The “Winter Dance Party” tour continued, without its headliners-with Jennings singing Holly’s vocals. The plane crashed in a windy snowstorm shortly after takeoff, killing Holly, Richardson, and Ritchie Valens, along with the pilot. It was a small plane, and Jennings originally had one of the seats, but gave his spot to J.P.

The acts traveled the 24-city route by bus, but the brutally cold weather and long distances between nightly gigs proved to be such a problem that Holly chartered a plane from a tour date in Clear Lake, Iowa to Fargo, North Dakota, which was close to the next scheduled venue. (Jennings played electric bass.) The four would be the headline act on the “Winter Dance Party” tour of the Midwest, which began on January 23, 1959. Among other things, Holly set up Jennings’s first recording session-and played guitar on two songs laid down that day, 'Jole Blon' and 'When Sin Stops (Love Begins).'Īfter the Crickets broke up in late 1958, Holly recruited guitarist Tommy Allsup, drummer Carl Bunch, and Jennings to form his new band. Holly and Jennings had met in Lubbock, Texas, their hometown, and Holly took Jennings under his wing. Buddy Holly 'discovered' Waylon Jennings. “The fact that the group relied on originals for their singles made them unique and put them years ahead of their time,” Bruce Eder wrote at, noting that the group’s first three big hits-'That’ll Be The Day,' 'Oh Boy!,' and 'Peggy Sue'-were originals, a stark contrast to Elvis Presley, who didn't write his own tunes. But Holly and the Crickets wrote most of their own material, which didn’t go unnoticed by the next generation of rock and rollers. Buddy Holly was the prototypical singer-songwriter.īefore Holly came along, pop music performance and songwriting were, for the most part, separate businesses composers crafted tunes in places like New York’s Brill Building, and performers picked from among those songs to record and sing in concert. If you’re ever in Lubbock and want to find the Buddy Holly Center, just look for a giant pair of horn-rimmed glasses: A 5-foot tall, 13-foot wide, 750-pound sculpture of the glasses, created by Lubbock artist Steve Teeters, was installed there in 2002. He needed the glasses, because he had 20/800 vision. These would soon become popularized as “Buddy Holly Glasses.” “It was Buddy’s perception that the glasses helped make him,” his optometrist, Dr. When Holly started out, he wore nondescript plastic and wire-framed glasses, but his eye doctor-inspired by Phil Silvers’s character, “Sergeant Bilko”-convinced him to switch to horn-rimmed models. Bruce Eder, writing at, called Holly “the single most influential creative force in early rock & roll.” In 2011, Rolling Stone ranked him 13th on its list of the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time”-extraordinary, especially when you consider that he died at age 22, after a recording career that lasted less than two years. The source of the above quote is the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which should know.

'Rock & roll as we know it wouldn't exist without Buddy Holly.' “Peggy Sue” hit number three on the Billboard singles chart, and in 2011 Rolling Stone ranked it 197th on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. Happy ending: Allison and Peggy Sue got married. But Jerry Allison, The Crickets’s drummer who co-wrote the song (with Holly and Norman Petty), prevailed upon the others to name it after his girlfriend, Peggy Sue Gerron. The single, released on September 20, 1957, first carried the moniker of Holly’s niece, Cindy Lou Kaiter. The pair would open for Presley twice more that year. On February 13, 1955, at the Fair Park Coliseum in Lubbock, Buddy and Bob opened for Elvis-with Holly borrowing Presley’s Martin guitar for the occasion. Buddy Holly opened for Elvis Presley.īy the time he hit high school, Buddy Holly was playing guitar by 1953, when he was only 17, he was playing regularly on radio in the country-and-western duo Buddy and Bob (Bob was Bob Montgomery, a friend from elementary school). Here are a few things you might not know about Holly and his music on the 61st anniversary of his death. The date became known as 'The Day the Music Died.' Holly was only 22 years old at the time, but he has had a lasting impact on music history. 'The Big Bopper' Richardson (along with pilot Roger Peterson) were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. On February 3, 1959, musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.

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