Buddy Holly
Buddy Holly first performed and broadcast in his hometown of Lubbock,
Texas, around 1954, singing and playing straight country and country-bop
numbers with a school friend. During 1956 he first recorded
professionally in Nashville, mostly his own songs performed in roughly
similar style to the first few of his subsequent hits.
Some of the tracks were later rated amongst his best work, but at the
time they went nowhere.
Early in 1957 Holly and The Crickets started recording in Norman
Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico, and, with a new record deal, hit
the jackpot. Because of contractual problems the first new release was
simply credited to The Crickets, and thereafter they more or less
alternated the credits - one release was by Buddy Holly, the next by The
Crickets - even though the same team participated in most of them until
not long before Holly's death.
Interestingly though, whereas the releases credited to The Crickets
were all fairly raunchy (even It's So Easy had a rough edge to
it), several of the Buddy Holly issues were candybar-sweet. They had
great charm, of course, especially to love-sick young things, but Everyday,
Heartbeat, and other syrupy titles that emerged after Holly's
death had precious little to do with Rock & Roll.
Once
Holly had split from The Crickets this tendency was confirmed: listen to
his work with the Dick Jacobs Orchestra, as heard on both sides of his
posthumously released hit It Doesn't Matter Anymore/Raining In
My Heart (1959).
 In two years he had taken his music from the raw southern sounds of Rock
Around With Ollie Vee and That'll Be The Day (1957) to a
blueprint of Adam Faith's British pop hits.
During a particularly harsh winter in 1959, Holly was touring the
American Midwest in an unreliable tour bus with a broken heater.
On
February 3rd he decided (along with Ritchie
Valens and The Big Bopper) to charter a
small plane for the journey from Clear Lake, Iowa to Moorhead,
Minnesota.
Minutes after taking off, the plane crashed in a snowstorm. All three
musicians and their pilot were killed.
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