Buddy Holly Born: Rock and Roll's Brief Genius

Buddy Holly was born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1936 and had less than three years of recorded output before dying in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, the day Don McLean later called "the day the music died." He was twenty-two. In those three years he had written and recorded "Peggy Sue," "That'll Be the Day," "Rave On," and "Everyday," invented the recording technique of overdubbing his own voice, and established the guitar-bass-drums rock band format that became the standard for everything that followed. He grew up listening to country music, gospel, and the rhythm and blues that drifted across the Texas plains on late-night radio from stations in Louisiana and Tennessee. By fifteen he was performing on local radio; by nineteen he had opened for Elvis Presley and Bill Haley on their Texas tours. He signed with Decca Records, was dropped, then signed with Brunswick through producer Norman Petty, who recorded the Crickets in his Clovis, New Mexico, studio. The records that came out of that studio changed popular music permanently. Holly was the first major rock artist to write, arrange, and produce his own material as a complete creative package. John Lennon heard him on BBC radio and formed a skiffle band. Paul McCartney named the Beatles partly after the Crickets. The Buddy Holly tribute concert in Clear Lake, Iowa, continued annually for decades. The plane that killed him also carried Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson. Holly had chartered the flight because the tour bus heater was broken and it was February in Iowa. He was buried in Lubbock. His glasses were found at the crash site the following spring.