A lifetime ago on 3 February 1959 the private plane carrying Buddy Holly crashed in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa killing Buddy and two other touring musicians.
Buddy, 22 years old, was a rock and roll pioneer, he was the first to write his own songs. 17-year-old Ritchie Valens and 28-year-old Jiles P Richardson who performed as ‘The Big Bopper’ had hits in the charts and died too. The pilot Roger Peterson also perished.
Buddy, from Lubbock Texas, was survived by his wife of 6 months, Maria Elena Holly. She was pregnant and miscarried a day after the crash due to the trauma.
He had many great hits including;’ Oh Boy’, ‘That’ll Be the Day’, ‘Peggy Sue’, ‘Rave On’, ‘Every Day’ and the haunting ‘True Love Ways’. Songs loved to this day and the inspiration to many great musicians including the Beatles.
Ritchie wrote the hit song ‘Donna’ for his girlfriend Donna Ludwig. It was a great single with the ever popular ‘La Bamba’ on the flipside.
The Big Bopper wrote his novelty hit, ‘Chantilly Lace,’ depicting a cheeky phone call from a boy to his girlfriend.
A generation of teenagers were overwhelmed by the loss of Buddy at the peak of his career. It was hard to accept that this was the end of Buddy Holly songs. In fact, there were others released posthumously; ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man,’ ‘Peggy Sue Got Married,’ ‘Midnight Shift,’ etc.
I was 14 years old and delivering the morning papers when I heard the news. You can imagine my feelings of de javu 12 years later when Don McLean depicted this very scene in his 1971 song ‘American Pie,’ about the death of Buddy’s music. Perhaps teenagers all over the world were delivering papers that morning.
At school we were irritated by our teachers saying, ‘Who is Buddy Holly?’ and gravitated in awe to the one boy in the school who had seen Buddy live at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in 1958. The boy’s fame lasted until we left school to start work years later.
Soon after their tragic deaths a tribute song to the musicians, ‘Three Stars,’ was released. A tear jerker about three bright new stars in the heavens and how we would miss our heroes. When it was played on juke boxes, sobbing girls had to be carried out of coffee bars. Then along came the last song to be released in Buddy’s lifetime, only a few weeks before his death, written by Paul Anka, about the end of a relationship, with the ironic title- ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.’
Copyright © Ken Tracey 2023
Ken Tracey 