Buddy Holly: Lubbock's Most Famous Son

Charles Hardin Holley was born in Lubbock on September seventh, nineteen thirty-six, the youngest of four children in a family that prized music. During the Depression years, the Holleys moved frequently within the city as L.O. Holley changed jobs. Buddy's elder brothers performed in local talent shows. At one such contest, Buddy joined them playing violin, a violin he could not actually play, and his brother Larry had greased the bow so it would not make any sound. The brothers won.

By his early teens, Buddy had switched to guitar, learned properly this time, and was performing on Lubbock radio and at local venues with his friend Bob Montgomery. He saw Elvis Presley perform live in Lubbock in February of nineteen fifty-five, at the Fair Park Coliseum, and again in April and June of that year. He later described how those performances shifted his sense of what was possible in music. Holly opened for Bill Haley and His Comets in October of that year, and a Nashville scout in the audience helped arrange a contract with Decca Records.

Recording sessions with producer Owen Bradley in Nashville did not go well; Holly felt constrained by the style Bradley imposed. He left for Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico, sixty miles from Lubbock, where the atmosphere was different. The sessions there produced a demo of That'll Be the Day. Released under the name The Crickets, chosen partly to get around contract restrictions, it reached number one in the United States and the United Kingdom in September of nineteen fifty-seven. Peggy Sue followed in October.

Holly was twenty-one years old.

Over the next fourteen months he performed across the United States, appeared twice on The Ed Sullivan Show, toured Australia and the United Kingdom, married María Elena Santiago in August nineteen fifty-eight, and recorded a body of work that musicians from Bob Dylan to the Beatles would later name as formative. He defined what a rock and roll band looks like: two guitars, bass, and drums. He was among the first artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in nineteen eighty-six.

In early nineteen fifty-nine, Holly assembled a new touring band for a winter run through the Midwest. Among the musicians he recruited was a young Waylon Jennings, another West Texan, working as a DJ in Lubbock. After a show at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, on February second, nineteen fifty-nine, Holly chartered a small plane to reach the next venue. The aircraft went down shortly after takeoff in the early hours of February third. Holly was twenty-two years old. The songwriter Don McLean would later call that night the Day the Music Died.

The Buddy Holly Center on Crickets Avenue, in Lubbock's Depot District, preserves his story in the former Fort Worth and Denver South Plains Railway depot, a building that opened in nineteen twenty-eight. The city also maintains the West Texas Walk of Fame nearby, honoring musicians connected to this corner of the state.