Buddy Holly: Biography (2 page)

The songs Buddy wrote and sang are among the most original and ecstatic rock would ever know. They helped shape the new musical genre of rock ’n’ roll. He became the model for countless singer-songwriters, from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Bob Dylan and Elton John. As Keith Richards pointed out, it was Buddy who first demonstrated that the most exciting rock comes from bands performing their own material. With songs like “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue,” Buddy influenced the music and lifestyles of generations to come. He put the hiccup in Bob Dylan’s singing style and the falsetto in the Beatles’ hits and made horn-rim glasses and Edwardian elegance hip. His use of echo chambers, overdubbing, syllable-shattering scats, and high-flying trills gave rock ’n’ roll many of its trademark sounds.

In Lubbock I heard people say that God killed Buddy Holly to prevent the spread of rock ’n’ roll. Their beliefs, of course, are formed by the hand of fundamentalism, for his music died only to be resurrected and played back to us a few years later by the Beatles, whose popularity spread the Buddy Holly sound to every corner of the globe. That some of the persons close to Buddy could make statements such as “Sometimes the Lord snuffs people out when He sees He’s not going to get any more good out of them. I have felt like that might have been the case with Buddy,” indicates the kind of conflict Buddy overcame in order to help establish rock ’n’ roll as the most dominant musical form of the last half of the twentieth century. It explains, too, the suffering that underlies his darker-hued ballads, such as “Learning the Game,” written only days before his death. Gigantic as his achievement was, we barely glimpsed the dawn of his talent.

This book completes my trilogy, begun in 1990 with
Dark Star: The Roy Orbison Story
and continued in
Pearl: The Obsessions and Passions of Janis Joplin,
on the Texas roots of rock ’n’ roll. Holly, Orbison, and Joplin all grew up in Texas in the fifties—a scene every bit as steamy and sexual as Larry McMurtry portrayed in
The Last Picture Show.
Roy’s hometown, Wink, was a wild and woolly oil camp. Port Arthur, where Janis lived, was a sailor’s port known for its rollicking whorehouses. Lubbock, the “Buckle of the Bible Belt,” where Buddy was born in 1936, has a Pentagon-sized church in the middle of town, testimony that religion is the overpowering fact of life here. But despite its pious façade, Lubbock’s population of 230,000 seems more hot and bothered than virtually anything I encountered in either Port Arthur or Wink. While their fundamentalist religion makes the good burghers of Lubbock at first appear to be straitlaced, beneath the veneer they’re as untamed and dangerous as the Lubbock weather. It’s easy to see why rock ’n’ roll as we know it started here. Perhaps repression breeds such things.

Tornadoes were zigzagging across the South Plains as I explored the city in the spring of 1992. Most of the downtown area had been leveled by a tornado on May 11, 1970, and when Lubbock was rebuilt, a statue of Buddy was erected in front of the new Civic Center. Bill Griggs, the amiable founder of the Buddy Holly Memorial Society, takes me on a tour of the inner city, now a bleak and desolate slum. We pause before 1911 Sixth Street, where Buddy was born in one of the worst years of the Great Depression. It’s now a vacant lot, full of rattlesnakes, the house having been condemned by the city in 1977 and hauled out beyond the city limits. No one seems to know where it is.

Three blocks down is the garage apartment where Jerry Allison, Buddy’s drummer, and Peggy Sue Gerron lived after they got married. Nearby, at University and Second, is the roller rink where the Crickets played; the art deco brick structure still stands but today houses Bell Dairy, an ice-cream warehouse. Across the railroad tracks is Tommy’s Burgers, where one of Lubbock’s three Hi-D-Ho Drive-ins once stood. The Hi-D-Ho was a favorite hangout of Buddy’s. One night in 1957, just after the release of “That’ll Be the Day,” Buddy and the Crickets climbed on top of the drive-in and serenaded dozens of kids in parked cars. The only Hi-D-Ho that survives today is located in a shabby strip mall at 6419 University Avenue. Buddy’s niece, Sherry Holley, greets me warmly and slaps a Hidy Burger on the grill for me. She serves it in a tight pocket of wax paper that keeps it piping hot. The incredibly fresh, soft bun is packed with a thin, pancake-sized patty of succulent ground beef, minced onions, pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, and mayonnaise—a classic Texas hamburger, one of the finest I’ve ever eaten.

“Uncle Buddy used to hold me and serenade me when I was little,” Sherry says. “He sang me my first lullabye.” Sherry’s a pretty woman in her thirties and she has those bright brown Holley eyes. She also has a melodic country singer’s voice, as I learn when I listen to her album
Don’t Say Hello; Say Hi-D-Ho.
She shows me a picture of Buddy and her sitting around a campfire in Colorado in 1955. He’s nothing like the familiar nerd in the Crickets’ publicity still—grinning and toying with his bow tie, looking like a cross between Archie, Henry Aldridge, and Dagwood Bumstead. In the campfire photo, he’s a handsome, broad-shouldered teenager whose face, in the orange glow of the fire, is luminous and serene.

In probing deeper into’s Buddy’s intimate life than previous writers have attempted, I have uncovered personal details that are the key to the man and his music. I have tried to portray Buddy as he truly was: bright, quick, visionary, torn by internal polarities—at once willful and submissive, impatient and long-suffering, independent yet always clinging to stronger personalities. Like Jack Kerouac he was a young man in a hurry. He was plagued by a fire in the belly, which he tried to quench, but only succeeded in tamping down with the fast times and high spirits of the rock ’n’ roll life.

Buddy was a complex human being with a river of talent coursing through his veins. That is what comes home to me as I stand at his grave in the Lubbock cemetery, which is located between an automobile junkyard and a grain elevator, under a vast blue Texas sky. Musical notes and a guitar decorate his granite gravestone. Nearby stands a stone angel with cupped hands that are full of buzzing bees, a ready-made tableau of both the tranquillity and the manic impetuousness that made up Buddy’s character. It was his frenetic, hard-rocking songs as well as the late ballads that are so tough, mournful, and wise that transformed the agonies and joys of his brief days into lasting art.

Chapter One

The Cradle Will Rock

“We all sorta spoiled him, because he was so much younger than the rest of us,” says Larry Holley. When Buddy was born in 1936, Larry was already ten years old and the other Holley children, Travis and Patricia, were nine and seven, respectively. Sex was a forbidden subject in Baptist families, so Larry didn’t even suspect his parents, Ella, thirty-four and L.O., thirty-five, were expecting a baby until a friend told him. Hurt and bewildered by his parents’ silence, Larry was so confused that he began to cry. The Holleys were a poor, decent family of hard-shell Baptists; Buddy would be the first of them to graduate from high school. His father, L. O. Holley, was a laborer who sometimes earned as little as $12 a week, going from job to job, toiling as a cook, carpenter, construction worker, car salesman, and clerk in a men’s clothing store.

Buddy was born September 7, Labor Day, in the family’s white-frame house at 1911 Sixth Street in Lubbock. The day had dawned cloudy and overcast, but by the time Buddy arrived a gentle, southerly wind was blowing across the South Plains. Born at the end of an age when the bedroom still served as the delivery room, Charles Hardin Holley was named after both grandparents. Mostly of English and Welsh descent, Buddy also had Indian blood from a grandfather who was one-fourth Cherokee. The Cherokees, originally from North Carolina and Georgia, had been forced to resettle in Oklahoma after a brutal march along what came to be known as “The Trail of Tears.” Among their illustrious sons was the great humorist Will Rogers, who made America laugh during the Depression. Rogers died in the crash of a small airplane just a year before Buddy was born. He came from Claremore, Oklahoma, about four hundred miles from Lubbock. Of his Cherokee heritage he once quipped, “My ancestors didn’t come over in the
Mayflower,
they met the boat.”

Lawrence Odell Holley, Buddy’s father, came from a farm near Honey Grove, a town in Fannin County near the Oklahoma border in northeast Texas. In his youth L.O. moved two hundred miles westward across the state to Vernon, a town situated on the Old Chisholm Trail, where he found work as a short-order cook. He met Ella Pauline Drake and they were married in 1924. Ella’s parents had decided to move to Lubbock, 150 miles west of Vernon, where the construction of Texas Tech had opened up new jobs. There was also the promise of work in the sprawling cotton fields of West Texas. In 1925 L.O. and Ella Holley moved to Lubbock, settling in a rented house and moving to a different place almost every year. Larry was born in 1925, Travis in 1927, and Patricia in 1929.

The family was still poor when Buddy arrived. The Great Depression, described by John Steinbeck in his 1939 novel
The Grapes of Wrath,
lingered much longer in the Southwest—well into the 1940s—than in the rest of the nation. When Buddy was still very small, his mother said his given name of Charles Hardin Holley was “too long for such a small boy.” So she nicknamed him Buddy. He grew into a smiling towheaded charmer, the pet of the family. The Holley home was intensely musical, one that resounded with country-and-western songs and Protestant hymns. As soon as Buddy was old enough to carry a tune, his mother taught him “Have You Ever Gone Sailing on the River of Memories.” In 1941, when he was five, he won a $5 contest singing the song at County Line, a rural school, accompanying himself on the violin.

Later the same year, on December 7, World War II began, robbing him of both his brothers, Larry and Travis, who joined the Marines and went off to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. Buddy entered the first grade in 1943 at Roscoe Wilson Elementary and quickly found he didn’t like to study—nor did he need to. When he brought home his first report card, it was full of A’s. “He was the first of the Holley children to excel scholastically,” says Larry.

Even so, he preferred the outdoors, which are nowhere grander or more alluring than the wide-open spaces of West Texas. He spent the summer of 1944 horseback riding, hunting, and fishing on his Uncle Jud’s farm with his cousin from New Mexico, Sam Modrall, whose mother was Ella Holley’s twin sister. Nights he sat in front of the radio with his parents tensely listening to war news. Travis was with the Marine Corps’ 4th Division when it stormed ashore on Iwo Jima on February 18, 1945. “Right after Iwo Jima we were in Hawaii,” Travis later told writer William J. Bush. There a shipmate with a $15 Harmony guitar got Travis hooked on the instrument. Throughout the war, soldiers from Texas had been spreading C&W all over the globe. Everywhere from Piccadilly Circus to Pearl Harbor people were singing “You Are My Sunshine” and “San Antonio Rose,” wartime megahits that launched the crossover phenomenon that would vitalize the pop scene for decades to come. When the war ended later in 1945, Travis brought his guitar home and taught Buddy how to play.

Later Buddy got his own guitar, an acoustic Epiphone, and “made a clean sound,” says Larry, who had managed to make it home from the war safely. “I would have swore it was another instrument entirely—the way he pressed down on it,” adds Larry. Soon Buddy progressed to banjo and mandolin, applying a driving attack on any instrument he took up. His singing was equally spirited. One day the family heard him belting “Love Sick Blues,” a difficult tune full of vocal somersaults. Though his voice hadn’t changed yet, he managed every trick and turn of the 1949 No. 1 hit that heralded to Buddy the arrival of C&W’s greatest star, Hank Williams, Sr., who became Buddy’s musical model. Williams and Holly, by age only separated by thirteen years, by sound a great deal more, had in common a passion for breaking and twisting words into almost as many fragments as Handel, making them spin and loop to the delight of the listener. Before his thirtieth year, Hank Williams, Sr., would die, of alcoholism, on New Year’s Day 1953.

Buddy’s idol in every other respect was his brother Larry, whom Buddy seemed to cling to, perhaps because his mother and father were growing old and showed little understanding of the particularly treacherous adolescent years Buddy was entering. Larry let Buddy tag along, although Larry was far more interested in chasing girls and soon found and married the woman of his dreams, Maxine. When they went on a camping trip to the Red River, Buddy not only came along but insisted on sleeping between them when coyote howls alarmed him at night.

In the years just before adolescence, from ten to twelve, Buddy was the star of his class—a cute, lovable show-off. Lois Keeton, the playground director, adored his “infectious laugh. He just bubbled all over,” she remembers. “He was a good-lookin’ little fellow at ten, just as cute as he could be, but very small.” He was also clever, quick, and sly. Lois, who always wore huge dark sunglasses in the glaring Texas sun, taught him to play Canasta. After he won every game for a month, she inquired, “How is it you manage to beat me every time?”

“Because I can see your hand in your big black sunglasses,” he replied.

Still financially strapped, the Holleys experienced little of the prosperity that others enjoyed in the years following the Depression. To make ends meet, they moved outside the Lubbock city limits in 1946, to the less expensive Loftland Addition. Ineligible to attend city schools, Buddy transferred to suburban Roosevelt Elementary and had to ride the bus twenty miles daily. When he was twelve he could tell from the way girls flirted with him that he was the most popular kid in class. At one point, he peroxided his hair, and looked a little like Marlon Brando in
The Young Lions.
At an age awkward for most kids, he turned out to be at the peak of his physical attractiveness. So much so that in 1948, his classmates voted him and a girl named Barbara Denning “King and Queen of the Sixth Grade.” On the school bus, everyone gathered around when he played his Epiphone guitar and sang Bill Monroe’s “Gotta Travel On.” One day classmate Wayne Maines brought his guitar and they performed duets on the bus, singing C&W hits such as “Pistol Packin’ Mama” and “Born to Lose.” Wayne was more advanced in his guitar playing but Buddy quickly soaked up everything he knew and left his classmate far behind.