"Death which struck in a snowy winter's night in Iowa early Tuesday brought to an abrupt end the life of a 22-year-old Lubbock singing star and ended a meteoric career which had brought him cheers on three continents," wrote Lubbock Avalanche-Journal staff reporter Jack Sheridan on February 4, 1959, the day after news broke that the chartered airplane Texan Buddy Holly had boarded with fellow rockers Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson had violently crashed into an Iowa cornfield "With the tragedy went the dreams of a young man who was in a hurry to reach his goal, and gave every indication of doing so."

His life had abruptly ended, but Holly's legacy to popular music had only just begun to be understood. As guitarist Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones put it several years later, "Listen to any new release. Buddy will be in it somewhere. His stuff just works." In fact, for the Rolling Stones, the band's 1964 entry to the U.S. charts came via a cover of Holly's "Not Fade Away." Holly and his Crickets were the prototype for the classic rock and roll band: two guitars, bass and drums, a self-contained unit largely performing its own material and, for the time, making a mighty racket.

Though barely into his 20's and with little more than a year of chart success behind him, Holly himself was more self-possessed and savvy than most of his peers; he was attempting to take control of his career, his finances and his music in a way that no other pop star of the era was doing. His approach to playing lead guitar was simultaneously rhythmic and melodic, with plenty of fire but no excess. His exuberantly elastic singing style – with its sudden shifts in register, its hiccups, and a hint of twang – seemed the epitome of barely inhibited youthful ardor. It was the sound of an artist teetering between the urgency of adolescence and the responsibilities of manhood. His songs traced an arc from the joy of infatuation to the deeper satisfaction of true love. They were ebullient, optimistic, infectious and affecting.

As John Mellencamp, who cut a version of "Rave On" for the 1988 Tom Cruise vehicle Cocktail, noted in a Rolling Stone tribute, "Record companies encourage young artists to copy what's been there before. But nobody was pushing Holly in any direction. That was just all him and his instincts…. The magic that Buddy Holly created was nothing short of a miracle. The fact that he died at 22 is just ridiculous. That tells you all you need to know about just how focused and visionary he was."

Charles Hardin Holley was born in Lubbock, Texas on September 7, 1936 to Lawrence and Ella Holley. His parents, his two elder brothers and a sister took to calling him Buddy; he later ditched the "e" in his last name after he found it misspelled on his first music publishing contract.  Holly's family members all were musically inclined, but Buddy proved to be especially gifted from an early age. The first documented instance of Holly performing was on April 19th, 1940, as reported in the Lubbock paper, when he sang a song for a fellow four year-old at her birthday party. At age five he won a talent contest – and, perhaps more importantly, a five-buck prize – and even made a recording, a rendition of Hank Snow's "Two Timin' Woman," that his family taped with a wire recorder. His mother told the Lubbock newspaper that young Buddy had studied the violin, the piano, even the Hawaiian steel guitar.  In high school, he joined the a capella choir. His brothers had initially taught Buddy some chords on the guitar, but he quickly outpaced their rudimentary tutelage. In the early fifties, with his school friend and fellow guitarist Bob Montgomery, he made more home recordings, including a version of Bill Monroe's "Footprints In The Snow." He also traveled to a Witchita Falls studio to record demos with various other young Lubbock musicians.

Holly formed a country and bluegrass-oriented duo with pal Jack Neal, calling themselves Buddy and Jack, and they landed a regular spot on the local, all-country-music radio station KDAV, which featured local talent in it programming lineup. Montgomery eventually replaced Neal and the duo renamed itself Buddy and Bob, continuing to perform on the radio and at local schools, churches and dance parties. Like other young musicians of that era raised in the south or the southwest, Holly was interested in country and bluegrass and intrigued by the rhythm and blues music he found on far-reaching southern AM radio stations. But it was seeing the still up-and-coming Elvis Presley at the local Fair Bank Park Coliseum on January 16, 1955 that proved to be Holly's watershed moment.

"Presley just blew Buddy away," Holly's friend and fiddle player Sonny Curtis has recalled. "None of us had ever seen anything like Elvis, the way he could get the girls jumping up and down, and that definitely impressed Holly. But it was the music that really turned Buddy around. He loved Presley's rhythm --it wasn't country and it wasn't blues --it was somewhere in the middle and it suited just fine. After seeing Elvis, Buddy had only one way to go."

As fellow Lubbock native, the country singer Joe Ely, has more recently observed, "[Holly] had this totally unique, perfect blend of old hillbilly and new rock and roll. And he had that bit of country in there to give it a sense of place." Hoping to appeal to the burgeoning rockabilly market, Holly first attempted to integrate himself into Nashville's rigid star-making apparatus before finding his own trailblazing voice as a recording artist far away from Music Row.  A month after that momentous appearance by Presley, a newly energized Holly and his cohort Montgomery actually landed the opening slot when the King returned to Lubbock. That fall, with bassist Larry Welborn now part of the lineup, they played at the Coliseum on two consecutive nights, opening for Bill Haley and the Comets on Friday October 14th and Presley again on Saturday the 15th. Country star Marty Robbins's agent Eddie Crandall caught their set on the 14th and decided to offer them the opening slot for Robbins's own upcoming Coliseum gig. Within a month, Crandall had also agreed to broker a recording deal for Holly, and Holly returned to the Witchita Falls studio to cut a four-song demo, with Don Guess and drummer Jerry Allison, whose innovative playing would be crucial to Holly's later hits.

In 1956, with the help of Crandall, Holly signed with Decca Records and Cedarwood Publishing, the company responsible for misspelling his name. Holly's Nashville period lasted little more than a year. Decca paired Holly with estimable Nashville producer Owen Bradley, best known for his later work with Patsy Cline, but Bradley's strict approach to record-making didn't allow Holly much room to move creatively. Bradley's production of the Holly/Allison composition "That'll Be The Day" only hinted at the song's potential: it has little of the good-natured swagger that marked the definitive side Holly cut a year later in Clovis, New Mexico with Norman Petty. Holly's vocal, pitched higher than on the better-known version, reveals little personality and never veers outside the lines. "That'll Be The Day" was not meant to be country but it was definitely western: the classic tune had been sparked by one of John Wayne's memorable catch phrases in John Ford's venerated 1956 Western, The Searchers. Clearly, that film had an impact: Randy Newman has admitted he was inspired to compose the haunting "Cowboy" for his own debut album after watching the movie. 

In January of 1957, Decca declined to pick up Holly's option. However, the label did release two singles recorded with Holly, Sonny Curtis and Don Guess under the band name of Buddy Holly and the Two Tones – "Blue Days, Black Nights" b/w "Love Me" and "Modern Don Juan" b/w "You Are My One Desire" – that met with only middling results. Bradley later admitted, "We had been very successful with a country format; we were all into country, and it's hard to change patterns. Buddy couldn't fit into our formula any more than we could fit into his -- he was unique, and he wasn't in a pattern. We didn't understand, and he didn't know how to tell us."

Holly returned to Lubbock, his ambition undiminished and his songwriting skills exponentially growing. He soon found the right environment to develop his craft as a recording artist in the Clovis, New Mexico studio of musician and producer Norman Petty, 100 miles from his home town, just over the Texas border. Petty had a more flexible approach to recording than his tightly scheduled Nashville peers, ignoring the clock and allowing an artist like Holly the room to experiment and record at his own pace. Bespectacled singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw, who credibly portrayed Holly in La Bamba, the Ritchie Valens bio-pic, remarked in an National Public Radio interview, "They kind of used the studio in the' 50s the way people like The Beatles started to use it in the ‘60s, which was a sort of combination laboratory and playground."

As pop history attests, Holly had found his milieu. Petty became both producer and manager and he devised a unique strategy to advance Holly's career. Though Decca claimed exclusive rights to "That'll Be the Day," having been first recorded under its banner in Nashville, Petty found a way around that stricture by having Holly and his band record under a name the musicians had come up with, the Crickets. (Bird names were then in fashion for rock and roll groups; they decided to branch out to insects.) Petty struck a deal with Brunswick Records, ironically a subsidiary of Decca, for the Crickets. He then managed to capitalize on Holly's name recognition by securing a second deal for Holly himself as a solo artist with Coral Records, another Decca imprint. Thus Holly was able to have twice as much material reach the ears of radio listeners in the short period before the 1959 plane crash.

By any reckoning, Holly's output in 1957 would be remarkable; his recordings have become the very foundation of rock and roll. "Words Of Love," Not Fade Away," "Everyday," "Oh Boy," and "I'm Gonna Love You Too," as well as "That'll Be the Day," were all cut at the Clovis studio in a period of less than six months. Using the rudimentary technology at his disposal, or whatever he could find that might provide the sound he wanted, Holly pioneered recording techniques that have been employed in more sophisticated form for years to come. He carefully overdubbed his voice using a home tape recorder on "Words Of Love," an unheard of approach in an era when singers simply performed live to tape. Allison was captured drumming on a cardboard box to create that indelible Bo Diddley-style beat on "Not Fade Away." Holly used the piano-like Celeste to give "Everyday" its sweet music-box sound. Though Petty was clearly a catalyst for Holly's creative breakthrough, Holly himself was ultimately the architect of his sound – songwriter, arranger, producer, singer, and performer. 

With the success of "That'll Be The Day," which reached #1 on the Billboard singles chart in the summer of '57 and topped the U.K. charts later that fall, Holly and the Crickets – drummer Jerry Allison, bassist Joe Maudlin and rhythm guitarist Niki Sullivan -- became a sought-after live attraction. That August they appeared at the Howard Theatre in Washington D.C. and the Royal in Baltimore on a tour with such R&B acts as Clyde McPhatter and Otis Rush. They performed six nights at Harlem's famed Apollo Theatre, one of the few Caucasian acts to successfully appear there at the time. Legend has it that the promoter, having booked the group sight unseen, thought the Crickets was a black group. The highly fictionalized 1978 bio-pic The Buddy Holly Story, which garnered lead actor Gary Busey an Oscar nomination for his genuinely impassioned performance, depicts the Crickets' first gig on the Apollo stage as an instantaneous hit, with the all-black ticket holders dancing in the aisles by the time the group hits its third number. In reality, the African-American audience did ultimately welcome the Crickets, but it took a few sets before the band and crowd warmed up to each other.

Later that month, Holly and the Crickets made their first appearance on Dick Clark's American Bandstand in Philadelphia, lip-synching to "That'll Be the Day," and performed on the New York City-based Ted Steel Show, airing on the local WOR-TV channel. As Labor Day approached, Holly and the Crickets performed a week-long run at the Paramount Theatre in Manhattan's Times Square as part of taste-making deejay Alan Freed's Holiday Show, which also featured Little Richard, the Del Vikings, King Curtis and the Moonglows. They immediately embarked afterwards on a three-month long U.S. package tour, The Biggest Show of Stars for 1957, along with Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, and the Drifters, among many others.

"Peggy Sue," which reached #3 on the Billboard singles chart, was released in September under Holly's own name, though he recorded it with the Crickets.  The song started out bearing the name of Holly's niece Cindy Lou, but Allison persuaded Holly to rename it so he could woo back his estranged girlfriend, Peggy Sue Gerron. Allison didn't just provide the song title, he gave the track its almost breathlessly propulsive beat, a feat of real-time drumming in the studio. In November, the Brunswick label put out The "Chirping" Crickets, the group's first and only album with Holly in the lead, and it's a veritable greatest hits package, with "Not Fade Away," "Oh Boy," "Maybe Baby" and "That'll Be the Day" among its twelve cuts.

Still veritably teenagers, Holly and his band mates capped the year off with their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, performing "That'll Be The Day" and "Peggy Sue." By then, guitarist Sullivan, fatigued by the constant touring, had left the group and it continued on as a trio. The group rejoined deejay Freed for his Christmas Jubilee Show at the Paramount, which took them right into the first week of '58. During the run, they squeezed in a December 29th guest spot on the nationally broadcast Arthur Murray Dance Party, performing "Peggy Sue."  Murray, the namesake of learn-to-dance studios around the country, presented his show like a fancy country club party, filling the sound stage with young couples in semi-formal wear. Holly and his band-mates in turn wore black dinner jackets, white shirts and bow ties. With his black-framed glasses and lanky build, Holly looked perfectly collegiate in this setting, more boyishly handsome than nerdy, though the posh trappings did not inhibit his performance. Before the Crickets launched into their latest hit, Murray's wife Kathryn explained to viewers, "If you haven't heard of these young men then you must be the wrong age because they're rock and roll specialists. No matter what you think of rock and roll, I think you have to keep an open mind about what the young people go for. Otherwise the youngsters won't feel like you understand them. Now we're ready for our rock and roll specialists, Buddy Holly and the Crickets!"

The new year took these seemingly tireless rock and roll specialists literally around the world. In late January 1958, the group, accompanied by Petty, flew to Honolulu on the first leg of a trip that brought them to Australia for a whirlwind, six-night tour, sharing a bill with Jerry Lee Lewis, Paul Anka and others. Within two weeks of returning to the states, Holly and the Crickets were on their way to London for a groundbreaking British tour, the full effects of which would not be fully realized for half a dozen years to come. The Beatles arrival on U.S. shores launched the British Invasion in 1964, revolutionizing the look and sound of rock and roll, but that may not have happened if Holly had not first stepped on British soil. Call it the American Infiltration. Holly's singles were selling even more briskly in the U.K. than in the states, and his live shows were eagerly anticipated, so he was indeed a pop sensation there. But it wasn't the reaction of the fans lucky enough to catch his gigs that had lasting ramifications: Holly's greatest impact came from a single appearance on the popular British television show, Sunday Night At The London Palladium. More than even the exotic Elvis, whose only trip to Europe came courtesy of the U.S. Army, Holly and the Crickets became the catalyst for the formation of countless aspiring young U.K. bands. Every British superstar can recall their first glimpse of him with his amazing Fender Stratocaster, his improbable eye-glasses and regular-guy features. As Eric Clapton has put it, "Of all the music heroes of the time, Buddy Holly was the most accessible, and he was the real thing... He was one of us. Elton John, then still known as Reginald Dwight, has admitted  "I only needed specs for reading, but as a result of wearing them all the time to try to look like Buddy Holly, I became genuinely nearsighted." 

On the 50th Anniversary of Holly's passing, Paul McCartney told Rolling Stone, "Buddy was a major influence on the Beatles. And in John's case, he had to wear heavy horn-rimmed glasses, just like Buddy, which he would always whip off when any girls came near. But post-Buddy, he didn't have to and that was an added bonus for him. Buddy to us was your neighbor. He looked like some of the kids you saw around." The Fab Four officially recorded Holly's "Words of Love" in 1964 for the Beatles For Sale LP, but the band's Liverpudlian precursor, the Quarrymen - -which counted George Harrison, John Lennon and McCartney among its members – had already cut its own version of "That'll Be The Day" back in the summer of '58, albeit straight onto one 78 RPM vinyl disc that the band-mates had to share. Recalled McCartney, "We spent hours trying to work out how to play the opening guitar riff of ‘That'll Be The Day' and were truly blessed by heaven the day we figured it out."

Returning to the states, Holly and the Crickets resumed their grueling touring pace on another Alan Freed package tour. Coral had already released Holly's self-titled debut album, which included the singles "I'm Gonna Love You Too," "Rave On," and "Words Of Love," as well as "Peggy Sue." In April, Decca compiled all the sides Holly cut in Nashville on an album called That'll Be The Day.  At the Crickets' next recording session in Clovis, where they cut "It's So Easy," Holly invited a second guitarist, Tommy Allsup, to join them. Allsup would tour with the Crickets and accompany Holly on the ill-fated tour that culminated for Holly in the plane crash. "It's So Easy" couldn't have been more prescient: when Holly went to New York City that June to meet with his publishers at Peer Southern Music, he was immediately smitten with a Puerto Rican receptionist there, Maria Elena Santiago and there he went, just like the lyrics, breaking all the rules. Not only did he take Santiago out to dinner that night, he proposed to her. As his widow told the New York Times in April 2011, after the posh Upper East Side hamburger joint P.J. Clarke's unveiled a commemorative wedding photo above the table where Santiago and Holly first dined, "I said to myself ‘Is he insane or what?' I said, ‘Do you want to marry me now or after dinner?' "

Holly was serious: He and Santiago were married in Lubbock on August 15th and they honeymooned in Acapulco with Jerry Allison and his own new bride, the famous Peggy Sue. Though Holly may have ultimately been planning to settle down in Lubbock and raise a family there, he and Santiago moved to an apartment in the fashionable Brevoort building on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, just a short walk to Washington Square. Holly and Santiago, by all accounts, took advantage of their proximity to Greenwich Village, frequenting late-night jazz and folk clubs in the neighborhood; Holly even played his guitar in the park, unrecognized among the amateur musicians and buskers. Holly's New York idyll is, for many, the most fascinating, yet all too brief chapter of his short life, as he absorbed a melting pot of sounds and asserted his independence as an artist. It's tantalizing to imagine Holly on the city streets; he may have been from the Texas plains, but he fit right in because he sported his own brand of iconoclastic cool. His trademark look would endure in New York City, along with his music -- revived among the eighties' new wave kids and more recently as a kind of geek chic in the Brooklyn neighborhoods where the hipsters now congregate. (Elvis Costello and David Byrne certainly cribbed a few things from him sartorially in their heyday.) 

Holly never really got the chance to demonstrate how his city life and his catholic taste in music might have served to reshape and advance his work. After he'd relocated to Manhattan, he did manage to do a full-fledged session with the Crickets at the auditorium-sized Pythias Temple studio that Decca Records owned on the Upper West Side, innovatively deploying a string session on "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," written for him by Paul Anka, and "True Love Ways," written by Holly himself for his new bride. 

But the move to New York City precipitated a creative as well as geographic distance between Holly and his band-mates. After a fall tour, Holly parted ways with the Crickets, who chose to stay in Lubbock and continue as a group without him, and he ended his partnership with Petty. Holly had ambitious plans as a songwriter, record maker, producer and entrepreneur – establishing a label and publishing company of his own and developing the careers of other artists as well as his own.(He'd already recorded a few sides with his friend Waylon Jennings for his new label.) He made some home recordings, including the sequel song "Peggy Sue Got Married," but got no further than the demo stage with the material. 

After the Christmas holiday, which Holly and his bride spent in Lubbock with his family, he decided, with some reluctance, to hit the road again on a bill called the Winter Dance Party, with Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, Dion and the Belmonts and others. Accompanying him would be Allsup on guitar, Jennings on bass and Carl Bunch on drums. Given the changes Holly had made in his career and the new life he was establishing in New York City, the tour would be a financial help for this newlywed and, as it turned out, father-to-be. But touring the Midwest in the dead of winter proved especially arduous for the performers, all of whom were traveling in a poorly heated bus by night in snowy, below-freezing temperatures. The conditions were so bad that Bunch had to be hospitalized with frostbite. Holly's decision to charter a private plane to get himself and two of the other artists to Fargo, North Dakota was a practical one: he craved a good night's sleep, a warm room, a chance to do laundry – everyone's laundry -- the next morning. The inexperienced pilot Holly had contracted apparently flew right into an oncoming blizzard and the plane went down in a corn field just miles from where it had taken off. A short time before, fans had been waving their farewells on the tarmac. The tragedy of the crash was compounded when Holly's distraught wife, Maria Elena, miscarried her child in its aftermath.

The date of February 3, 1959 will forever be referred to as the Day the Music Died. With his out-of-left-field hit "American Pie," singer-songwriter Don McLean helped solidify the idea that our nation had lost a part of its innocence along with three of its most promising rock and roll stars. If anything, from that day forward, the music took on a remarkable life of its own. In the weeks following the crash, "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," backed with "Raining In My Heart," rapidly rose up the charts, a bittersweet coda to Holly's cut-short career. In the decades to come, Holly's catalog would become a touchstone for artists of all kinds. The Beatles chose their name partly in homage to the Crickets. The Grateful Dead turned "Not Fade Away" into an incantatory hippie anthem. Linda Ronstadt went to the top of the charts with her own brash rendition of "That'll Be The Day." Blondie remade "I'm Gonna Love You Too" as new wave pop, with just a touch of punk bravado. Contemporary guitar virtuoso M. Ward relaxed the pace of "Rave On" to a cool guy's stroll, and actress-singer Zoey Deschanel chimed in with girl-group style harmonies. 

In 1989, Holly's life and work became the subject of the first successful "jukebox musical" – Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story -- a theatrical production in London's West End that ran for almost thirteen years. It was praised for being a more accurate recounting of Holly's biography than the popular 1978 Hollywood bio-pic, and it won the support of Paul McCartney, whose publishing company now controlled the Holly catalog. The show transferred to Broadway in 1990, with actor-singer Paul Hipp recreating his acclaimed title role and garnering a Tony Award nomination. Illustrating the perennial draw of Holly's repertoire, productions of Buddy have literally toured the world ever since, and the show reopened in the West End in 2007 to an enthusiastic reception for another two-year run.

Most recently, the Fantasy label compiled a Buddy Holly tribute disc, Rave On Buddy Holly, in honor of what would have been the artist's 75th birthday year. It underscores yet again the remarkable adaptability of Holly's repertoire to a wide range of sensibilities, voices and arrangements. Julian Casablancas of the Strokes recreates "Rave On" as electro-pop rockabilly, while Patti Smith wears her ample heart on her sleeve in a lullaby-like rendition of "Words Of Love," fading out, appropriately enough, to the sound of crickets chirping. The Black Keys take a similarly tender – if ever so slightly grungy -- approach on "Dearest" and Jim James of My Morning Jacket delivers "True Love Ways" as earnest, affecting crooning. McCartney himself goes the farthest out, turning "It's So Easy" into a freewheeling, R&B-inflected romp, stopping the track cold right before the end to deliver a growling, ribald rap. Sounding like the most youthfully audacious performer on this 19-track disc, the indefatigable Sir Paul locates all the passion and fun in Holly's work, and he adds some good-natured sex appeal of his own.

As Sir Paul clearly knows, there's romance, humor, heart, innocence and wonder – plus a healthy dollop of youthful lust -- in these simply yet brilliantly constructed songs. World weariness is nowhere to be found. As Marshall Crenshaw put it on NPR, "There's a real sense of joy in almost everything that [Holly] ever recorded. And everything about those records appealed to me when I was a kid.,. It just sounded very celebratory and made me really happy and excited." Though tragedy resides at the end of Buddy Holly's life story, his music captures all that was upbeat and optimistic in his outlook and career – and, for that matter, in rock and roll. The wisdom to found in his songs is direct, pure and true.

Simply put: Rave on!   

 -- Michael Hill