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"Did you know?"
| Buddy was born Charles Hardin Holley, on 7th September
1936, in Lubbock, Texas, USA. He was nicknamed "Buddy" because, as his mother
once confided, "Charles Hardin was just too long a name for such a little boy."
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He died in the early hours of 3rd February 1959 along with
Ritchie Valens, J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson and the pilot of the light
plane that was taking them from The Surf Ballroom, Clear Lake, Iowa, to the
next gig near Fargo, North Dakota. Buddy's guitarist and bass player should
have been on the plane but had given up their seats to Ritchie Valens and The
Big Bopper. Drummer Carl Bunch was already in hospital with severely
frostbitten feet following the tour bus' breakdown a couple of nights earlier.
The original Crickets
were:- Buddy Holly, Niki Sullivan, (guitar), Joe B Mauldin, (bass) and J I
Allison, (drums), but, following a dispute with his manager, Norman Petty,
Buddy was accompanied on the Winter Dance Party Tour by Tommy Allsup (guitar),
Waylon Jennings (bass), and Carl Bunch (drums).
Buddy Holly and The Crickets were the
first white group to play the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. They were booked there
in 1957 by a promoter who assumed they were black! This is a high spot of the
movie about his life, "The Buddy Holly Story", released in 1978 starring Gary
Busey, who sang Holly's songs himself for the film.
The Beatles acknowledged Buddy Holly as a
major influence to their music and chose their name partly as a take off of
'The Crickets'. As Paul McCartney once put it, "If it wasn't for The Crickets,
there wouldn't be any Beatles." McCartney, now owns the publishing rights to
Holly's songs.
Don
McLean's 1972 No1 hit "American Pie", one of the all-time great rock era
records, refers directly to the loss of Buddy Holly:-
| "February made me shiver, with every paper I delivered Bad
news on the door step, I couldn't take one more step, I can't remember if I
cried, when I read about his widowed bride But something touched me deep
inside, the day the music died" |
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