were. That’s all we still are. We’re the music, Buddy, and the music lasts forever.”

Why is Buddy Holly still so popular five decades after his death? Why has his story perdured? As Joe B. Mauldin, from Holly’s band The Crickets said: “Buddy’s music was always sincere. He always tried to make everybody he saw or met happy.” Jerry Ivan Allison (The Crickets drummer) agrees: “He was more intelligent, talented and ambitious than most people who have picked up a guitar.” As John Gribbin summed it up in his book Not Fade Away: The Life and Music of Buddy Holly, “the simple answer is because he was the best.” Article first published as Book Review: ‘The Winter Dance Party Murders’ by Greg Herriges on Blogcritics.

Rock Around with Buddy Holly: Debut of Buddy Holly's first recording session

Rock Around with Buddy Holly video. Soundtrack: "Oh, boy!", "Rock Around with Ollie Vee", "Ting-A-Ling", and "Crying, Waiting, Hoping" by Buddy Holly.

Buddy Holly’s Recording Debut: Today in 1956, Buddy Holly's first recording session for Decca Records took place in Nashville. After playing gigs the previous year, including one opening for the emerging Elvis Presley in Buddy’s home town of Lubbock, Texas before the bespectacled hopeful had even graduated from high school, Buddy landed a one-year record deal with Decca. Almost simultaneously, he also won a three-year publishing contract with Cedarwood.

So it was that on 26 January, 1956, Buddy and the Two Tones, also featuring Sonny Curtis and Don Guess, went into producer Owen Bradley’s Barn in Nashville to record their first tracks under the new Decca deal. The numbers they cut included 'Midnight Shift' and 'Don't Come Back Knockin'.' When Buddy’s contract arrived, his surname was misspelled without the “e,” but he decided to go with it, and he was Buddy Holly from that day on.

Live shows followed that year, as did two more Decca sessions, in July (where they recorded the first version of ‘That’ll Be The Day,’ among others) and November. But early in 1957 came the bombshell that Decca were not renewing their option, and that Buddy would be dropped at the end of the one-year term. Determined to make a go of his obvious talent, Holly went to record at Norman Petty’s studios in Clovis, New Mexico, where they cut what became the hit version of 'That’ll Be The Day.’ After some legal issues were resolved, and a name change to the Crickets was decided on, Decca subsidiary Coral bought Holly’s new masters, and he was all set to record and release the songs that would place him, and the Crickets, in rock ‘n’ roll legend. Source: www.udiscovermusic.com

Buddy Holly ("Maybe Baby"/"Gone") video, 57th anniversary in The Buddy Holly Center

Buddy Holly ("Maybe Baby"/"That's What They Say"/"Gone") video.

The Buddy Center Presents 'The Day the Music Died' on February 3: Wednesday, Feb. 3 will mark the 57th anniversary of the Feb. 3, 1959, death of legendary Lubbock-born recording artist Charles Hardin “Buddy” Holly in the crash of a private plane near Clear Lake, Iowa.

Also perishing that night: fellow pop stars J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson and Ritchie Valens, and pilot Roger Peterson. The Buddy Holly Center, 1801 Crickets Ave., offers free admission on Feb. 3 to the Buddy Holly Gallery from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and to the adjacent original home owned by the family of Crickets drummer J.I. Allison house from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Jacqueline A. Bober, Buddy Holly Center assistant manager and curator, will provide a guided tour, using a Citybus trolley, to “four significant Holly sites in Lubbock” at 11 a.m., 1:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. on Feb. 3. Sites being visited include: Lubbock High School, Fair Park Coliseum at the Panhandle-South Plains Fairgrounds, the KRFE (formerly KDAV) radio station and City of Lubbock Cemetery. Source: lubbockonline.com

The story of American popular music in the 1950s has about it the feel of absurdist fiction. Even the bare outline is strange to recount: how the nation drifted away from its love affair with the grand tradition of big band swing music and into a period of musical nihilism; how entrepreneurs with little experience of the music business and just as little capital competed effectively with large and powerful corporations. Before rock and roll was an idiom, it was a process of absorption, revision, and fusion of disparate influences. The new sounds pointed in no particular direction, yet, paradoxically, it was the era’s unfocused meandering that fueled its revolutionary thrust. Adding to the confusion, Billboard identified as “country artists” in the 1957's R&B charts: Elvis Presley (“Jailhouse Rock”), Buddy Holly (“Oh Boy”), Jerry Lee Lewis (“Great Balls of Fire”), Jimmie Rodgers (“Kisses Sweeter Than Wine”), Bill Justis (“Raunchy”), and Bobby Helms (“My Special Angel”). —Source: "I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America" (2012) by Albin J. Zak 

Americans tend to think of the 1950s as an idyllic time when the babies were booming, the jobs were plentiful, and the country was flourishing. The average yearly income rose from $3,210 in 1950 to $5,010 in 1959, and post-war Americans were enjoying access to products and services that were scarce during World War II. Finding good uses for disposable income in the 1950s began the American love affair with consumerism. The median home price in the United States in 1950 was $7,354 (which is equivalent to $71,360 in today's dollars), rising to a median of $11,900 in 1960 ($93,830 in today's dollars), and housing represented about 22% of a 1950s household budget. For comparison, the median home price in October 2015 was $281,500, and the modern household spends about 43% of its budget on housing. While the specifics of what Americans bought in the 1950s might look different from modern purchases, the habits themselves were remarkably similar. That's because the spending habits we consider normal were born in the post-war 1950s. Source: www.wisebread.com

Hank Williams, Bob Dylan and Buddy Holly: Rock and Roll Mavens

Though he may have tragically passed away at the age of 29, legendary country singer Hank Williams left a defining mark on the music industry that few have replicated. It’s fair to say that Williams burned the candle at both ends, succumbing to drug addiction and alcoholism that ultimately triggered his untimely passing, and that’s a fall from grace played brilliantly by Tom Hiddleston in the new international trailer for I Saw The Light.

Hank Williams wrote and recorded some of country music’s most enduring songs, fuelled by a blend of turmoil and heartbreak — not surprising considering the Alabama-born balladeer’s private life, which director Marc Abraham brings to the screen with a clear-eyed appreciation of the man’s complexity. When Hank marries Audrey Mae Sheppard (Elizabeth Olsen) at a gas station in 1944, success is only a few years away, but Audrey proves a challenge as she replaces Hank’s mother as the prime influence in his career. Though ambitious, Audrey is a woman of limited talent, and Williams is caught between listening to friends who tell him to remove her from his act and a wife who will listen to no one. Source: wegotthiscovered.com

"The songs of Woody Guthrie ruled my universe, but before that, Hank Williams had been my favorite songwriter." —Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One. “I’ll never forget the image of seeing Buddy Holly up on the bandstand,” Bob Dylan, who’d caught Buddy in Duluth on January 31, 1959, told Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder. “It was unbelievable.” "Bob Dylan absorbed the divergent styles of Hank Williams, Johnnie Ray, and his heroes Woody Guthrie and Buddy Holly." -"Rock N Roll Gold Rush" (2003) by Maury Dean

I couldn’t understand how Jerry thought he had the right to take over The Crickets’ name. Buddy and Norman Petty were just about halfway to the door where the reception room is, and Maria said, ‘Buddy, he [Norman] looked up my skirt!’ We absolutely froze. All the blood just drained from Buddy’s face. Whenever someone even mentioned Maria, Jerry would simply state, “That’s Buddy’s wife,” and put an end to the conversation. “Buddy, you’re crazy,” I said sharply. “I know,” he said, with his eyes sparkling and a boyish grin on his face. Buddy had filed to get the song credits straightened out and his name on “Peggy Sue.” Buddy was an artist, not a businessman, and he didn’t understand the detailed intricacies of the deals he was making. Jerry was upset because he was still holding a grudge over what he perceived to be Norman’s callous attitude toward Buddy’s death. -Peggy Sue Gerron

Buddy thought those high, squeaky voices of Alvin & the Chipmunks really were the coolest thing. The Winter Dance Party was about to head out of town: Opening night was at George Devine’s Ballroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the tour would run for twenty-five straight shows to wind up in Springfield, Illinois. There wasn’t a night off to be had, crisscrossing the upper midwest in a bus in the middle of winter. I know Buddy wouldn’t have taken that tour if Norman hadn’t tied up his money, and besides, “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” had stalled in the charts. The tour was starting to get to Buddy. He was having trouble with Norman. That’s the one time I saw him really mad. I think he was missing Maria. He was really dedicated to her. Maria Elena was a sweet girl, and you could see that Buddy was very much in love with her. [But] she was a terrible cook. She couldn’t boil water. One time she was listening to one of my tapes that was in the apartment, and she said, “Waylons” —She didn’t speak very good English— “Every time I listen to you sing, it gives me goose bumples.” Buddy would crack up laughing when he heard that. -Waylon Jennings

I wanted to be a rocker, just like Buddy Holly. Buddy was cool, a rock-and-roll maven. I liked a lot of other performers, the Everlys, Chuck Berry, but Buddy was the top of the heap. Buddy had heart, and his songs were the best in the business. Buddy asked me if Brenda had been special to me, he asked if it was true love. He talked like the words in his songs. I ran on into the night into the storm, until I was all alone on a dark street, snow up to my knees, my fingers frozen and numb. I stopped and looked up at the swirling whiteness. I closed my eyes: “Please, God. Let me find those strings. Do it for Buddy.” “Lonesome Hank’s Music Emporium,” the stenciled sign read. I rubbed my eyes again because I thought I was hallucinating. I heard Lonesome Hank yell, “Say hi to Buddy for me.” -"The Winter Dance Party Murders" (2015) by Greg Herriges

R.I.P. David Bowie

David Bowie's final record was a carefully-orchestrated farewell to his fans, his producer has confirmed. Lazarus, released on the Bowie's 69th birthday just two days before his death, opens with the lyrics: "Look up here, I'm in Heaven!" Its video, which will be viewed in a very different light by millions of fans today, features the musician in a hospital bed, and finishes with him retreating in to a dark closet. Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Buddy Holly "Gone" video

A video featuring pictures of Buddy Holly with his band The Crickets, his wife Maria Elena, and friends. Soundtrack: "Oh Boy!", "Baby, won't you come out tonight?" and "Gone" by Buddy Holly ("Collected" CDs).

Like Paris, which nurtured the creative renaissance of the 1920s, New York in the fifties spawned half a dozen artistic movements, from abstract expressionism to the New York School of Poets and avant-garde breakthroughs like The Connection at Julian Beck’s Living Theater. New York was the cradle of formidable achievements ranging from fifties Broadway musicals (Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, West Side Story), to the folk movement, to Buddy Holly’s apartment tapes, to Brill Building rock ’n’ roll (Carole King, Leiber &Stoller). It was one of the city’s most romantic and glamorous eras, unforgettably evoked by Truman Capote in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 

The Greenwich Village alleys and byways that Buddy and Maria Elena haunted that winter are very different from the rest of Manhattan’s ledger-book grid. Positioned often diagonally to the rest of the city, Village streets are like a maze; they contain numerous surprises, such as the completely illogical intersection of West Tenth and West Fourth streets near Sheridan Square. “Buddy loved the jazz places,” Maria Elena says, mentioning the Five Spot, the Half Note, and the Village Vanguard. At Max Gordon’s Vanguard, a narrow cellar on Seventh Avenue, they could hear Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Gerry Mulligan, and Cannonball Adderley.

“We were always around the Village Gate,” Maria Elena remembers with fondness. In 1958 the Gate resounded with the sounds of R&B. Buddy, Eddie Cochran, Jimmy Bowen, Don and Phil Everly, Gene Vincent, and Buddy Knox had long been regulars there. Maria Elena was unable to pursue her own ambitions to be a dancer-actress. “After we got married, he said, `No, no. You don’t need to do that.` He wanted me to be around.” One day Buddy told her, “I want to do a classical score.” She marveled at the many-faceted nature of his genius. On her birthday in December 1958, Maria Elena persuaded Buddy to drink “a couple of glasses of champagne,” she later stated in Goldrosen and Beecher’s Remembering Buddy. He became seriously ill. As an ulcer sufferer (possibly, in part, from the stress of his career) he was playing with fire. As the New York winter set in, Buddy kept writing songs, the new tunes spewing out like an eternal fountain.

On December 8, 1958, he recorded “That Makes It Tough,” a blues number that dissects a broken heart with unflinching honesty. On 5 January, Coral released ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’ and ‘Raining In My Heart’. That same week, Buddy received some New Year tidings which all but wiped his anxiety over his new single from his mind: Maria Elena told him she was pregnant. ‘He said, “When I get back, we’ll go to Lubbock together and tell Mother,” Maria Elena remembers. ‘Buddy told me “It’ll be just as nice if it’s a girl.”’ They agreed to delay breaking the news to their respective families until Buddy’s return from the ‘Winter Dance Party’ tour. –"Buddy Holly: A Biography" (2014) by Ellis Amburn

"Buddy's success gave us all hope. His experiences in Nashville, where they tried to change his unique style, had helped to mature him, make him more sure of what he was doing as an artist; we'd usually stop at the Night Owl, a drive-in hamburger joint on Broadway, looking for girls, cruising around town aimlessly. Actually, we didn't know what we were looking for, and I don't guess we found it. I've often wondered if Buddy wasn't flying that plane. He wasn't afraid. Everybody wanted to talk about the crash and why I gave my seat to the Big Bopper. Buddy was the first person to believe in me. All I could think about was what good soul he was, what a happy man. He was in love with his wife and his music. To this day it doesn't seem fair. I didn't want to sing. I didn't want to play guitar. I was empty, drained of hope."  —Waylon Jennings

Sam Phillips and Buddy Holly: The Men who invented Rock 'n' Roll

"SAM PHILLIPS: THE MAN WHO INVENTED ROCK ’N’ ROLL" by Peter Guralnick.

Dubbing one individual “the man who invented rock ’n’ roll” may stir debate, yet there’s no doubt that Sam Phillips, founder of the iconic Memphis-based Sun Records, was the music’s pre-eminent catalyst. His 1950s talent roster: Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, Carl Perkins, Ike Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Charlie Rich. All were musical outliers when he found them and created much of their most enduring material in Sun’s tiny primitive studio. Phillips, an outlier himself, gave them creative freedom, shaping and focusing, yet never diluting, their raw talents.

In July 1954, he was producing Presley’s first groundbreaking single. By late 1955, his growing national visibility led RCA Victor to buy Presley’s Sun contract. Cash, Perkins, Lewis and others filled the void. A loose, impromptu jam at a 1956 Perkins session involving Presley, Perkins, Cash and Lewis became the famous Million Dollar Quartet. The others also joined major labels, yet most retained both admiration and affection for Mr. Phillips.

In unraveling Mr. Phillips’ complex life, Mr. Guralnick often finds more complexities. His family situation was complicated as he balanced relationships with wife Becky, sons Knox and Jerry, and his longtime companion Sally Wilbourn. There were darker sides as well. He suffered two mental breakdowns in the 1940s and ’50s, treated with electroshock therapy that left his intellect unimpaired. After his 1986 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, his bizarre sober behavior during a guest appearance on David Letterman’s NBC show left many shaking their heads. Source: www.post-gazette.com

Sam Phillips had business to take care of, and Jerry Lee Lewis was opening at the Paramount Theater on Broadway on Christmas Day, 1957, with only Fats Domino above him and Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers just down on the star-studded bill. Roland Janes rejoined Jerry for the new Alan Freed package show he was headlining that featured sixteen acts, including Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. The tour opened with a two-day engagement at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater.  —"Sam Phillips: The Man who invented Rock 'N' Roll" (2015) by Peter Guralnick.

Buddy Holly adopted this new songwriting mode to produce the most stylistically varied body of original recordings of any late fifties writer/performer, with up-tempo rockers such as “That’ll Be the Day” and “Not Fade Away” contrasting with such sweet pop numbers as “Everyday” and “Words of Love.” Some were sonically brash, others subdued. Some featured energetic performances, others were gentle, caressing. Some were paradigm examples of rock and roll instrumentation, others used such unlikely rock and roll sounds as celesta and harp. Holly made most of his records at Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico, over an eighteen-month span beginning in February 1957, which suited his inclination toward intuitive experimentation.

Added reverb provided an imaginary “setting” for recorded music. It drew listeners into the imaginary realm of the Cadillacs’ wistful “Gloria” and it made Duane Eddy’s guitar appear to call forth the sound of vastness. A good example is Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue,” which alternated dry and ambient drum sounds in a way that made no acoustic sense. It is impossible to imagine what would make reverb in the natural world behave in this way. The ambient shifts are simply the result of creative whim applied to a denatured acoustic phenomenon.

Buddy Holly was an innovator. He was the first rock musician to use the recording technique (invented by guitarist Les Paul), known as “overdubbing.” Elvis may have been “the King”, but it was Buddy Holly who drew up the blueprints to build the palace of rock ’n’ roll. Holly’s creative arrangements sometimes combined rock ’n’ roll instruments -electric guitar, bass, and drums- with jazz sax or instruments one might expect to find in a symphony orchestra. Buddy’s brother Larry said that the first song he ever heard Buddy teaching himself on the guitar was Hank Williams’ “Lovesick Blues.” The strings in “True Love Ways” answered Holly’s phrases in a tender commentary, which turned faintly exotic at the song’s chromatic bridge, a Scheherazade moment in rockabilly history. In the song’s second A-section, the strings fell to a hushed tremolo as the saxophone took up the responses in gentle, dreamy jazz phrases perfectly suited to the rockaballad aesthetic but stylistically distant from rock and roll saxology.

Peter Guralnick called it “the treacle period of the late fifties and early sixties,” invoked in 1971 in his book "Feel Like Going Home"—“Rock ’n’ roll died. It was over,” he wrote.  Guralnick was talking not about commercial success but spirit. The first rock critics and historians were devoted to a particular construct of rock and roll authenticity, by which measure they concluded that rock and roll’s essence had in fact died by 1960. “The burst of creation that exploded in the fifties was drying up,” Greil Marcus lamented in a 1969 essay. Langdon Winner complained that “all of the elements in the life-support system of rock and roll withered and disappeared.”

In March of 1958, Buddy Holly and the Crickets became the first American rock ’n’ roll band to tour England. Buddy’s popularity among British teens is amazing when you consider the fact that, at the time, rock ‘n’ roll was banned from radio throughout England. Some call “Peggy Sue” the first international rock anthem, because it had such a great influence. The song was unusual for the echo effect on Jerry’s snare drum (using an elaborate set-up at the studio to create an echo chamber), and the forceful, insistent rhythm of Buddy’s distinctive, downstroke-only style of playing lead guitar with his pick. Jerry Allison later said, “I’ve never seen anyone since who plays it that way.”

According to Niki Sullivan, Buddy “was never hustling girls after the shows.” One musician who knew Buddy, Ted Scott, said, “I can’t even remember him using a cuss word, let alone taking drugs.” Bob Thiele, one of the New York executives at Brunswick records described Buddy Holly as  “a nice kid, an extremely sensitive individual. And somehow I found myself being aware of his sensitivity and trying to be careful of how I said things to him. Even with his country talk, he sounded like a gentleman. And he was a gentleman.”—Sources: "Oh Boy! The Life and Music of Rock ’n’ Roll Pioneer Buddy Holly" (2009) by Staton Rabin and "I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America" (2012) by Albin J. Zak