Buddy Holly

Learning the Game

Spencer Leigh

• Publisher: McNidder and Grace
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780857161895
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musikbiographien

Buddy Holly died on the 3 February 1959 death. He was 22 years old. Don McLean called that fatal day 'The Day the Music Died'. But, his music hasn't died, as he has left us a wonderful legacy.

With his animated voice, trademark black glasses, fender Stratocaster and inimitable songs, Buddy and his music live on and continue to influence subsequent generations of musicians.

Spencer Leigh has interviewed those who knew him best – his young widow Maria Elena, his band members the Crickets, Des O'Connor who compered his UK 1958 tour as well as musicians, songwriters, friends, fans and many others who worked with Buddy.

A definitive account of Buddy Holly and his career.

'Spencer Leigh Raves On – brilliantly.' Sir Tim Rice

A journalist, acclaimed author and BBC broadcaster for over 40 years, Spencer Leigh is an acknowledged authority on popular music. He has written an extensive list of music biographies which includes The Beatles, Buddy Holly, Simon & Garfunkel, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan.

'A highly-readable mix of impeccable research, first-hand testimonies and a personal critique on Holly's life, career and music. First-rate.' Michael Leonard, Vintage Rock

'I am delighted to have been asked by Spencer to write the Foreword to Buddy Holly: Learning the Game, as I have read several of his biographies and he certainly knows what he is talking about.' Frank Ifield

'Spencer Leigh is a fine writer and a good researcher and I certainly enjoyed what he had to say about Buddy Holly.' Hunter Davies, author, journalist and broadcaster

CHAPTER 1

Never Mind the Lubbocks

‘Everybody gives Lubbock a hard time.’

Joe Ely, 2008

In 1957, Frank Sinatra recorded his exotic collection of travelling songs, Come Fly with Me where he sang about magical nights in Brazil, Capri, Hawaii, Vermont, London and Paris. A couple of years later, he revisited ‘Let’s Get Away from It All’ and, in a version which was never released, he paid tribute to Lubbock, a devout city in the Bible belt which banned alcohol. Sinatra sang:

‘Let’s go to Lubbock or Clovis

I’ll get a real Southern drawl

We could get lost in

Somewhere like Austin

Let’s get away from it all.

A city that’s drier than Texas

You’ll find no booze there at all

You better believe it –

Lubbock or leave it –

Let’s get away from it all.

My compass points to roadside joints

Where coffee’s just a dime,

The waitress thinks she’s Monroe,

The music’s ’59.

We’re heading out on the highway,

Buddy just gave me a call.

Hey wind, blow my hat back,

I’ll start a new rat pack

Let’s get away from it all.’

I’ve made that up, or at least, I’ve made it up with my friend, Andrew Doble: I don’t want to do a Norman Petty here. Sinatra would never have considered Lubbock his kind of town. In fact, very few outsiders, and precious few insiders, would have sung Lubbock’s praises. It was in the middle of nowhere and there was nothing to see once you got there. It is so flat that you wonder what driving instructors do for a hill start.

The British music writer Richard Wootton says: ‘While researching my book Honky Tonkin’ – A Travel Guide To American Music in the late-70s, I tried to visit as many of America’s musical cities as I could, but I never got to Lubbock. It is nowhere near anywhere else, but the main reason I avoided it was because it sounded like the dullest, flattest place on earth. The flatness reminded me of my home county of Suffolk, which I was so glad to escape from when I was 18. Lubbock musicians always talk about ‘the flat lands’ and it was Terry Allen who told me that if you stood and stared into the distance on a clear day you could sometimes see the back of your own head.’

The singer/songwriter Terry Allen was pushing the same line when I spoke to him. ‘There’s barely a tree in the city and it’s flat, totally flat, in every direction. Looking back, I’m sure that’s helped me and some other writers as it has made imagery and storytelling highly significant. There was nothing happening in Lubbock while I was there. I would stand under the Great Plains Life Building and look straight up and imagine that I was in New York.’

Any city wanting to put itself on the tourist map needs to sound as appealing as possible. It’s self-evident that any tourism officer who wants a challenge should settle in Lubbock. I love their adverts: ‘Get blown away’ and ‘Hot…Windy…Dry’. It strikes me immediately that Buddy Holly didn’t wear contact lenses because the grit would have got under their hard surfaces and been most uncomfortable.

Lubbock wasn’t on the tourist route and it wouldn’t be now if it weren’t for Buddy Holly. Okay, don’t write in: I know some people go to see windmills and tractors and for all I know, some may be obsessed with prairie dogs. However, I do know that the city receives 100 requests a day from potential tourists and the majority relate to Buddy Holly.

Another great singer and songwriter from the area, Joe Ely, says, ‘Lubbock’s a big city in the middle of a cotton field. There are a lot of people living there but it’s like a small town because it is so spread out. The main things are just cotton and boredom. I spent most of my time in high school thinking of how to get out. Lubbock is a musically creative area, and maybe that’s because there’s nothing else to do. Making music is something that has been passed down. There are songs that have been passed down from generation to generation that you won’t hear anywhere else.’

One of Lubbock’s most famous residents, Waylon Jennings, said in 1975: ‘It’s like they say sport is to black dudes: it’s a way to get up and get away from something that’s bad. You’ll do anything to get out of West Texas. I’ll tell you what it is: it’s either music or pulling cotton for the rest of your life. You’ll learn to do something else if you’ve ever been to a cotton patch.’ Waylon also commented, ‘Anyone who spends his life in the cotton patch is going to end up weird or unique.’ And he should know.

You’ve got to travel a long way to get out of Lubbock, but it’s easier to escape now. In Buddy Holly’s time, you had to go to Amarillo for a plane and now there is Lubbock International Airport, although in keeping with the times, it can’t be long before it becomes Buddy Holly International Airport. No, no, hang on, they must have thought of that already, and it wouldn’t inspire confidence to name an airport after someone who had died in a plane crash. Indeed, the authorities in Liverpool probably called it John Lennon International Airport because John had written ‘Above us only sky’ whereas Paul McCartney had gone ‘All the way a paper bag was on my knees, Man, I had a dreadful flight.’

As we will see in the final chapter, public opinion is shifting and the tourist potential of Buddy Holly is being recognised. However, the airport’s name is no longer up for grabs. In 2004, it was renamed Lubbock International Preston Smith Airport. Preston Smith was a former Governor of Texas who got embroiled in a stock market scandal and so was somewhat controversial. He wasn’t born in Lubbock but he went to the renowned university, Texas Tech, built cinemas in Lubbock and died there in 2003. The airport is on the North Martin Luther King Boulevard. I’ve no objection to that or indeed to Governor Smith but it does look as though Lubbock is missing an opportunity.

Lubbock is part of West Texas, a huge isolated region with vast, featureless plains. You would need to travel 100 miles to find another town or city with over 25,000 people. Oklahoma City is 300 miles north-east, Fort Worth and Dallas 300 miles southeast and travelling even further you hit Austin, Houston, San Antonio and, on the coast, Corpus Christi. Is this the way to Amarillo? Well, yes it is, if you go 100 miles due north. There’s not too much heading west: Clovis, New Mexico is 100 miles away, the ultraspooky Roswell 150, and it’s 250 to the West Texas town of El Paso. By the time you got to Phoenix you would have travelled 700 miles and seen a lot of mountains, and it’s another 300 miles to the California girls and Los Angeles.

In his song, ‘Wheatfield Lady’ (1974), John Stewart sings:

‘Laying out before me, the endless highway lies.’

Spot on, mate, and we’re talking distances here: I don’t know where you come from but I live in Liverpool and going the 200 miles to London and back would take most of the day and I delay visits until I can do several things at once. However, in Lubbock, in the 1950s, nobody appeared to be concerned about travelling: I didn’t find anyone who said, ‘God, I hated the trip from Lubbock to Clovis.’ (Oh, they wouldn’t say ‘God’ either: even slight profanities are out. Buddy never swore – he said ‘barf ’ when he was irritated – so there are no ‘fucks’ in this book: whoops, just written one.) The journeys passed the time and got them out of Lubbock, and they just accepted that you had to travel to get anywhere. Buddy Holly and his cohorts were perpetually in motion, and as they were writing songs as they went, it’s also poetry in motion.

The West End actor and rock’n’roll singer, Tim Whitnall, says, ‘Texas is sprawling. If you go to Lubbock, Dallas, Austin or Fort Worth, you will find that the business districts are very small and the rest is a great big suburb. I like the roads in Texas and I think of the Crickets and the others travelling through the nights in their sedans and station wagons, sometimes doing two gigs a night in clubs or gymnasiums.’

Another singer and songwriter from Lubbock – we’ll be meeting a lot of them and they all have colourful views – Butch Hancock, says, ‘I’ve both loved and hated Lubbock, but I was born with a big rubber band around me. I can get away from there but sooner or later, the band goes ‘Boing!’ and I’m back in Lubbock. I was born in Lubbock, and we lived on farms in the area. I drove tractors for my dad around Lubbock and that’s very good for songwriting as there’s not much else to think about while you’re driving a tractor. Nearly everybody in Lubbock is aware of the climate. In a city, you have to look up to see the sky. In Lubbock, you could see right across to the horizon.’

And another – Jimmie Dale Gilmore, ‘I like the sense of humour in Lubbock. We’re always making fun of the place and it’s really because we love it so much.’

Comparatively speaking, all the cities in that Texas Panhandle area, including Lubbock, are young. There may have been human life in the area for 10,000 years, but none of the cities were there in 1850. The very name, Fort Worth, tells you what happened as soldiers were garrisoned in forts across the country. The lands belonged to the Indians (then called Red Indians and now, with political correctness, American Indians or even better, native Americans). These innocent souls were fighting with the American army, the miners and the white settlers for many years, culminating in the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. The Indians were victorious but the American public was appalled that one of its heroes, General George Custer, had been killed. The campaign against the Indians intensified and they were bullied, broken and beaten, not just by the white man’s military might and superior weaponry but also by the slaughter of their primary source of meat, the buffalo. Nobody cared about the Indians, and General Sheridan, in keeping with the times, coined the infamous phrase, ‘The only good Injun is a dead Injun.’

The last big Buffalo Hunt took place in 1878 and lots of hunters took part. Two of them were singing around a campfire. When one sang, ‘Where seldom is heard a discouraging word’, the other added, ‘Home, home on the range’, and Kansas had its state song. I’m uneasy about the provenance for that story but it is cited in What to see, What to do, a leaflet published by the Lubbock Chamber of Commerce.

Lubbock County was established in 1876 and named after Thomas Saltus Lubbock, a Confederate colonel and founder of the Texas Rangers. Indeed, Buddy Holly attended the Tom S. Lubbock High School. Fabulous surname, isn’t it? Lubbock sounds like a Lancashire town: ‘Ee, he sounds like a right lubbock.’

The first settlement was established by some Quakers from Indiana in 1879. The threat from the Indians had disappeared, but the combination of appalling winters and rattlesnakes soon made them head home. However, one couple, Paris and Mary Cox, remained, partly because Mary was pregnant and, all in all, it was safer to stay. In June 1880, their daughter, Bertha, was the first white person to be born in north-west Texas. Then Hank Smith established a cattle farm and discovered that the land was good for grazing. Things didn’t exactly happen fast, but, getting the priorities right, a post office was established in 1884, the first wedding took place in 1889, then George and Rachel Singer opened the first store, and in 1891, there were enough children for a teacher and a schoolroom. There were attempts to grow cotton but nobody got it right until 1904 and then West Texas became a major centre for cotton production, and still is. Lubbock is surrounded by cotton fields, oil fields and cropland.

In the UK, a city is a large town and had to have, until recent times, a cathedral. Americans think differently and the city of Lubbock was incorporated on 16 March 1909 when its population was barely 2,000 (people, that is; there were a lot more rattlesnakes). The railway played its part in helping the region to grow, and so did the motor car. In 1914, all ten cars in the region were brought together for a group photograph. Whatever, the population was on the rise, hitting 20,000 in 1930; and then, thanks to the oil boom, 72,000 in 1950, and 130,000 in 1960 (sadly, minus one by that time.) By then, West Texas produced 15% of all the US oil.

Covering spiritual, physical and mental strength, a combination of God, guns and guts made the west. The way that Lubbock developed from the pioneering spirit is reflected in the city today. The average immigrant would never think of choosing a new life out west. These were violent, lawless places and only the tough could endure the treacherous conditions. The survivors would be the toughest of the bunch, and their children and their children’s children and so on passed their spirited genes to current generations.

The forefathers of the city were mostly male; there was a marked shortage of females. Not that it bothered the good ol’ boys too much until it came to dances. Then the men would take it turns to put a cloth on their arm to signify that they were the females for the next waltz, but probably not the last waltz. These counterfeit women were, in the terminology of the day, ‘heifer branded’, and many a dance ended with a fight.

After all, who was the most famous person to come from the region before Buddy Holly? Billy the Kid! William Bonney was born in New York in 23 November 1859 and after his father died, his mother moved with a prospector to the optimistically named Silver City in New Mexico. The Bonney boy killed a bully in Silver City when he was twelve and got involved in fighting over grazing land in Lincoln County; indeed, Billy, a ri...