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If February 3, 1959 was the day the music died
when Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash in Iowa, the September 7, 1936 was when the music
came alive at his birth. What a decade
preceded the birth of Buddy Holly, especially when it came to American icons.
Marilyn Monroe was born
June 1, 1926, James Dean February 8, 1931, Elvis Presley January 8, 1935 and Buddy
Holly September 7, 1936. All would grow
to dominate the entertainment industry and all would die way too early in life.
There respective ages were Buddy Holly 23,
James dean 24, Marilyn Monroe 36 and Elvis 42.
Buddy Holly was popular
for all of two years while alive, 1957 - 1959 and during that time he created a
remarkable body of work so extensive that new Buddy Holly albums were released
until ten years after his death, in 1969.
Among entertainers citing
Buddy Holly as a major influence on their careers were the Beatles, Elvis
Costello, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Rolling Stone magazine ranked Buddy number 13
on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time. He was one of few white entertainers to ever appear
at the Apollo Theater in New York City
performing shows August 16-22, 1957.
In perhaps an indication of his awareness that he had little time on Earth not only did he stockpile a wealth of recordings but he met his wife to be, Maria Elena Santiago in NYC and proposed on the first date, married her two months later, and died six months later. She had just discovered she was pregnant and canceled touring with him. Within 24 hours of hearing of his fatal plane crash on the news she had a miscarriage and lost their child.
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| Buddy, parents & Maria Elena |
The following is an
article written by Alan Hanson comparing the careers of Buddy Holly and Elvis
Presley.
Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley Comparisons
by Alan Hanson
“Buddy
Holly could have been a country singer, or pop crooner, could have and probably
would have fitted his talent to whatever music was happening when he came
along. It happened to be rock ’n ’roll. But it only fully became rock ’n’ roll
the day Buddy Holly started singing it.” —Paul Williams in his book, “Rock ’n’ Roll: The 100 Best
Singles”.
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| Elvis center Buddy far right |
Paul Williams may have
been over stating things a bit, but Buddy Holly certainly earned his currently
accepted status as one of rock ’n’ roll’s founding fathers in the late fifties.
In 1986, Buddy and Elvis Presley were both named charter members of the newly
established Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The two men had many other things in
common. Both were born in the deep south and raised in poverty. Early contact
with country music and rhythm and blues stimulated their youthful, creative
musical spirits. There were obvious differences, as well. Buddy looked like the
typical boy next door, while Elvis’s smoldering looks oozed sexiness. Holly was
an accomplished guitar player and songwriter; Elvis was neither. On stage,
Presley’s voice and energy were boundless, while Buddy depended more on
instrumentation and his unique “hiccup” vocal style.
Elvis Presley was born on
January 8, 1935, in Tupelo,
Mississippi. Buddy Holly was born
a year and a half later on September 7, 1936, in Lubbock, Texas.
Coincidentally, the currently accepted definitive biographies of both men were
published a year apart—Peter Guralnick’s Last Train to Memphis in 1994 and Ellis Amburn’s Buddy
Holly: A Biography in 1995. Most of the following references to Holly’s life
and career come from the Amburn volume.
• Family backgrounds were
important
Growing up in the late and
post-Depression years, both Buddy and Elvis were “mama’s boys,” due to weak
father figures. According to Amburn, “The situation would have far-reaching
consequences for Buddy, who would make the mistake of relying on stronger
personalities who were not always trustworthy.” Elvis had the same weakness,
but fortunately for him the man in whom he put his trust, Colonel Parker,
brought Elvis incredible fame and wealth, while Buddy’s manager held him back
and stole a fortune from him.
An advantage that the
young Buddy had that Elvis lacked was a trusted sibling. The youngest of four
children, Buddy found in his eldest brother, Larry, a confidant he would cling
to for the rest of his life.
When his other brother,
Travis, came home from the war in 1945, he taught Buddy how play the guitar.
Around the same time, about 900 miles to the east, Elvis Presley received a
guitar for his eleventh birthday and began learning how to play it with help
from his uncle and church pastor. A natural affinity for the instrument allowed
Buddy’s guitar playing to progress at a rate that amazed his family.
Hank Williams, Sr., was
Buddy’s first musical idol. According to Amburn, though, when Buddy first heard
Fats Domino sing on the radio, he saw his future. “It was as if the heavens had
opened,” Amburn explained. “But it was more than just the music. From that
moment on, Buddy identified closely with blacks.” Meanwhile, an adolescent
Elvis was experiencing a similar epiphany in Memphis, to where his family had moved in
1948.
Although a year younger,
Buddy Holly got started in professional music before Elvis. Around 1951, when
Buddy was 15 years old, he started jamming with another Lubbock musician, Jack Neal. The two put
together a country and western act and played live entertainment Saturday
morning for youngsters at Lubbock
movie theaters. In September 1953, “The Buddy and Jack Show” made its debut on
KDAV radio. On November 10 that year, a station DJ recorded an acetate of the
duo singing and playing. It was just a few months after Elvis had walked into
Sam Phillips’s Memphis Recording Service to make an acetate of “My Happiness”
and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.”
• Buddy the tortoise,
Elvis the hare
As rock ’n’ roll became
more prominent on the radio during Buddy’s senior year in high school, he and
Jack began playing the new music at sock hops, store openings, and community
shows. Meanwhile, things were happening much faster for Elvis in Memphis. By the time
Buddy graduated from high school in 1955, Elvis already had four singles out on
Sun Records and had worked the concert circuit across the south for a year and
a half.
Everything changed for
Buddy when Elvis came to Lubbock
five different times in 1955. “What is certain beyond any doubt,” Amburn
declared, “is that when Elvis Presley hit Lubbock in 1955, he transformed all
the C&W pickers in Buddy’s circle into rockers. ‘Without Elvis,’ Buddy once
said, ‘none of us could have made it.’ Though rock ’n’ roll had burst on the
world of West Texas the previous year with Bill Haley’s ‘Shake, Rattle, and
Roll,’ it was Elvis who whispered freedom into the ears of embattled Baptist
boys like Buddy and unleashed a new generation of rockabillies.”
“Elvis changed Buddy,”
singer Waylon Jennings, then another young West Texas
musician, later told Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick. “It was the beginning of
kids really starting to think for themselves, figuring things out, realizing
things that they would never even have thought of before.”
Buddy’s brother Larry
remembers when Elvis was late for one of his early 1955 appearances at Lubbock’s Fair Park
Coliseum. “In Elvis’ absence, Buddy and his front band blew the roof off the
coliseum, playing until Elvis came on,” Amburn reported. “Many people in the
audience preferred Buddy to Elvis, Larry proudly recalled, although Buddy was
still a beginner.”
On October 15, 1955, Elvis
appeared at two venues in Lubbock.
After finishing up at the coliseum, he gave another show at the Cotton Club,
the city’s major dance hall. “We opened for Elvis,” recalled Sonny Curtis.
“Bales of cotton were stacked around the stage to protect him from the
audience. The most beautiful girls in Lubbock
were trying to climb the bales to get at him. That’s what impressed us as much
as his music. We’d been hillbillies but after the Cotton Club we were rockers
like Elvis.”
• Buddy Holly knew Elvis
“quite well”
The extent of Buddy’s
personal relationship with Elvis in 1955 is unclear. “Buddy and Elvis got along
pretty good,” Larry claimed. “When Elvis came to town, Buddy found him a girl.
She was not anyone you’d find on this side of town.” As for Buddy, during his
Australian tour in 1958, he told a DJ that he’d once known Elvis “quite well.”
Back in Lubbock in 1955, though, Elvis was clearly
Buddy Holly’s idol. Buddy even made a leather guitar case for his J-45 that
matched the one Elvis used to carry his Martin D-28. “I Forgot to Remember to
Forget,” Elvis’s Sun record that topped Billboard’s C&W chart in late 1955,
was Buddy’s favorite Presley song. Late in the year, Buddy and his band
performed on "The Big D Jamboree," Dallas’s Saturday night country and western
radio show. Sid King, another musician on the show that night, described Buddy
as “virtually a carbon copy of Elvis.”
According to Amburn, in
1955 there was another Lubbock
visitor who would play an important role in the careers of both Elvis Presley
and Buddy Holly. Colonel Tom Parker came to town looking for a talent to
manage. Amburn says that both Elvis and Buddy “intrigued” the Colonel, who
decided to focus on Elvis. He thought enough of Buddy, though, to recommend him
to Nashville
talent agent Eddie Crandall.
That led to Buddy’s first
big break in show business. When he and his band opened for Bill Haley and the
Comets at Fair Park Coliseum in October 1955, Crandall was there to see Buddy.
On December 2, Buddy signed an exclusive management contract with Crandall.
That was less than two weeks after Elvis left Sun Records and signed a contract
to record for RCA. Soon Crandall got Buddy a record deal with Decca.
As 1956 dawned, it looked
like both singers’s dreams of fame and fortune were about to come true. Both
Elvis and Buddy had January dates in Nashville
for their first recording sessions for their new labels. While 1956 would turn
out to be a spectacular breakout year for Elvis, for Buddy it was a year of
failure and exploitation that would test his resolve to make it as a
professional entertainer. In RCA’s Nashville
studio on January 10, Elvis recorded “Heartbreak Hotel,” which would reach the
top of Billboard’s pop chart in May, launching Presley’s fabulous run through
the end of the decade. Meanwhile, Buddy’s Nashville Decca session on January 26
was a disaster that led to nowhere.
• Decca a little bit
country, RCA a little bit rock ’n’ roll
Amburn explained how
differing philosophies at RCA and Decca dictated totally different outcomes for
the two young singers. “In the growing conflict between C&W and rock ’n’
roll … country music would be split down the middle, RCA and at least half of
the C&W establishment fleeing to rockabilly … and the other half remaining
straight country singers.” Some at RCA may have had their doubts, but they
allowed Presley to do his thing. “At Decca,” noted Amburn, “Buddy’s mentors
would prove less amenable to the new music; in fact, they hated rock ’n’ roll.”
The result was that
instead of viewing Buddy as a potential new rockabilly star, Decca tried to
force him into the existing country music model. The result was predictable.
After Buddy’s first single, “Blue Days, Black Nights” and “Love Me” was
released on April 16, it sold only 19,000 copies. “It’s a wonder the world ever
again heard of Buddy Holly,” Amburn noted. Buddy’s second release for Decca also
failed miserably, and at year’s end the label declined to renew his contract.
As 1957 dawned, Buddy was penniless, his career no further along than it had
been 12 months before.
The one positive thing
Buddy took from his failed year at Decca was some experience with songwriting.
For his January 1956 Nashville
session, the label asked Buddy to show up with four original songs. One of the
songs Buddy wrote and recorded for Decca, “That’ll Be the Day,” came off poorly
and was never released by the label.
In January 1957, without a
manager, a band, or a recording contract, Buddy returned to Lubbock and considered quitting the music
business. Deciding to give it one more try, he formed another band and drove
ninety miles northwest of Lubbock to record at
Norman Petty’s recording studio in Clovis,
New Mexico. There, on February
24, 1957, Holly’s life changed when he recorded a rocking version of “That’ll
Be the Day.”
Petty took the acetate to Nashville and got Buddy a one-record contract on the Brunswick label. Amburn
called Brunswick,
“a kind of trash-basket label in which Decca dumped its undesirables.” “That’ll
Be the Day” by the Crickets, the name of Buddy’s new band, was released
nationally on May 27, 1957. It spent 22 weeks on Billboard’s Top 100 pop chart,
peaking at #3. It reached that same number on Cash Box magazine’s list of “Best
Selling Singles.” Buddy Holly had finally hit the big time.
• Buddy Holly's career
took off in ’57
He had a lot of catching
up to do, however. By the time “That’ll Be the Day” became Buddy’s first hit
record, Elvis already had five #1 singles and eight gold records. Holly had two
more of his own compositions lined up to follow his first hit—“Peggy Sue” and
“Oh Boy,” both recorded at Clovis
in July 1957. Both charted in the top 10 late in the year.
Suddenly, Buddy Holly was
in great demand. With the Crickets, he appeared three times on American
Bandstand and twice on The Ed Sullivan Show. At Christmas time in 1957 Buddy
co-starred with Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Everly Brothers on Holiday
of Stars Twelve Days of Christmas Show in Times Square.
As the new year began, Buddy Holly found himself Decca’s top recording artist.
Like Elvis had in 1956,
Buddy Holly spent much of 1957 and 1958 on the road. Unlike Elvis, though, who
headlined his own tours, tightly controlled by Colonel Parker, Buddy’s only
option was to join the great rock ’n’ roll package tours, organized by promoters
like Alan Freed and Dick Clark. “Planned and mounted like military campaigns,
these all-star caravans swept across the country in buses,” Amburn explained,
“playing as many as 70 cities in 80 nights.” Buddy toured the nation and Canada with
other rock stars, such as Frankie Lymon, Gene Vincent, Paul Anka, Jerry Lee
Lewis, Eddie Cochran, The Everly Brothers, Connie Francis, The Drifters, Chuck
Berry, Buddy Knox, and Danny and the Juniors.
Although Buddy never met
Elvis again after their 1955 encounters in Lubbock,
their paths almost crossed again in Vancouver,
B.C., in the fall of 1957, when both were out on tour. Elvis was there on
August 31 for his controversial show at Empire Stadium. Buddy came through
eight weeks later with a package tour booked into the Georgia Auditorium. Hall
of Fame DJ Red Robinson interviewed both stars prior to their shows. Buddy
expressed a longing for a break in the grueling rock ’n’ roll grind. “Enervated
from singing his guts out in nightly rock shows,” Amburn explained, “he longed
for a radical change in musical trends, confessing that he’d rather sing songs
that didn’t require him to scream and shout.”
Elvis and Buddy both
recorded their rock ’n’ roll versions of some R&B classics, including “Good
Rockin’ Tonight,” “Ready Teddy,” “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” and “Rip It Up.”
Although Elvis never recorded a Buddy Holly song, Buddy recorded one of Elvis's
from the soundtrack of his 1957 film, Jailhouse Rock. According to Waylon
Jennings, Buddy’s version of “(You’re So Square) I Don’t Care” is the best
example of the “Buddy Holly sound.”
The package tour format
allowed Buddy to perform overseas, something Elvis often expressed a desire to
do but never did. In January 1958, Buddy, along with Anka and Jerry Lee, flew
out of New York for a tour in Australia. They
stopped in Hawaii
along the way, where Buddy performed a free show for military personnel at
Schofield Barracks, the same venue where two months earlier Elvis had given his
final concert of the 1950s. While in Australia, a DJ asked Buddy if
Elvis was his favorite singer. “I guess he’s one of them,” Buddy responded.
Soon after returning from Australia,
Buddy and the Crickets left for England,
arriving on March 1, 1958, for a twenty-five-day British tour.
• Rock ’n’ roll’s first
wave played itself out
While Buddy was still in
abroad, cracks were beginning to appear in his career and in rock ’n’ roll
music in general. Buddy’s record sales began to decline. His single releases of
“Maybe Baby” and “Rave On,” both considered early rock classics today, stalled
at #18 and #37 respectively on the Top 100. “It’s So Easy,” another Holly
classic, didn’t chart at all in 1958. Neither of Buddy’s albums reached the Top
40 on Billboard’s album chart. When Alan Freed’s forty-four-day “Big Beat”
package tour, which included Buddy, ended with a riot in Boston, it galvanized
the societal enemies of rock ’n’ roll to mount an all out war against it. Elvis
was taken away by the army, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s career never recovered after
it was revealed he had married his 14-year-old cousin.
The only good news for
Buddy Holly in the latter half of 1958 was his marriage to Maria Elena Santiago
in August. That fall, however, Buddy and his wife left Lubbock
and moved to New York City.
Buddy had fired his manager, but it was too late. Much of the money he had
earned through record royalties and touring was gone, spent or tied up by the
man Buddy had trusted to handle his financial affairs. (Reading Ellis Amburn’s
account of how Norman Petty mismanaged Buddy Holly’s career should make all
Elvis fans say, “Thank God for Colonel Parker.”)
In early 1959, Buddy
Holly, with a pregnant wife and living off the generosity of his wife’s aunt,
did something he didn’t want to do—he signed on for still another all-star
package tour. The “Winter Dance Party” was to be a twenty-four-day meander
across the upper mid-West in a converted school bus in the dead of winter. His
death at age 22 in an Iowa
cornfield plane crash on February 3, 1959, abruptly ended the brief yet
brilliant career of Buddy Holly.
According to Peter
Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen in their book, Elvis: Day by Day, Elvis learned
of Holly’s death at his army posting in Germany on February 5. The authors
state that Colonel Parker’s assistant, Tom Diskin, sent a telegram of
condolences to Holly’s family on Elvis’s behalf.
• Death brought fame to
Buddy Holly
Recognition as one of rock
’n’ roll’s pioneers, denied him in life, came to Buddy in many forms in death.
In addition to being charter members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, both
Holly’s and Presley’s images appeared on U.S. Postal stamps in 1993. Buddy had
five entries—“That’ll Be the Day,” “Not Fade Away,” “Rave On,” “Peggy Sue,” and
“Everyday”—on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
(Elvis had 11 on the list.) “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue” are on the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of songs that shaped rock ’n’ roll.
No Graceland
exists for Buddy Holly pilgrims. His birthplace in Lubbock was demolished years ago, and in the
1990s, his family sold off their Buddy Holly keepsakes and memorabilia. In Lubbock there is the Buddy
Holly Center,
inside of which is The Buddy Holly Gallery, a permanent display featuring,
according to the center’s web site, “Artifacts owned by the City of Lubbock, as well as other
items that are on loan.” Included in the display are “Buddy Holly’s Fender
Stratocaster, a songbook used by Holly and the Crickets, clothing, photographs,
recording contracts, tour itineraries, Holly’s glasses, homework assignments,
and report cards.”
Like Elvis’s fans, the
Buddy Holly faithful honor their rock idol by gathering each year on the
anniversary of his death. Starting in February 1979, on the twentieth
anniversary of his death, the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa,
where Buddy gave his final show on February 2, 1959, has hosted an annual Buddy
Holly tribute weekend. The 2013 event is being expanded to four days to
accommodate the ever-increasing number of rock ’n’ roll fans who attend. It’s
not quite the same as the candle-light vigil at Graceland during Elvis Week,
but those who are moved to do so can trek through the snow to a nearby
cornfield where a marker memorializes the lonely spot where “the music died”
back in 1959. | Alan Hanson
(October 2012)
By Alan Hanson
- The Elvis History Blog
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