Buddy Holly
The young Texan in thick horn-rimmed glasses wrote and arranged his own songs, left behind the basic template of the rock band playing on two guitars·bass·drums, and was gone at twenty-two.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Bandmates and associates ⏳🌊
- FriendshipBob Montgomery
His partner in the junior-high duo 'Buddy and Bob,' he stepped aside when Decca wanted only Holly and later became a Nashville songwriter.
- InfluenceElvis Presley
The contemporary star whose 1955 show in Lubbock turned Holly from country toward rockabilly.
- ProducerNorman Petty
Owner of the Clovis studio, he shaped the Crickets' sound alongside them, but they parted over money in 1958.
- MemberJerry Allison
The Crickets' drummer and co-writer, he played the relentless drums on “Peggy Sue.”
- FamilyMaría Elena Holly
His wife, whom he married in 1958; he is said to have dedicated “True Love Ways” to her.
- FriendshipWaylon Jennings
A younger musician whose first single Holly produced; he played bass on the final tour and gave up his seat on the plane to Richardson.
I. The youngest in Lubbock · 1936–1954
(Birth) He was born in September 1936 in Lubbock, Texas. His given name was Charles Hardin Holley. His father, Lawrence Odell Holley, supported the family by turns as a cook·tailor·carpenter, and his mother, Ella Pauline Drake Holley, taught the children to sing. Above him came his brothers Larry and Travis and his sister Patricia; he was the fourth child and the youngest. “Buddy” was the pet name his mother gave him. (Family) There was always music in the house. The story goes that at five he entered a local talent contest with his brothers and won five dollars. He took piano and violin lessons for a while, then settled on the guitar after learning chords from his brother Travis. The family attended Tabernacle Baptist Church in Lubbock, and the harmonies of the hymns stayed in his ear for a long time. (Radio) On the flat plains of West Texas, most of the music a boy could hear came from the radio. By day he listened to Hank Williams's country and Bill Monroe's bluegrass; by night, to Black popular music (rhythm and blues) drifting in from distant stations in Louisiana and along the Mexican border. This habit of taking in white country and Black rhythm and blues with the same ear later became the foundation of his music. (Best friend) With Bob Montgomery, whom he met in junior high, he formed the duo Buddy and Bob, singing country harmonies they themselves called “Western and Bop.” From around 1953 they were regulars on a Sunday program on the Lubbock station KDAV. Friends remembered him as a shy boy who would not give an inch when it came to music.
II. Where Elvis passed through · 1955–1956
(Elvis) In 1955, the year Holly finished high school, Elvis Presley came to Lubbock to perform several times. Buddy and Bob opened for him, and Holly was deeply shaken by Elvis's sense of rhythm. From then on his playing tilted quickly away from easygoing country toward early rock (rockabilly), which laid the restless beat of rhythm and blues over country guitar. (Discovery) That October, when he opened for Bill Haley in Lubbock, the Nashville agent Eddie Crandall took notice of him. Through this connection he signed with Decca Records in early 1956, but Decca wanted Holly alone, not the duo. Montgomery stepped aside rather than stand in his friend's way, and later established himself in Nashville as a songwriter·producer. The contract misspelled his surname as “Holly,” and he kept that spelling as his stage name. (Nashville) In 1956 he recorded three sessions at Owen Bradley's studio in Nashville, but the results were disappointing. The seasoned session players smoothed his rough, jittery rhythm into a polished country accompaniment, and his first single, “Blue Days, Black Nights,” did not sell. He had already recorded “That'll Be the Day” by then, but Decca placed no hopes in it. (Dropped) In January 1957 Decca declined to renew his contract. The contract carried a clause barring him from re-recording elsewhere, for a set period, any song he had cut for Decca. The twenty-year-old Holly learned then that unless the player held the final say in the studio, he could not make his own sound. That lesson shaped the way he worked from the following year on.
III. The Crickets of Clovis · 1957
(Clovis) The breakthrough came in Clovis, New Mexico, just across the Texas line. The small studio run by Norman Petty charged by the song rather than by the hour, so young musicians could spend all night polishing the same number. Roy Orbison, another West Texan, had recorded “Ooby Dooby” there around the time of his debut. (The Crickets) On February 25, 1957, Holly re-recorded “That'll Be the Day” with drummer Jerry Allison, bassist Larry Welborn and others. The title is said to come from a catchphrase John Wayne repeats in the film The Searchers. To get around the Decca contract, the record was released under a band name, the Crickets. Soon Joe B. Mauldin settled in on bass and Niki Sullivan on rhythm guitar, completing a four-piece of lead guitar·rhythm guitar·bass·drums. (Irony) As luck would have it, the label that bought the recording was Brunswick, a Decca subsidiary. Bob Thiele of Coral Records championed the song, and a dual arrangement emerged: recordings by the same musicians came out on Brunswick under the Crickets' name and on Coral under Holly's own. “That'll Be the Day” reached number one on the American charts that September and on the British charts in November. (Petty) Petty was producer and manager, and he also ran a music publishing business that held and administered the songs' copyrights. He added his own name to the writing credits of a number of songs. It was not an uncommon practice in the industry at the time, but these roles converging in one man later sowed the seeds of money troubles. Even so, Petty's echo chamber and patient experiments made up half of the Crickets' sound.
This song, which went nowhere at Decca and was recorded again in Clovis, changed his life. The two recordings of the same song show the difference between failure and success.
- Listen to the opening, where Holly frets two notes at once on his Fender Stratocaster and slides down in a short phrase (a double stop). Those few seconds set the buoyant mood of the whole song.
- Notice that the song opens not with a verse but with the chorus. Putting the title-bearing chorus up front made it stick after a single hearing.
- Holly uses a hiccuping vocal style (the hiccup), flipping the ends of syllables slightly upward. The male and female backing voices layered behind him were sung by Lubbock friends, Niki Sullivan among them.
- Set it beside the 1956 Nashville recording: the Nashville version is slower and its accompaniment stiff, so the same song sounds entirely different.
Released as the B-side of “Peggy Sue,” this song carries the experimental spirit of Clovis, where rhythm could be made without drums. It whispers the flutter of a love just beginning.
- The clicking that sounds like a drum is Jerry Allison slapping his own knees with his palms. With no drum kit, he kept the beat this lightly.
- The bell-clear keyboard is a celesta (a keyboard instrument that sounds when small metal bars are struck with hammers), played by Petty's wife, Violet Petty, who also takes the solo in the break.
- Holly never raises his voice, singing close, almost as if speaking. The large string bass played standing (the double bass) quietly holds up the bottom.
- The volume barely rises by the end of this song of just over two minutes. It is often cited as proof that rock doesn't have to be loud.
IV. A year at the peak · 1957–1958
(The summit) From the fall of 1957 to the following spring he was at his peak. “Peggy Sue,” “Oh, Boy!” and “Maybe Baby” reached the charts one after another. “Peggy Sue” originally bore another girl's name but was changed to that of Allison's girlfriend, Peggy Sue Gerron. In December 1957 and the following January he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show; the band members recalled that on the second appearance he clashed with the host over the choice of song, yet played “Oh, Boy!” loud, just as planned. (Touring) The tours were long and grueling. In August 1957 he played the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, and in the fall he joined a joint tour (a package tour) on which Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers and many others rode a single bus from city to city. In some Southern cities segregation laws kept the Black performers off the stage, and only the white acts played. The time he spent on the bus with Black musicians widened his ear still further. (Glasses) Around this time he traded his thin-rimmed glasses for thick black horn-rims. Before that, it is said, he often took his glasses off on stage. By not hiding his horn-rims, he showed that a plain-looking young man could be a rock star too. (Changes) At the end of 1957 Niki Sullivan left, saying he was worn out, and the Crickets became a trio. In early 1958 they toured Australia, and in March, Britain. There, the Fender Stratocaster he carried and the band's spare lineup left a deep impression on the country's young people. Offstage he was a twenty-one-year-old who bought motorcycles in Dallas with his bandmates and rode them around.
This song, named after a friend's girlfriend, marked the start of his peak. It carries a simple confession — calling one person's name over and over — on the sheer force of its rhythm.
- The drumming that rolls on without pause from start to finish is Jerry Allison playing the basic rudiment in which the hands alternate in a set order (paradiddles), carried across the tom-toms. That figure is the song's engine.
- Holly's rhythm guitar fills the sound like a wall, using a technique of striking the strings rapidly in one direction only, top to bottom (downstrokes).
- Each time he sings the name in the title, Holly changes his tone, leaping from a low note into a high, flipped voice and more. Listen and compare how each one differs.
- In the solo break the guitar suddenly grows louder and sharper. It is said that while Holly played, Niki Sullivan flipped the guitar's pickup selector switch (the switch that chooses which pickup produces the sound) for him.
The only album released under the Crickets' name in Holly's lifetime, it captures the band's Clovis-era sound on a single record. You can hear the full verve of a four-piece hardened by touring.
- For the video we chose the track “Oh, Boy!” It is the song in which Holly's voice leaps most roughly; listen for the short, punchy guitar solo.
- The male backing vocals on “Oh, Boy!” and several other songs are not the Crickets but the vocal group the Picks, recorded separately later and laid on top (overdubbing).
- On “Not Fade Away,” Allison beat a cardboard box instead of drums. This broken pattern — three hits, then two — is the rhythm Bo Diddley loved to use (the Bo Diddley beat).
- The track “You've Got Love” was co-written by Roy Orbison, a fellow West Texan.
Released on Coral under Holly's own name, the song compresses the giddy rush of his peak into less than two minutes. It is the voice of someone in love, pouring out words without a pause for breath.
- The song's signature is its opening: the voice alone, unaccompanied, breaks the first word into syllables and draws it out before leaping into the beat.
- The piano hammers chords on every beat and drives the rhythm. It is a rare Holly song in which the piano, not the guitar, takes the lead.
- The song runs less than two minutes. Verses and choruses follow one another without a break, leaving the feeling that it is over in an instant.
- The hiccup style, with syllable endings that bounce upward, is especially prominent here, so listen closely to the final sound of each line.
V. A new start in New York · 1958
(Marriage) In June 1958 he met María Elena Santiago, a Puerto Rican woman who worked as a receptionist at Peer-Southern, a music publisher in New York. Two months later, on August 15, the two were married in Lubbock, and they soon moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village. Holly wanted to escape a life tethered to Clovis and Lubbock and to work at the very heart of the New York music world. (Split) After the fall tour ended, he decided to part ways with Petty. Allison and Mauldin, after much agonizing, stayed with Petty, and the name ‘the Crickets’ stayed with them. Holly suspected that Petty was not properly paying out the share owed to him on every record sold (royalties), and Petty froze the money until the accounts were settled. It is said that right after the split he had almost no cash in hand. (Strings) On October 21, at the Pythian Temple in New York, he recorded four songs, among them “True Love Ways,” with an orchestra led by the arranger Dick Jacobs. It was his first recording with strings and his last formal studio session. The sight of him setting down his guitar to sing over the strings signaled a wish to move a step beyond the rockabilly singer. (Plans) He envisioned founding his own label and publishing company and producing other artists. In September, in Clovis, he personally produced the first single by Waylon Jennings, a Lubbock DJ. Toward the end of the year he set a tape recorder running in the apartment and recorded new songs with nothing but a guitar — the so-called ‘apartment tapes.’ Critics generally agree that his songs after the marriage grew slower and more intimate.
A ballad recorded with an orchestra in October 1958, two months after his wedding, and said to have been dedicated to his wife, María Elena. It was not released until 1960, after his death.
- Over the long, sustained notes of Dick Jacobs's string arrangement, Holly leans in close to the microphone and sings low and soft. Unlike his earlier songs, it makes almost no use of his hiccup vocal style.
- The tenor saxophone solo in the middle is played by the New York session musician Boomie Richman. Listen for the soft, breathy tone.
- It was recorded live in one room with the orchestra, and the session finished four songs in just a few hours. That is why the voice and the accompaniment seem to move on a single breath.
VI. The winter dance party · 1959
(Tour) With his money frozen and a new household to support, he set out on a tour he had little heart for: the ‘Winter Dance Party,’ which opened in Milwaukee on January 23, 1959. His backing band was Tommy Allsup on guitar, Waylon Jennings on bass and Carl Bunch on drums, and the bill also featured Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson), and Dion and the Belmonts. (Cold) The itinerary zigzagged back and forth across the map of the Midwest, and the buses' heaters kept breaking down. When Bunch was hospitalized with frostbitten feet in the subzero weather, the remaining musicians took turns on drums. In the audience at the January 31 show in Duluth, Minnesota, sat seventeen-year-old Robert Zimmerman, the future Bob Dylan. In his 2017 Nobel lecture in literature, Dylan recalled that Holly, onstage that night, had looked him in the eye. (Crash) After the February 2 show at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly chartered a light plane to reach the next venue. Jennings gave up his seat to Richardson, who had the flu, and Valens is said to have won his seat from Allsup on a coin toss. The plane took off around 1 a.m. on the 3rd and, within minutes, went down in a snow-covered cornfield. Holly, Valens, Richardson and the twenty-one-year-old pilot, Roger Peterson, were all killed. The Civil Aeronautics Board found the chief cause to be a pilot with too little instrument-flying experience who lost his bearings in bad weather. (Funeral) The funeral was held on February 7 at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Lubbock, and he was buried in the Lubbock City Cemetery. He was twenty-two. Jennings said many times that the teasing jokes he and Holly had traded that night about the bus and the plane weighed on his heart for the rest of his life.
A song from the same October session, released just before the crash; after his death it went to number one in Britain. Its way of bidding a departed lover a light, resigned farewell took on a different weight after he was gone.
- From the opening bars, the strings pluck with their fingers instead of the bow (pizzicato), creating a bouncy accompaniment. That sound sets the light gait of the whole song.
- Paul Anka wrote the song for Holly. Though it is a breakup song, Holly sings it not in a wounded voice but in a breezy tone, almost a shrug.
- In the arrangement, the strings do not drape the song in lushness but serve as a rhythm instrument. With the guitar all but inaudible, it captures the moment a rock 'n' roll singer was crossing over into pop arrangement.
VII. The songs that remained · 1959–1986
(Afterlife) “It Doesn't Matter Anymore,” released just before his death, reached number one on the British charts after he was gone. Bouncing along on strings plucked with the fingers (pizzicato), the song sounded entirely different in the wake of his death. Coral layered accompaniment and backing vocals onto the apartment tapes (overdubbing) and released them one after another, and his songs lived on longer in Britain than in America. (Liverpool) In 1958 the Quarrymen of Liverpool — John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison — paid to make their first recording, and the song they chose was “That'll Be the Day.” His trace is there in the band name ‘the Beatles,’ a twist on an insect name like the Crickets, and in 1964 the Beatles recorded his “Words of Love.” Lennon and McCartney said they learned from Holly that it was all right to write their own songs. The Rolling Stones' first American single was also his: “Not Fade Away.” (Traces) Elton John recalled that as a boy he started wearing glasses in imitation of Holly, and Bruce Springsteen is said to have steadied himself before going onstage by listening to Holly's songs. In 1971, Don McLean's “American Pie” sang of the day of the crash as a symbol of the innocence a generation had lost. (Tribute) In 1986 he became one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His career lasted little more than two years, but what he left behind was less a number of songs than a way of working. Critics broadly agree that the model of the rock musician who writes his own songs, arranges them himself and experiments in the studio began with him.
Lesser-known stories
(Glasses) The horn-rimmed glasses that could not be found at the crash site turned up in the spring of 1959 as the snow melted, and were placed in an envelope at the sheriff's office of Cerro Gordo County, Iowa. The envelope lay forgotten for more than twenty years until it resurfaced at the courthouse in 1980; it was returned to his family, and the glasses are now on display at the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock. (Producer) That it was Holly who brought Waylon Jennings into the music business is less well known, overshadowed by the story of the crash. In September 1958, producing Jennings's first single, “Jole Blon,” he brought the Black New York saxophonist King Curtis to Clovis, and Curtis also played on Holly's “Reminiscing.” It is a rare record of where he meant to go as a producer. (Overpainting) Most of the apartment tapes we usually hear contain sounds he never heard himself. In 1959 Coral had the arranger Jack Hansen overdub accompaniment and backing vocals, and in the 1960s Petty brought in the band the Fireballs to overdub them again. The original recordings, with only guitar and voice, became fairly fully available only much later, when complete collections were released. (Rights) In the mid-1970s, much of the publishing rights to Holly's songs passed to Paul McCartney's company, MPL. Beginning in 1976, McCartney held a ‘Buddy Holly Week’ in Britain around Holly's birthday. Honoring his boyhood idol carried over, in effect, onto the ledgers of the music business.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Rockabilly
(Word origin) A blend of rock and hillbilly, a once-disparaging term for the rural music of the American South. The name itself says it: rock rhythm laid over country music from the countryside. (In rock) An early branch of rock music that emerged in the American South in the mid-1950s, mixing country guitar playing with the excited beat of Black rhythm and blues. Elvis Presley's early recordings and Buddy Holly's debut years are prime examples. It is a bit like taking the familiar side dishes at Grandma's house and adding a trendy hot sauce, only to find a whole new flavor.
Rhythm and blues
(Word origin) A combination of rhythm and blues. In the late 1940s the American record industry began using it in place of the discriminatory names once used for Black music. (In rock) Black popular music that adds a strong, danceable beat to the blues, and the most important root of rock 'n' roll. Buddy Holly grew up listening to it night after night as it drifted in from distant radio stations. Sing the same song while clapping loudly, and suddenly your body starts to move — rhythm and blues is the music that put that urge at its center. (Elsewhere) Today, R&B often refers to the sleek Black pop and soul music of the 1990s onward.
Package tour
(In rock) A touring show in which a group of performers ride the same bus from city to city, each singing a few songs at every concert. It was common in 1950s America, and Buddy Holly's last tour, the Winter Dance Party, worked this way. Think of a school festival where each class does a few minutes of a talent show to fill a single stage — then imagine repeating it every night in a different city. (Elsewhere) In the travel business, it means a group tour that sells flights, lodging and sightseeing as a single bundle.
Music publishing
(Word origin) Before recording technology existed, the way to make money from a song was to print it as sheet music and sell it. That is why the business of handling a song's rights came to be called ‘publishing.’ (In rock) The business of holding and managing a song's copyright, collecting fees each time the song is used on records, on the radio or in concert, and splitting them with the songwriter. What matters is that this is a right to the song itself — its melody and lyrics — not to the recorded sound. Picture an agent who, every time another class wants to put your drawing on a T-shirt, grants permission on your behalf and brings you the fee. (Elsewhere) Ordinarily, publishing means putting out books or magazines.
Royalty
(Word origin) The English word royalty originally meant the royal family or royal power. From the fees kings once collected for letting others use mines or land came the sense of money paid for using someone else's rights. (In rock) The share that goes to the songwriter and the singer every time a record is sold or a song is broadcast. It is set as a percentage in the contract, and disputes often arise over the accounting of who gets how much. It is like a rule that gives you points every time your friends play a game map you made — and the trouble is always who keeps track of those points in between. (Elsewhere) In the franchise industry, it means the money a franchisee pays for using the head company's brand and methods.
Overdubbing
(Word origin) A combination of the English over (on top) and dub (to re-record sound), meaning to lay new sound over what has already been recorded. (In rock) A method of playing back a performance recorded earlier and, while listening, recording new sound separately and layering it on. Adding another vocal group's backing vocals to a Crickets song after the fact, and adding accompaniment to the apartment tapes after Holly's death, are both overdubbing. It is like laying a sheet of clear film over a finished pencil drawing and coloring on top — the original drawing stays the same, but what you see changes.
Pizzicato
(Word origin) From the Italian pizzicare (to pinch, to pluck), meaning ‘plucked as if pinched.’ (In rock) A technique of playing a string instrument such as the violin by plucking the strings with the fingers instead of drawing a bow across them, producing short, crisp, detached notes. Though originally a term from classical music, it is also used in string arrangements for pop and rock, as in “It Doesn't Matter Anymore.” Think of the twanging sound you get by stretching a rubber band over a pencil case and flicking it with your finger.