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Not the last time George would play with Roy

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Eddie Cochran.

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Ritchie Valens *May 13, 1941

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For some unknown reason people will take a photo of a random man wearing glasses and say "this is Buddy Holly". And then a bunch of small music websites making lazy blog posts will Google "Buddy Holly", find the picture, and then repost it without thinking. And before long you have a new photo of Buddy Holly going around in circulation and the only problem is he looks nothing like himself.

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Remembering Bobby Vee 🌹on his Birthday 🎂

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Remembering Bobby Vee 🌹🕊on his Birthday

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february 16

1931 Otis Blackwell, composer of the seminal rock 'n roll tunes "Great Balls of Fire" and "All Shook Up," and the R&B sizzler "Fever," is born in Brooklyn, New York.

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On 4 February 1959 John walked solemnly into the classroom, visibly shaken. It was not often that students saw Lennon vulnerable, broken, unhappy. ‘Oh God, Buddy Holly’s dead,’ he muttered. Holly, a vital pioneer of early rock ‘n’ roll, a singer of plaintive love songs wedded to jerky, haunting melodies, was one of John’s idols. He had died in a plane crash in America. Unlike many of the students, John did not cry over the news, but went silent for the day and took some time to snap out of the shock. Lennon always buried his feelings deeply.

John Lennon - Ray Coleman

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Waylon Jennings voluntarily gave up his seat in the plane to J. P. Richardson, known as The Big Bopper, who was suffering from the flu and complaining about how cold and uncomfortable the tour bus was for a man of his size.“

“When Holly learned that his bandmates had given up their seats on the plane and had chosen to take the bus rather than fly, a friendly banter between Holly and Jennings ensued, and it would come back to haunt Jennings for decades to follow: Holly jokingly told Jennings, "Well, I hope your ol' bus freezes up!" Jennings jokingly replied, "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes!" Less than an hour and a half later, shortly after 1:00 am on February 3, 1959, Holly's charter plane crashed into a cornfield outside Mason City, instantly killing all on board.”

2.3.1959 - The day the music died

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Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens 

† February 3, 1959

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#OnThisDay in 1959, the Day the Music Died.

Musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and "The Big Bopper" J. P. Richardson were all killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, together with pilot Roger Peterson.

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260: Buddy Holly // Greatest Hits

Greatest Hits Buddy Holly 1967, Coral

As with following any artist who died young, being a Buddy Holly fan is like doing one of those connect-the-dots drawings where they give you part of the image and you fill in the rest as a wireframe. There isn’t a shortage of material exactly—he’d released 50 or so songs by the time he died in February of 1959, and recorded enough that “new” Buddy Holly records ensured he was a regular presence on store shelves well into the late ‘60s. But his literal absence gives all these assorted cash-in repackagings a fanfictional quality, exercises in instant nostalgia. As a fan, you can choose between seemingly half-a-dozen sensationally overdubbed versions of a song like “What to Do,” each based on a hushed demo he’d recorded on an acoustic guitar in his apartment; you can even decide that that set of demos, which are admittedly exquisite, represent the “true” Buddy, even though the singles he signed off on in his lifetime often had plenty of bells and whistles.

The fact is, we can never know where Holly might’ve gone as an artist, no matter how assiduously we sift through the pile of variously-incompleted sketches he left behind. Grim, unromantic precedent suggests we lost out on perhaps three to four years of his prime. Among the early prodigies of rock ‘n’ roll, none had a run of greatness much longer than six or seven: not trailblazers Berry or Little Richard, not the King, not even a singular songwriting genius like Orbison. Most of them rarely even managed a memorable single once they’d moved past their primes, let alone albums (with all due respect to the Everlys’ Roots and Bo Diddley’s The Black Gladiator). Perhaps something in the effort of instantiating a brand-new genre burns an artist out more than the work of refining one with an established foundation. Regardless, the shapes of these primordial figures in rock and roll are detectable again and again throughout the music’s history; for a rock fan, discovering the recordings of a Buddy Holly is one of those Rosetta stones that helps translate and connect so many of the currents you’ve followed in your own listening journey. He’s dissolved into the body and blood of rock like some bespectacled divine sacrifice.

But before he was dissolute, he was his body of songs. I don’t own either The “Chirping” Crickets or Buddy Holly, though both are great records and contain a good number of his classic songs. I also don’t own any of the more comprehensive retrospectives (of which 1979’s six-LP The Complete Buddy Holly is probably still definitive) either. I’ve just got this basic as mish Greatest Hits from 1967 and… that’s absolutely fine! It’s well-sequenced, has no bad songs, hits a lot of the absolute peaks, and even includes my preferred overdub of “What to Do.” It necessarily lacks many of his essentials, but in terms of single LPs you can find for like $1 in the year of our lord 2024, the list of records with more bang for your buck is short indeed. If Holly’s yet to hit for you, the hoopla can admittedly be a little perplexing, but take it from me: if you’re wired for rock music, you’ll get it one day.

260/365

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december 30, 1928

R&B and rock 'n roll icon Bo Diddley is born Ellas Otha Bates in McComb, Mississippi. He grows up on the South Side of Chicago, where he and his friends perform music on street corners.

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George Harrison/ Carl Perkins/ Jeff Lynne

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Gene Vincent † October 12, 1971

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Brown Eyed Handsome Man · Chuck Berry

Berry was inspired to write this song while he was touring through heavily black and Latino areas of California. As Berry put it, “I didn’t see too many blue eyes.” He did see a good-looking Chicano nabbed for loitering until “some woman came up shouting for the policeman to let him go.”