Buddy Holly: the central conflict of the 1950s

Buddy Holly embodied, as much as James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, the central conflict of the 1950s: conformity with establishment values versus individuality/rebellion. While he sometimes wore leather and rode a motorcycle, he was a devout fundamentalist Christian, hounded by a puritanical conscience that condemned rock and roll as evil. Perhaps it was this innate contradiction that made him so great. Smart in the head is one thing, smart in the heart is another. With an artist possessed of both, it’s game over for all challengers, which is why, if there are 10 performers in rock history that matter more than all others, Buddy Holly is one of them. Holly did look slightly milksoppish—but in an earnest, quick-with-a-smile way. Buddy thought those high, squeaky voices of Alvin & the Chipmunks really were the coolest thing. This was not someone you’d expect to be a rock and roller, especially at a time when rock-and-roll badassery wasn’t just in vogue, but represented by some seriously tough-looking cats—Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, or Eddie Cochran. 

Buddy Holly was hardly the awkward geek that his amateurish, poorly lit promotional photos suggest. Duane Eddy, the twangy guitar rocker who collaborated with him in 1958, once described Buddy as a “well-built” six-footer who had “wavy hair” and was “very good looking.” And he could play the Fender Stratocaster the loudest too. Buddy Holly’s right hand was among the strongest in rock history. According to Bill Griggs of the Buddy Holly Memorial Society, Holly learned a unique way of picking: “Most people play down, up, down, up, when they're stroking the guitar. Buddy played basically downstrokes in a lot of his music. Therefore, he had to play twice as fast, but it also gave him what we call 'rhythm lead.' He kept hitting the bass chord on the guitar first. That's why he had that unique sound that people even today cannot duplicate, because you have to play the guitar 'wrong' to make it right.” The Beatles wrote “Can’t Buy Me Love” in a hotel, and Dylan recorded notable music in sleeping quarters (ditto Janis Joplin with her Typewriter Tape). But the ultimate grail is Holly’s tapes that he made just prior to his death in his Greenwich Village apartment. With his guitar and an Ampex tape machine, this is a very different Buddy Holly than his more "rockabilly garage" sound from two years prior. His enunciation is emphatic, as if he were a film director who’d recorded an intense emotional scene by overcranking the camera, playing it back so that it ran slower. You really hear it on the four versions of “Slippin’ and Slidin,” like Holly is decoding rock and roll for you. Source: www.thedailybeast.com

In rock critic Jonathan Cott’s words, “Holly’s deepest, wisest, and seemingly least complicated songs express the unadorned confrontation of beauty and love with time.” A letter seen in the Buddy Holly Museum in Lubbock was written by Holly's grieving father, Lawrence, to the editor of the New Musical Express two months after the plane crash, expressing his gratitude to his son's UK fans. "How has this loss of one so dear affected Buddy's beautiful wife?" asked Holley rhetorically. "She's been very brave and courageous but she, like us, will never get over such a great loss." Maria Elena's intense devotion to Holly's memory explains her antipathy towards the late Peggy Sue Gerron. The namesake of Buddy Holly's most memorable song was the girlfriend of Jerry Allison, drummer in Holly's band the Crickets. And even though Gerron died last year, aged 78, Maria Elena is still fuming about the claims she made about Holly in her memoir. "Oh my God, that book!" she exclaims. "But I stopped her. It was published, but she couldn't get much out of it. She went to London, then I called the journalists who were interviewing her and I said, 'That will be the last time you hear from me!' So they just stopped the interview. She claimed that Buddy was in love with her, and that Jerry knew about it. But Buddy hated her guts! When we were in his father and mother's house after the wedding, she came in and said: 'I don't know why Buddy would marry this woman because she's not from the same background. What? We were already married!" Source: www.afr.com

According to Peggy Sue's memoir, it seems that she never loved her first husband Jerry Allison—“Standing at the wedding ceremony: The biggest mistake of my life.” What do we learn about Buddy Holly? Always kind and understanding, like his parents, but he could erupt when pushed. We learn that Buddy helped “the Lubbock girl with the bad reputation” when she got pregnant—“Really, I loved her,” Holly reportedly said of her. Although Niki Sullivan hinted at Buddy going through a tragic romance with the wild girl of Lubbock that culminated in an unwanted pregnancy, Philip Norman dismantled that myth, proving that Holly was not the father. Norman was conceded a brief interview with Lubbock's mysterious woman: "On my first visit to his hometown in late 1994, I talked to Niki Sullivan, the Crickets’ rhythm guitarist, convinced that story was true. But the story has just one flaw. The person named by several knowledgeable sources as the mother of Buddy’s illegitimate child (who supposedly, according to Sullivan, waited for Holly's paychecks while living at a shelter for runaway unwed women) is adamant that she knew him only slightly and certainly never dated him romantically. She got married in 1954, almost two years before Buddy allegedly might have left her pregnant, and her two children–by the same husband–were both girls. The trail stops here." Philip Norman also refuted Sullivan's allegations of an affair between Buddy and Norman Petty's wife Vi.

Travis Holley (Buddy's brother): "I met Maria when he brought her here to be married. I had only heard about it a week before. And when I met her I understood why he wanted to marry her. She was just a little raven beauty. She was just as cute as she could be. And charming. And she still is." Next day, the Lubbock Avalanche newspaper reported: "Married: Buddy Charles Holley (21), and Miss Maria Elena Santiago (25), both of Lubbock". Maria Elena of course was not from Lubbock, but in rural conservative Texas, interracial marriages were still considered taboo, and it was unusual for an older woman to marry a younger man. From the very beginning of their relationship, Buddy confided to Maria Elena about his growing dissatisfaction with Norman Petty: “I’m not happy with Norman, because he never wants to put money out to promote us.” Maria Elena understood Buddy’s discontent: “Norman didn’t want to spend a red cent. Everybody else was exposed out there, and Buddy always had to struggle to make sure that the people knew about him.” Petty, in fact, had done little to increase the Crickets’ public exposure. The only promotional pictures of the group were black and white shots taken by Petty’s loyal bookkeeper, Norma Jean Berry. The Crickets were sorely disappointed when Petty refused to allow them to appear alongside other rock and rollers in the movie Go, Johnny, Go! (1959).

As described by Philip Norman, Norman Petty's portrait is quite frightening: "The face is a blandly good-looking one, its cheekbones curving with the symmetry of a ventriloquist’s dummy’s, its complexion airbrush-smooth, its butterfly bow perfectly tied. The expansive smile is professional rather than humorous, and kindles no warmth in the eyes, which are narrow, opaque and calculating." Petty turned over all the correspondence and financial records relating to Buddy and the Crickets to his banker in Clovis, with instructions to retain them for the three years required by the US Internal Revenue Service, then destroy them. But the banker did not destroy the papers and, after Petty’s death in 1984, we can go through receipts for Buddy’s guitars and clothes, see the cashed cheques for his dental work and wedding-ring, even read the heartbreakingly polite last letter Buddy sent to Petty a couple of weeks before his death. To the self-seeking professional biographer, it is a wildly exhilarating experience. But to the one-time English schoolboy, whose adolescence Buddy both brightened and soothed, it is horribly sad. As so often with those who cloak themselves in ostentatious secrecy, there was little about Petty’s life that could be called exotic. His father, Sydney, had originally been a migrant from the Oklahoma oilfields, stricken with tuberculosis and seeking a cure in New Mexico’s high altitudes. His wife Vi had her mother institutionalized for schizophrenia and herself manifested all the symptoms of the disease in its ‘episodic’ form: insecurity, anxiety, squirrel-like acquisitiveness, and chaotic disorganization.

Norman Petty was technically brilliant but creatively mediocre; a visionary in some respects but in others a blinkered small-town wheeler-dealer; ostensibly a backroom-boy, yet with a ravening ego, watchful for any chance to use the talent of the young musicians who passed through his hands for his own profit and advancement. Dr Jerry Fisher, who worked as an engineer with Petty in later years, and got to know him well, believes Petty to have been a classic case of arrested development. That explains his sexlessness. He didn't even seem to understand the rock and roll genre, or Buddy Holly's passion for the opposite sex. Norman Petty could not face the fact that Buddy Holly had evolved beyond the Clovis/Tex-Mex ethos. In an interview with Skip Brooks and Bill Malcolm, Norman Petty still found it difficult to address why he hadn’t been more supportive of Buddy’s need to experiment as an artist; Petty admitted he had lacked vision. As John Beecher recalls: "Norman and Vi Petty sent us information, but mostly they obstructed us in our efforts to gain access to their photographs, recordings, and film - something I found really hard to understand until later, when I worked out that Norman was just waiting for an opportunity to make some money. I suspect that by the time Buddy (and later the Crickets) discovered what had been going on with their income that had been directed to Clovis, it was too late for Norman to regain trust and he knew this. Thus, he burned all his boats with Buddy and cold-shouldered his attempts to get his royalties. Soon, lawyers were involved in getting Buddy his money and the process would have taken years to resolve. When I visited Clovis, I saw the problem at first hand; it was not until MPL took over Nor Va Jak that writers received regular statements and payments." About Amburn's mean-spirited biography, of which Bill Griggs said "that book belongs to the trash can", John Beecher agrees: "I don't much dig what Albert Goldman has to say on Elvis. I knew that a lot of what he attributed to Lennon wasn't true; he tried to destroy Lennon's soul for commercial gain and I think that's unforgivable. A bit like the tales Ellis Amburn told on Holly - so many of his facts that were able to be checked were so out of line that it made one doubt his assertions on anything he wrote. Goldman again."

Amburn hinted about Maria Elena's suspect aunt Provi Garcia, Maria's lack of domesticity or her tempestuous personality, sexy yet brainy. According to Peggy Sue, "Whenever someone even mentioned Maria, Jerry would simply state, “That’s Buddy’s wife,” and put an end to the conversation." Peggy Sue insinuated Maria Elena was very demanding of Buddy and more experienced than she let on. On 5 January, 1958, 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 singles from his mind. Maria Elena told him she was pregnant. In her interview with Philip Norman in 1996, Maria Elena explained: "We had not been trying to have a baby. It was an accident; it just happened. I didn’t want to have a child because it was going to interfere with all the projects we had starting out. But Buddy was elated about it. I told him, “If I have a baby, that means I won’t be able to travel around with you like you want me to.” But he said, “No, that’ll be fine. The baby can come with us.” Maria Elena didn't pursue her own ambitions to be a dancer-actress. “After we got married, he said, 'No, you don’t need to do that.’ He wanted me to be around.” Knowing how much she loved flowers, Buddy brought her an extravagant bouquet of roses for her 26th birthday. Maria Elena persuaded Buddy to drink “a couple of glasses of champagne,” she later told Goldrosen and Beecher. He became seriously ill, due to being an ulcer sufferer (possibly, in part, from the stress of his career).

Buddy Holly was described by The Melbourne Herald during the Australian tour in February 1958 as ‘the perfect representation of the American person, ascetic, serious, dignified...’ Buddy’s stage persona was the very opposite of what they had expected—not cool, but friendly, funny and unpretentious. Holly didn't intend to change the world (like Lennon or other 60s rock icons) but he wasn't going to let the world change him either. Buddy Holly adopted his new songwriting mode to produce the most stylistically varied body of original recordings of any late fifties writer/performer. Some were sonically brash, others subdued. Some were paradigm examples of experimental rock and roll, by including celesta and harp. Holly’s creative arrangements sometimes combined electric guitar with jazz sax or instruments one might expect to find in a symphony orchestra. His vocal hiccups are the skipped beats that convey to us that we are not lost on the way out, but surging towards the irreducible. —"Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly" (2014) by Philip Norman