In a museum in Lubbock, Texas, a set of spectacle frames, a pair of white leather shoes, a motorcycle, and a couple of guitars are enshrined behind glass. These items are among the few that remain of the possessions of a very young man whose name is known around the world.

Buddy Holly was born in a small town in Texas, Lubbock, on September 7th, 1936 and he died in a cornfield outside of a small town in Iowa, Mason City, on February 2nd, 1959, when the plane that he and two other performers were on failed to fly due to pilot error.

When the legend overcomes the facts, print the legend.

The decades since have been filled with a lot of strangeness. Charles Hardin Holley, known to his family, friends, and fans as 'Buddy', was a hard-working fellow who never rested on his laurels, or let the hype of the pop world go to his head. Having been post-humously and repeatedly crowned as one of the innovators of rock and roll has probably given him reason to wish that solid objects could be dropped from heaven with pinhead accuracy and the list of pinheads he would want to drop them on seems to be growing all the time.

The rest of the story.

It is a sad fact that Buddy, at 22, left no issue. Maria Elena (nee Santiago) Holly, his 25 year old wife, miscarried a month after the aircraft incident, and was left to carry (with the assistance of her aunt and the Holley family) the burdens of fame that have plagued and pleased her ever since. J.P. Richardson, the Big Bopper, left behind a pregnant wife who had a child very soon after the incident and she already had a couple (check on this) to deal with.
Today, the youngest son, who has only heard his daddy's voice in recordings, is carrying on the musical legacy in a poignant manner. Richie Valens, even more sadly, was not married at the time of his death, and not to get too icky, is not known to have left any children for the curious of the world to poke at.

Daddy Sang Bass, Momma Sang Tenor...

Rather than a peak in the heartbeat of Texas music history, Buddy was proud to be part of a tradition that continues today. He listened to other musicians and entertainers throughout his life and he had no problem learning or sharing.
His stated co-writers on some of his songs were his mother, his drummer, his producer, and, in one instance, a movie star that he had never met ¹. Fans and writers inebriated on the history of "rock and roll" often ignore the obvious influence on Buddy and his friends by "country music", television, "Broadway Show Tunes", and "rhythm and blues", in addition to the rockabilly boom that Buddy was later caught up in.

Mommy, Mommy, I want one!

Buddy's choice of guitar is a good instance of fact being overwhelmed by historical fiction. The magic that he was able to wrest from the electric guitar he is most famous for owning, recording and being photographed with came from years of experience with other instruments. His first Fender Stratocaster was bought for $600 cash by Buddy with a loan from his brother after they were reasonably certain that he was going to continue to work as a recording artist and performer.

He had gotten by for years with various guitars, including an acoustic that he had hand-tooled a rosetted leather cover for after seeing Elvis with something similar on one or more of the four appearances that Mr. Presley made in Lubbock in 1955. Memories of those who performed with him suggest that he had several electrics before he purchased the first of the possibly five ²Strats that he owned before he died. One witness states that Buddy had a Les Paul "Gold Top" for awhile before he bought a Stratocaster.

The Stratocaster was chosen for it's visual appeal, as well as it's association with various country musicians that Buddy respected, including Eldon Shamblin, of the Texas Playboys. A guitarist in the Lawrence Welk band even had one. Leo Fender had designed and built the Stratocaster with input from country musicians and it's appearance was actually secondary to it's intent as an instrument.

Buddy was known to have a sense of the usefulness of flash and style. Some of this shown through in his purchases of cars such as a '55 Oldsmobile, a Chevy Impala (for his parents), a Lincoln, which was soon traded for a Cadillac Fleetwood, and motorcycles, among which were a Cushman scooter, a Triumph and later an Ariel Cyclone. In some of his last performances, he wore a tie and tails, but he had always had paid attention to his appearance on stage, going to the trouble of spending another $400.00 on stage clothing at the time he bought his first Stat.

Despite the legendary zeal with which some "historians" describe Buddy's innovative use of the Strat, a close listen to his recordings shows that he used it in a utilitarian manner reflective of his influences, experiences and stylistic needs, as simply an amplified tool of his trade. His skill as a guitar player is tertiary to his songwriting and entertaining abilities, but no less remarkable. His playing would have been interesting no matter what brand of electric guitar he chose. He was also not precious about his guitar. Photos early and late in his career with the Stratocaster display it being played by others in his band and his tour. One of the last photos of the last tour before he died shows Richie Valens wearing Buddy's Strat, with a capo ready for use on the headstock.

What do you think, an animated series or a comic book?

It is hard to find anything truly spectacular in Buddy's life, outside of his two week courtship of Maria Elena in New York after proposing on their first date and the day that poorly piloted plane plowed an unseasonable furrow in that snow-covered field in Iowa. That is why the only movie to have claimed to deal with his life (Paul McCartney's production was a documentary), "The Buddy Holly Story", had to crawl through several script drafts and disapproval from his family and spouse before it produced a generic shadow of a guess about the man, the era and the meaning of it all.

Fortunately the competent vocal and acting abilities of a hard-working Gary Busey saved the movie almost in spite of itself. Busey will be associated forever with the Holly legend, despite the fact that Gary was a singer/songwriter/musician/drummer (under the name Teddy Jack Eddy) long before the movie was made.

Buddy wrote a short autobiography (link here) in high school that expressed his own wry and unimpressed attitude toward his life, except for his propensity to inflict damage on the family truck and his wish to possibly have a career in western music. It can be hoped, out of sincere charity to the movie-makers, that being a fan of entertaining cinema matinees, Buddy appreciates having any movie made about him, regardless of factual usefulness.

The truth is stranger than fiction.

Of course, there were several things incidental to Buddy's life that would have made a good story, if they had fit into the Hollywood notion of "story". The first one is that the local newspaper, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal (link here), originally listed his parents as having had a daughter. It is not known if Buddy was ever aware of that. One would suppose that it would have had a prominent place in his autobiography if that had been the case.

The second item is also from the Avalanche-Journal (link here) and details the capture of an armed 37-year-old shoplifter by the 21-year-old Buddy (the article says both "Holly" and "Holley") and several friends on December 29th, 1956. Buddy is described as being the leader of "a small orchestra" playing at the American Legion Youth Center.

Another slightly exciting fact is that according to his mother in a bio that came with the boxed set from MCA “The Complete Buddy Holly”, he was elected King of the Sixth Grade. It appears that his popularity started early, with an aluminum foil-wrapped cardboard crown.

Do I hear a waltz?

The influence of his culture and his family and friends, as mentioned lightly earlier, cannot be discounted in seeking reasons for his facility with composition and stagecraft. Most of his family were musical in one form or another, with guitars, fiddles, accordions, and voices readily available to the young and impressionable ear.

He sang in choirs in church and school. Lubbock had several radio stations and guitars, drums and basses were apparently everywhere to be heard and messed with. There was a thriving Latino musical culture in that part of Texas, including Orquestra, Norteno, and Mariachi, and it is almost certain, given his romance with Maria Elena, that Buddy was bilingual. Bob Montgomery, his first playing and writing partner, said that Buddy and he were fans of what they called "root blues", singles known as "race records" because they were recorded by black musicians with little "cross-over" potential.

Buddy claimed in a recording company bio that he was taking violin lessons as a preschooler, but his mother rebuts that he never seriously studied the instrument. He did take almost a year of piano and several months of steel guitar lessons. His mother said that he bought his first acoustic guitar when he was twelve. She says, "In a short time, he was doing quite well, without going through that period of 'a lot of noise and no music', as is usually the case... in a short time, he was playing and singing a few tunes." Also, within a short time, he was playing songs on the school bus and picking up a partner, Bob Montgomery, with whom he began playing lyceums, talent shows, barn raisings and radio spots. By the time he was 15 he could play the guitar, mandolin, banjo, and piano with equal ability. It was also around this time that he began writing songs with Bob Montgomery.

Take 427, "The World Is Waiting For A Sunrise"

Several claims have been made over the last forty years about Buddy's "recording innovations". Many of these claims are based on a sincere ignorance of recording history. Buddy did grow up with access to equipment, such as acetate disk cutters, wire recorders, and tape machines, so by the time he hied himself and his group forth to the sacred shrine of Norman Petty's Clovis, New Mexico recording studio in June of 1956 (check this), he had a pretty good idea of what was possible.

The earliest known recording is from 1949, when Buddy, then just 13 and a few months into his guitar study, waxed a version of Hank Snow's "My Two-timin's Woman". It is not known how many of his early recordings were destroyed, played to death or just lost, but Buddy continued to record as often as he could. It is also known that he did a lot of listening. The whereabouts of his record collection are unknown and any indication of exactly what he owned is equally a mystery, but the songs that he played and recorded displayed disparate influences.

He also had no problem playing or playing along with other people's songs. Buddy was not alone in attempting to craft his own songs. Sonny Curtis, Jack Neal, Niki Sullivan, Tommy Alsup, Waylon Jennings, and later the Everly Brothers all benefited and shared in Buddy's workmanlike ability to turn to whatever song was at hand. It was a community of sorts, of young people doing their thing.

Propounders of the strict "rock and roll" timeline often ignore the fact that Buddy stated in several interviews that he thought "rock and roll" was a fad. He described what he played and sang as "country bop", "rockabilly", "country swing", or just plain "entertainment".

Recording technology received a tremendous boost after the U.S Army plundered the BASF and other factories in Germany at the end of the late great unpleasantness. Les Paul was a beneficiary in many ways, as he had already spent two decades playing with primitive "sound on sound" techniques involving two acetate-cutting machines.

When Ampex kicked out an improved version of the German technology, Bing Crosby made sure Les was given one of the earliest reel to reel magnetic tape machines. Les immediately began to tinker with it and pioneered multitrack recording, phasing, slap-back echo and multi-speed special effects noises within a few months. This was at the same time that Buddy was making his first recordings at thirteen.

In the record bins, radio play lists and television schedules of Buddy's High School days, many recording and musical innovators such as Les Paul, Patti Page, Stan Freberg, Spike Jones, Merle Travis, and Chet Atkins could be heard and seen. Not only that, but the vocal and musical icons of the Warner Bros and MGM cartoons probably did not pass through the local theatres unnoticed by the young Texan.

"We always called him Buddy, 'cause Charles Hardin Holley was such a big name for a little boy."

It's not polite to say that Buddy was a spoiled child, but the very fact that Buddy was the youngest, with siblings who were quite a bit older by ten years for Larry, eight for Travis, and six for Pat (Patricia) strongly suggests, along with numerous quotes citing his "cuteness" and his willful ways, that he might have been the teensiest bit "favored" by his family.

His eyesight was very weak at the time of his death and it is not known when he got his first glasses, but early photos seem to show him squinting. Children with uncorrected vision have a tendency to get more in your face and it is possible that this occurred with Buddy. The earliest photos to show him with glasses are from his late Jr. High period, but vanity and odd adult predelictions often led to a spectacled child or adult to have their picture taken without them.

Four eyes cryin' in the rain.

This researcher hates to keep driving sacred cows integral to the Holly legend through the minefield of truth, but the hoopla about Buddy's glasses being a real big deal is also full of many sorts of odd-smelling gasses. While it is true that performers such as Nat King Cole were persuaded to leave their spectacles in the dressing room at an early stage in their public careers, it is conversely true that by the time Buddy became a visual icon, he had switched from relatively innocuous wire frames to slightly tinted plastic frames mostly out of a need for something a bit sturdier to handle his vigourous showmanship and his thick lenses.

The wire frames were simply not up to it and replacing broken prescription lenses on the road when you are doing two shows a day for a month can be a real pain in the you-know-what. It is also true that the popular media was full of people wearing glasses, including Truman, Eisenhower, Stan Freberg, Groucho Marx, Glenn Miller, Vince Guaraldi, Roy Orbison, and, most significantly, Dave Garroway and Steve Allen, of television fame. The stars of, respectively, the "Today" and "Tonight" shows had their countenances squarely planted in the center of the TV set for years.

Of course, it didn't hurt that Yves St. Laurent and Edith Head wore them, either, and Buddy's fashion-consciousness has already been mentioned.

The Hits Just Keep On Coming!

Another facet of Buddy's, um, legacy that wouldn't play well in a movie is that his recordings, which according to witnesses, were nothing compared to his live shows, lived on and on and on. Forty songs are listed as being written or co-written by Buddy. Fewer than that were actually recorded and released.

Within months of Buddy's death, Norman Petty, Buddy's producer, recording engineer, and erstwhile Svengali, repackaged, and in some cases, redubbed bits of Buddy's catalog, and threw it back into the record bins as a "new" album. And, in a move that presaged the experiences that the Beatles were to have with album track lists and covers, Buddy's various record companies (he had a veritable mare's nest of legal entanglements in his short career) released different albums on different sides of the big pond, in some cases leaving charted singles off the album released in the country that the charting occurred in. To this day, everything that Buddy recorded during his life has not been released on a single "legal" compilation.

Bootlegs and record company "almost but not quite" efforts have come close, but in the end, who really cares except the collectors of minutiae and incunubula? The MCA boxed set "The Complete Buddy Holly" (which is nothing of the kind) has so many alternate takes and ephemeral items that hardly anyone but a masochist would listen to the whole thing through more than once a year. The tracks from the stillborn Decca sessions (another little twinge for you Fab Four fiends!) in Nashville are almost interesting as a documentation of just how much the suits didn't know what to do with him, but ultimately the tracks are disappointing, just as they were to Buddy. They are not quite an embarrassment, but this researcher doesn't think that if he'd lived to control his catalog that Buddy would have wanted them distributed as they have been.

Play it again, Sam! This time with more... everything!

It is a legendary story that some of Bob Dylan's odd tunes didn't take off until someone ³put a rock beat to them, though when he chose to rock himself, the purists were incensed. It is also part of legend that Simon and Garfinkel's "Sounds of Silence" did not take off until some enterprising DJ paid to have a rocking backing track added.

Norman Petty beat all that hollow. Normy-poo dug up the corpse and as Elvis Costello put it in another context, dressed it "in a suit of lights". Petty added backing tracks from a group called the Fireballs (whom he had under contract) to some of Buddy's early Buddy and Bob material, as well as some items that Buddy had recorded in his New York apartment during his last months, using a tape recorder, his voice, and a Magnatone amp. At one desperate point in the late sixties, Petty had his wife play an early synthesizer (or just an odd-sounding organ) on a ten-year-old track that had already been released six times before.

By 1969, ten albums of Buddy and the Crickets work had been released, not including re-releases of exactly the same album under a different title and cover art! And that is just in the US alone. In the UK, a similar situation existed, yet with different track lists, different overdubs, different takes, and yet more different covers! That is not including the various rip-offs, sound-alikes, tributes and covers that featured Buddy's and the Cricket's sounds, images, and songs.

Don't sign anything you're going to regret.

One of the big differences between Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly was their attitude and their manager's attitude toward song writing. Elvis never sat down and wrote himself a letter. Buddy had no qualms about performing or recording other people's work, but Norman Petty wanted his name on as many publishing documents he could generate.

Thus, while legally incestous incidents occurred with other people's and publisher's songs, as long as Buddy was associated with Norman (he was part of incorporation papers for Buddy's own label at the time of the plane crash), new songs meant new papers and more royalties. You would think that with all the releases, rereleases, overdubs, alternate takes and albums, singles, and eps that Buddy's widow and family, as well as the Crickets, would have benefited. It ain't necessarily so.

During Buddy's life, he and the Crickets often lived off what they got from the death race tours that they were booked to play, with pockets full of money that was never banked and in some cases, never written down. At the time of Norman Petty's death, there were still disputes between members of the Crickets and his lawyers about the accounts.

It is a fact that Buddy and the Crickets were just barely out of their teens. While all evidence points to a lack of drugs and alcohol (Buddy had an ulcer) in their partying and goofing off, other evidence suggests that Norman didn't begrudge them new clothing, new equipment or the ability to handle their own finances, regardless of the consequences. Each band member was instructed to open his own savings account, far from the prying eyes of Mr. Petty. On one occasion, Buddy and the boys, flush with cash from a tour, took a plane from Lubbock to Dallas and went shopping for motorcycles. They ended up spending over $3000.00 for a Triumph Thunderbird, an Ariel Cyclone, and a Triumph Trophy, as well as caps and jackets. One of the band members claims that Buddy had $5000.00 in his pocket that day. This, in a time when that was a year's income for some hard-working folk.

It will never be known how much money Buddy and the Crickets went through. At the time of his death, he had an expensive penthouse in New York, and had bought land in Lubbock for a home and a recording studio, which he had already ordered the equipment and the contractor for. When he died, the land was quietly sold. It was one of Buddy's fans, who went on to live and learn from his example, as well as becoming quite rich after his own legal Gordian Knot, who made sure everybody got most of what was coming to them, in the end.

Sir Paul McCartney, back in 1976, when he was known as Linda's Husband and the tenor in Wings (Who?), bought the catalog of Buddy's works and made sure that many of the old BMI and ASCAP and what-have-you fees were collated, collected and paid out before he began working to make his own substantial investment generate a respectable return. Due to some of this largesse, the original Crickets later bought Buddy's Ariel motorcycle and gave the refurbished bike to Waylon Jennings, who had once played Fender Bass for the Crickets, most notably on the last night before Buddy died.

Despite Paul's efforts, or because of them, as late as 1999, the remaining family of Buddy was engaged in a civil suit against the band, the manager, and the record company, MCA for lost royalties.

Don McLean's "American Pie" will not be mentioned any more.

Due partly to record company hyperbole, teen magazine bumpf, and media stupidity, Buddy was almost a cardboard figure to all those who hadn't known him or seen him live even before he died. His death, in reality a horrible event that cannot be sanitized once fully realized, became the trigger for elevation to a rather sick form of "rock and roll" sainthood.

Long before Janis and Jimi and Brian Jones, Buddy, along with The Big Bopper, and Richie Valens, was lamented as a lost "promising future" by many fans and pointed to by detractors as evidence of the pitfalls of a "rock and roll" lifestyle. Never mind that Will Rogers, Glenn Miller, and Carole Lombard had died in plane incidents, this was the first time that a "youth icon" of the "rebel" sort, had fallen ignobly from the sky.

The plain fact is that the cold and sick trio wanted to do some laundry for themselves and others on the tour bus. Not only had they had to change buses because one broke down in freezing weather (it was unheated to begin with), but they had been performing in the same clothes for a week. So, in inclement weather, in fact, "instrument" weather, they climbed into a tiny plane that was barely adequate, with a pilot who was, regrettably, not quite up to speed on the weather conditions and the technique of instrument flying. The plane didn't get very far before it left the sky and tore into a snow-covered cornfield and rammed into a fence, leaving scattered broken bodies behind it.

We will never know if or how long the pilot and passengers lived after the crash, but it took hours afterward to reach the site after it was noticed the next morning. Nothing really marketable or theatrical, is there? So, it is pretty much ignored. On with the show. "Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story", in particular.

The yard-long library!

There has hardly been a day since his death that his name hasn't been mentioned in an article, an interview, or a book. Bands have been named after associations with Buddy. Other musicians have been branded with his ghostly image, most notably Marshall Crenshaw (who was famous for playing John Lennon (link here) in a traveling Beatle musical), and Elvis Costello, who as far as is known never sang a Buddy song, but never blinked from embracing his own quirky version of the iconic "geeky" image that suffused the hagiography of Buddy after his death.

Dozens of books have been written about him, most cobbled from rumours (Hello, Graham Parker!) and bad newspaper features. One notable effort, written by a fellow who had already published odd and scurrilous books about Janis Joplin and Roy Orbison, suggested that Buddy had had a relationship with Little Richard on a star tour while he was engaged to Maria Elena. Mrs. Holly and the remaining members of his band and family denied any possibility of this happening.

Books are still appearing on a regular basis as of this writing and maybe, sometime around Buddy's hundredth birthday on September 7th, 2036, some form of the truth might emerge. In the meantime, his fans get to clutch whichever stuffed and mounted version of his image and life that they choose to.