the day the music died

- Buddy Holly

A long, long time ago
I can still remember/How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance/That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they'd be happy for a while.

But February made me shiver/With every paper I'd deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep/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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Buddy Holly was amongst the first and most important of the rock and roll pioneers. Yet, his career in music lasted for only a short eighteen months - during which he shaped an entire industry for the better.

Fifty years ago today, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, along with Ritchie Valens and 'Bopper' Richardson.


The Times
We lost a driving force with Buddy Holly

- The Beatles took the inspiration for their name largely from Holly’s group, the Crickets; they took the inspiration for their early efforts at songwriting from Holly, and chose the Crickets’ That’ll Be The Day for their first attempt at recording. George Harrison later said: 'Buddy Holly was my first favourite and my inspiration to go into the music business.'

- Although the Crickets also performed as a trio, Holly’s band essentially invented the now classic group line-up of two guitars, bass and drums.

- Elvis was undoubtedly a greater performer — but Elvis didn’t write songs, didn’t produce records, and was no more than a competent guitar strummer. Buddy Holly did it all, and he did it all so well.

The Independent
Oh boy: Why Buddy Holly still matters today

- It is often said that rock'n'roll was the music of rebellion, a response to the dull, conventional lifestyle of the previous generation. There is none of that in the Buddy Holly story: his parents supported him all the way and he, in turn, loved them.

- Listen to how Holly drawls "car" and "far"; you can hear Bob Dylan doing the same thing 10 years later.

- It is wrong to assume that Holly's simple songs imply simplicity. Dominic Pedler, the author of The Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles, analyses the simplest of all, the B-side of "Peggy Sue", the whimsical "Everyday": "Among Buddy Holly's finest musical moments is the bridge to 'Everyday', which showcases his understanding of a classically derived, five-chord cycle which unfolds so irresistibly towards the song's musical and lyrical climax ('Do you ever long for true love from me?'). I don't know whether Holly had ever heard Marlene Dietrich's 'Falling In Love Again' but he manages a brilliant take on that concept in that bridge, descending in inevitable fifths but creating a clever effect that ends on that hanging imperfect cadence rather than a settled resolution on the tonic note as in the vast majority of cycles of fifths: for example, in 'Falling In Love Again', 'Can't help it' takes us to a feeling of closure."

- [...] Buddy Holly was a springboard for The Beatles' creativity – they chose an insect name as homage to The Crickets and Paul McCartney was to purchase his publishing rights. Philip Norman, a biographer of Holly and John Lennon, says: "John and Paul used to do a pastiche of Buddy Holly, but then everybody used to imitate Buddy; that was the whole point. Buddy's voice invited you to imitate him and if you did that, you could see how the songs were put together."

The Guardian
Richard Williams salutes the clean-cut Buddy Holly

- If Elvis Presley made a generation want to play rock'n'roll, Buddy Holly showed us how.

- Whereas the smouldering greaseball Presley represented the darkness of mortal sin, Holly sang with a kind of light in his voice: he sounded as though he might be about to put down his guitar and set off on his paper round, or give his father a hand with chopping the firewood. Probably no one did more to make rock'n'roll acceptable to adult society without neutering its essence. That veneer of smiling innocence was to achieve a similar effect for the Beatles, his greatest disciples, who also managed to reconcile the apparently opposing forces of core-audience credibility and parent-friendliness during the two or three years in which Beatlemania gripped the nation, between their appearances at the Palladium and the Palace.

The Telegraph
Buddy Holly: The 50th anniversary of an unlikely legend

- He was a singer-songwriter and self-producer who did about as much with four chords (at least one more than most rock and rollers of the era used) as it was possible to do. His Fender Stratocaster guitar licks are prototypes for rock's obsession with riffing, which Holly weaves through seamlessly structured, melodically expansive songs. The rhythm tracks are sprightly and inventive: listen to Cricket drummer Jerry Allison's rolling tom tom's on Peggy Sue, or the cardboard-box beat of Not Fade Away.

- Holly came out of the country music tradition, which is reflected in the economy and wit of his writing. He cut records with guitar-twisting grooves that teenagers wanted to dance to, but there was simply nothing about Holly that evoked the revolutionary, sexually liberated spirit that made this youth movement so threatening to an older generation.

- There was a real liberation in the unapologetic plainness of Holly's image. Frank Allen of the Searchers called it "the revenge of the nerd". But it was the undeniable quality of the music that made the revenge complete.

Buddy Holly, remembered.

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They were singing,
"Bye, bye, Miss American Pie",
Drove my Chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "This'll be the day that I die."


-- Don Mclean