|
It was the night of 3rd February 1959, - "the day the music died" - when Buddy Holly, at only 22 years old, was killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, USA. His backing band, The Crickets, continued to tour without him but the magic was gone.
Now, nearly 50 years later, their music is revived in HeartBeat - a talented trio, re-creating the original sounds of Buddy Holly and the Crickets.
 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."
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"
|
|
