The day the music died, in 1959 - Buddy Holly.

Charles Hardin Holley (1936-59) was born in Lubbock Texas. As the youngest child in his family, Holly was nicknamed Buddy, and Holly was the accidentally altered form of his surname. Young Buddy learned piano and fiddle, then his older broth­ers taught him the guitar.

Holly the rebel clearly set his sights on his own career. After high school Holly formed a band, regularly playing country and west­ern songs on a Lubbock radio stat­ion. Then he opened for Elvis Pres­ley in 1955, a cruc­ial turning point for the young Texan. Holly’s bandmate said that when Elvis came along, Buddy fell in love with him & they all changed. The next day they be­came Elvis clones. A record company scout caught his act, and signed him up.

In 1956, Holly and his band The Three Tunes began recording singles in Nash­ville, until they be­came The Crickets. Holly wrote and rec­ord­ed his first hit That'll Be the Day with The Crickets in 1957, topping the U.S ch­art. And in 1958 they charted 7 diff­erent Top 40 singles.

Buddy Holly met Maria Elena Santiago in June 1958 in New York. Holly proposed on his first date with Maria Elena, and married her in Lub­bock in less than 2 months. The couple moved to New York and rent­ed a one-bedroom apartment in Fifth Ave where Buddy recorded on his home tape recorder the legendary songs called Apartment Tapes. I partic­ul­arly remember Crying, Waiting, Hoping and Peggy Sue.

  

Buddy Holly (left) and the Crickets, 1958 

The Last Tour

In Oct 1958 Holly & The Crickets split and he moved to Greenwich Village. Due to legal & financial problems after the band's breakup, Holly reluctantly agreed to tour through the Midwest in 1959 with The Winter Dance Party.

On the last tour were 

a] 22-year-old Buddy Holly; 

b] 17-year-old Ritchie Valens, son of Mexican parents, from San Fernando Valley Cal;

c] 19-year-old Dion DiMucci (b1939); 

d] The Belmonts from the Bronx; and 

e] 28-year-old group elder, The Big Bopper Richardson, a radio DJ from Beaumont Texas. The Bopper's signature song Chantilly Lace was a recent Top 10 hit.

The musicians started their 3-week tour of the Mid West in Jan 1959 at the Million Dollar Ballroom in Milwaukee Wis. Playing gruelling one-night stands and travelling around in old, decrepit buses, they were heading down Highway 51 on a 300-mile journey to Appleton Wis. The previous evening, they performed for an aud­ience that included adoring high school student Bobby Zimmerman/Bob Dylan.

Near the town of Hurley Wis, before dawn, their bus was pitch black and freezing cold, the mus­ic­ians were stranded for hours until res­cued by passing motorists. Dion recalled that snowy night. “You know Buddy, Ritchie and I used to sit in the back and jam together. It was a lit­tle bit of heaven. When we hit those chords and were stompin’ on the floor of the bus and we were rockin’ and taking solos. That was home, that was family, that was touching the very centre of my heart.” Dion became famous for Runaround Sue.

Then the Winter Dance Party musicians boarded another bus in Green Bay Wis, for the 340-mile journey to the next stop. At the ball­room that night, they performed their hits, and for the finale they all came onstage to jam with La Bamba and Great Balls of Fire.

On the bus to Iowa Buddy wanted a good night’s sleep. if he could fly after the show to Fargo Nth Dakota. So Bud­dy asked the ballroom manager to charter a flight from Mason City to Fargo. A flying service contacted one of their pil­ots to fly a small 4-seater pl­ane so Buddy offered one seat to Dion. Music­ians Tommy Allsup and Waylon Jenn­ings were asked next. But Big Bopper contracted the flu, and Jennings grac­ious­ly gave him his place. Ritchie Valens won the final seat in a coin toss.

In Feb 1959, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper climbed into the back seat of the plane with their dirty laundry, and Buddy sat next to the pilot. The barometer was falling, visibility reduc­ed, light snow was falling, the runway dark and windy. At 1 AM, the plane moved down the airport’s runway, made a sharp turn and quickly crashed, killing all aboard. Buddy Holly, just 22, had a funeral at the Tabernacle Baptist Church back in Lubbock. My heart was broken.

Don McLean was a 13-year-old paper-boy in New Rochelle NY,  carrying a bundle of the local Standard-Star papers. Mc­Lean saw Holly's death on the front page and memorialised the trag­edy in his iconic song American Pie 1971. 

Paul McCartney, who idolised Buddy Holly as a teenager, also learned about the plane crash from The Daily Mirror, just as the Liver­pudlians were learning music. John and Paul sang Words of Love together, with John leading and Paul harmonising. They spent hours trying to work out how to play the opening guitar riff of That’ll Be the Day, and finally figured it out - the very first song John, George and Paul ever recorded. It is not surprising that in 1960 The Beat­les chose their name as a homage to The Crick­ets, and Paul McCartney later purchased Holly's publishing rights.

The Daily Tribune newspaper report of the plane crash 

Wisconsin Rapids, 4/2/59

Despite his short professional life and tragic death, new recordings of Holly's work were released throughout the 1960s. Holly's material influenced artists like Elvis Costello and Bob Dyl­an. The Rolling Stones had their first Top 10 single in 1964 with a cover of Holly's Not Fade Away.

In 2008, Dion released Heroes: Giants of Early Guitar Rock, an album of his covers of early rock and roll songs he loved. The album had versions of songs originally recorded by Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and other early rock guitarists.