Buddy Holly was born in Texas.
In those days, pretty much the only sound coming out of the radio was country music.
Other music came and went, but country music was the staple.
So that’s what Buddy Holly wanted to be: a country musician.
Until he heard Bill Haley, and then Elvis Presley.
They were playing a new sort of music called rock and roll.
And suddenly, Buddy Holly wanted to play rock and roll music.
However long the craze lasted.
In 1956 he formed a group called Buddy Holly and the Crickets.
They were determined to have a hit record before this rock and roll craze blew over.
And eventually they did have a hit with THAT’LL BE THE DAY.
But they didn’t stop there.
Straight away they followed it up with another hit, PEGGY SUE.
And they didn’t stop there either.
They kept on writing more and more hits as fast as they could.
RAVE ON, and HEARTBEAT, and EVERY DAY.
And even then, they didn’t dare stop, they kept writing more hits.
WORDS OF LOVE, and RAINING IN MY HEART, and IT DOESN’T MATTER ANYMORE.
Every one a huge hit.
Jerry Allison, the drummer in The Crickets, was talking about this.
He was asked why they were in such a hurry.
Why didn’t they save some of these hit songs to release later?
Jerry Allison said “We didn’t know when this rock and roll craze would blow over.
Then we’d have to go back to singing country, back to regular music.
We thought we’d better just do as much as we could as fast as we could.
There wasn’t no point in hanging on to it.
So we just did it while we had the chance.”
They thought the craze would probably be over in a few years, just like every other music craze that had come along.
So they might as well make the most of it while it lasted.
Use it or lose it.
And with that they had an amazing two years.
An incredible run of hit after hit.
Which was just as well because it did all end after two years.
At least it did for Buddy Holly.
He was killed, travelling between dates in a light aircraft that crashed in a snowstorm.
And suddenly, just like that, it was all over.
Buddy Holly wouldn’t be writing any more rock and roll records with the Crickets.
And that’s how it is with life.
There really isn’t any point in hanging onto anything.
If they had waited, they wouldn’t have written so much.
None of it would have happened if they’d waited.
But luckily they didn’t wait.
And what they wrote made Buddy Holly and the Crickets one of the most influential rock and roll groups of all time.
So influential that, years later, Don MacLean wrote a song about the plane crash, called “The Day The Music Died”.
So influential, one group even named themselves after the Crickets.
The Beatles.
That ending was one of the best I have read! Quite a powerful finish. Thank you Dave.
Thanks Jaffer
Hee Hee, Dave – the song title’s ‘American Pie’ – I remember because it was such a long song the DJ played it over 2 weeks. Kind of daft because in those days cassette-recording days, it was hard to get Part I next to Part II.
You’re right Robin, well spotted.