Buddy Holly: The Music Lives

Unfortunately, when people recall Charles Hardin Holley, aka Buddy Holly, many think first of the plane crash in which he, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens died, fifty years ago today. That’s a shame because Buddy’s music was about life, about living bigger than a Cadillac. Buddy’s Sound was not about death. Nor was Buddy about “raging against the machine.” Buddy said, “move over, give me the keys to that machine, I want to see how fast I can make it go.” Buddy’s music is a Yes, not a No.

Perhaps more than any other fifties rock and roller, Buddy displayed a capacity for growth, for pushing the boundaries of The Sound. At the time of Buddy’s death he was living in New York City, married to a young woman born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and hanging out in coffeehouses, where he listened to beat poetry and flamenco guitar; at the same time he had booked a steel guitar player for the recording session that he didn’t survive to attend. Buddy was both growing in new directions and sinking his roots deeper into that fertile American earth from which The Sound had sprung. Who knows what great music this restless creative spirit would have brought forth in the sixties and seventies? Maybe in Heaven Buddy will play us all a new song.

It’s a great day to celebrate the genius of the American muse that gave rise to Buddy Holly, who deeply absorbed both Bo Diddley and Bill Monroe, and then filled the West Texas plains with a new American tune equal parts swampy blues and lonesome mountain pining. Only in America my friends, only in America could The Sound spring forth; a music as traditional as the bluegrass tunes that the Crickets cut their teeth covering, as radical as Buddy’s Fender Stratocaster, which redefined what a guitar could look, sound and feel like. Like another great American rock and roller, Johnny Ramone, Buddy’s guitar style was all about machine-gun fast downstrokes. A Hungry Sound, a Mighty Sound.

It’s funny when people talk about the British Invasion of 1964 as some sea change in the sound of popular music, because at first all those British groups, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones included, sounded astonishingly like…Buddy Holly. Indeed, both Paul McCartney and Keith Richards gratefully acknowledge their debt to Lubbock, Texas’ favorite son. Maybe the truth is that by 1964 the world was finally ready to fully open up its ears to The Sound, and the British Invaders reaped the harvest that Buddy sowed.

But today let’s not grieve or recriminate but remember and celebrate, because on that windswept American plain the car is fast and the girl is beautiful, the music lives and liberates and we’re gonna shake it just a little in the middle of the night…

All Hail Buddy Holly, and His Big American Sound. Rave On!