Tag Archives: Buddy Holly

That’ll be that day-How John Wayne inspired Buddy Holly.

So you are young musician. You have had some success thus far ,but you are still struggling to get that all important first number one hit, that first megahit.

You want to put your stamp on Rock and Roll, You just saw Elvis performing and you know he is the guy to beat when it comes to chart success.

What do you do?

Well you go to the cinema of course because that is what Buddy Holly. Buddy and his friend and band mate Jerry Allison went to the cinema where they saw John Wayne in probably his best movie “The Searchers”.

According to legend, Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison saw the movie “The Searchers” and heard John Wayne use the phrase throughout the film. One night, while Holly and Jerry were working together, Holly said to him that it sure would be great if they could write a hit song. Jerry replied “That’ll be the day.” Immediately inspired, they wrote the rock-and-roll song of the same name.

It was first recorded by Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes in 1956 and was re-recorded in 1957 by Holly and his new band, the Crickets. The 1957 recording achieved widespread success. Holly’s producer, Norman Petty, was credited as a co-writer, although he did not contribute to the composition. It would become Buddy Holly’s first number one hit single.

Meanwhile back in Liverpool, England. an unknown skiffle band called “The Quarrymen” picked up the song and recorded it as a demo track.

That Liverpool band would soon change their name to “The Beatles”.

Linda Ronstadt recorded “That’ll Be the Day” for her 1976 Grammy Award-winning platinum album Hasten Down the Wind, produced by Peter Asher and issued by Asylum Records. Her version reached number 11 on both the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and the Cash Box Top 100 and number 27 on the Billboard Country Singles chart. In Canada, her version peaked at number 2 on the singles chart and was the 35th biggest hit of 1976. It also made the adult contemporary charts in the United States and Canada.

I bought Linda Ronstadt’s single, but I have to be honest I didn’t only but it for the song but also for the cover. Hey what can I say I was a young boy .

Finishing up with the great man himself.

sources

“That’ll Be the Day” Buddy Holly and John Wayne

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/buddy-holly/thatll-be-the-day

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Peggy Sue became a plumber.

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I could not call myself a genuine Music buff without looking back at the life of the subject of one of Rock N Roll’s most iconic songs, Peggy Sue.

The very title of the song could have been different altogether, the song was originally called “Cindy Lou”, after Holly’s niece. But it was changed to Peggy Sue  referring to Peggy Sue Gerron who was the girlfriend of Jerry Allison, the drummer for the Crickets, at the time .After the couple had temporarily broken up, the title was renamed Peggy Sue.

Allison and Gerron would later get married.however the couple did get divorced in the late 70s.

After her divorce from Jerry Allison, Peggy Sue went to Pasadena Junior College in  and became a dental assistant. She got married again and had two children, a girl and a boy.

Her second husband was a plumber, Peggy Sue and her new husband started a successful plumbing business and she became the  first woman licensed as a plumber in the state of California.

Peggy Sue

Peggy Sue died last Monday,October 1st at the age of 78. She had always enjoyed being the subject of the iconic song.

Buddy Holly did write a follow up to the song, “Peggy Sue Got Married”, and recorded a demo in his New York City apartment on December 5, 1958, with only  himself on guitar.The tape was discovered after his death and was “enhanced” for commercial release, with the addition of backing vocals and an electric guitar.

The rarely heard original version was released on a vinyl collection, “The Complete Buddy Holly”. It was also used over the opening credits of the 1986 movie “Peggy Sue Got Married” with Kathleen Turner in the title role.

Got Married

Finishing up with the aforementioned song ‘Peggy Sue got Married”. RIP Peggy Sue, this week  you have made us all feel blue.

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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Sources

BBC

IMDb

You Tube

Survivor Guilt

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Survivor guilt is a particular type of guilt that may develop in people who have survived a life-threatening situation. Individuals who believe it is unfair that they survived when others died and/or believe they did not do enough to save the lives of others may come to experience survivor guilt after trauma or a catastrophic event.

Waylon Jennings was a guitarist for Buddy Holly’s band and initially had a seat on the ill-fated aircraft on The Day the Music Died on February 3 1959.

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But Jennings gave up his seat to the sick J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, only to learn later of the plane’s demise. When Holly learned that Jennings was not going to fly, he said, “Well, I hope your ol’ bus freezes up.” Jennings responded, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes.” This exchange of words, though made in jest at the time, haunted Jennings for the rest of his life. Jennings, who later became a country music star, expressed survivor’s guilt about Richardson’s death.

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https://dirkdeklein.net/2017/02/03/the-day-the-music-died/

In 1945, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank in the Philippine Sea. Most of the crew survived the sinking but were left adrift for days. Only 317 survived the whole ordeal. The Captain of the USS Indianapolis, Charles B. McVay III was court-martialed for hazarding his ship. Despite the captain of the Japanese sub standing up for McVay, he was convicted of gross negligence. Living with survivor’s guilt and hate mail for years, McVay killed himself in 1968.

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In an interview on Lifetime TV’s Unsolved Mysteries, Lawrence “Larry” Geller, one of Elvis Presley’s closest friends, reported that Elvis, as a “twinless twin”, was plagued by guilt over the death of his infant brother, Jesse Garon, who was stillborn.

 

 

 

Elvis had confided to Geller about his concerns that maybe he had absorbed more than his share of the nutrients while he was developing inside his mother’s womb, causing his twin brother to starve to death before he was born. Elvis had also related to Geller about how his mother had tried to comfort her son by assuring him that “they would all meet in Heaven” after their lives on Earth were completed.

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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The Day the Music died

 

 

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On February 3, 1959, rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, together with pilot Roger Peterson. The event later became known as “The Day the Music Died“, after singer-songwriter Don McLean so referred to it in his 1971 song “American Pie”.

 

At the time, Holly and his band, consisting of Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Carl Bunch, were playing on the “Winter Dance Party” tour across the Midwest. Rising artists Valens and Richardson had joined the tour as well.

The long journeys between venues on board the cold, uncomfortable tour buses adversely affected the performers, with cases of flu and even frostbite. After stopping at Clear Lake to perform, and frustrated by such conditions, Holly decided to charter a plane to reach their next venue in Moorhead, Minnesota. Richardson, who had flu, swapped places with Jennings, taking his seat on the plane, while Allsup lost his seat to Valens on a coin toss.

Soon after take-off, late at night and in poor, wintry weather conditions, the pilot lost control of the light aircraft, a Beechcraft Bonanza, which subsequently crashed into a cornfield, leaving no survivors.

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After the February 2, 1959, performance in Clear Lake, Iowa (which ended around midnight), Holly, Richardson and Valens flew out of the Mason City airport in a small plane that Holly had chartered. Valens was on the plane because he won a coin toss with Holly’s backup guitarist Tommy Allsup. Holly’s bassist, Waylon Jennings, voluntarily gave up his seat on the plane to J.P. Richardson, who was ill with the flu.Just after 1:00 AM on February 3.

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Holly’s pregnant wife, María Elena, learned of his death from the reports on television. A widow after only six months of marriage, she suffered a miscarriage shortly after, reportedly due to “psychological trauma”. Holly’s mother, on hearing the news on the radio at home in Lubbock, Texas, screamed and collapsed.María Elena Holly did not attend the funeral and has never visited the gravesite. She later said in an interview: “In a way, I blame myself. I was not feeling well when he left. I was two weeks pregnant, and I wanted Buddy to stay with me, but he had scheduled that tour. It was the only time I wasn’t with him. And I blame myself because I know that, if only I had gone along, Buddy never would have gotten into that airplane.”

The “Winter Dance Party” tour did not stop; Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup continued performing for two more weeks, with Jennings taking Holly’s place as lead singer. Meanwhile, the funerals of the victims were being held individually; Holly and Richardson were buried in Texas, Valens in California, and pilot Peterson in Iowa.

Buddy Holly

 

Ritchie Valens

 

The Big Bopper

Following the miscarriage suffered by Holly’s wife and the circumstances in which she was informed of his death, a policy was later adopted by authorities not to disclose victims’ names until after their families have been informed.

 

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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Overshadowed Historical events.

I did a blog recently about JFK and found out that the same day JFK was assassinated , the authors CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley had died. This made me wonder how more historical event were forgotten because they were over shadowed by even bigger events. Below are a few examples.

Harriet Quimby

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Although her name is nowadays remembered by a small group of people, Harriet Quimby was one of the greatest early female aviators. In 1911, Quimby became the first woman in the country to get her pilot’s license with the Aero Club of America. When she wasn’t busy flying planes recreationally, Harriet Quimby enjoyed quite a successful career in Hollywood by writing screenplays that were turned into silent shorts.

Eventually, Quimby set her sights on more ambitious projects and was soon planning a flight across the English Channel, a first for a female pilot. She completed it on April 16, 1912 by taking off from Dover and landing 59 minutes later on a beach near Calais in France. She officially became the first female pilot to fly the Channel, but her feat drew little interest from the media. It’s not that it wasn’t newsworthy, but something really big just the day before completely captured the public’s attention.

On April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank during its maiden voyage.

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Quite understandably, all other events took a backseat in the press. And unfortunately for Harriet, she didn’t get to enjoy her legacy once the frenzy around the Titanic subsided, either. Just two and a half months later, Harriet Quimby died in an accident during an aviation contest in Boston.

Dr Who

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The longest running Sci-Fi show nearly didn’t happen. Like the aforementioned deaths of CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley, the pilot episode of Dr Who had been scheduled on the 22nd of November 1963. The day of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

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The BBC did broadcast the pilot episode again a week later.

John Fairfax

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On January 20, 1969, Fairfax set off on his own from the Canary Islands in a boat. On July 19, he arrived in Florida, becoming the first person to row across an ocean solo.

Fairfax became the talk of the town, but only for a day. His bad timing didn’t allow him to bask in the adulation of the media because the very next day, something truly historic was happening. On July 20, 1969, all of humanity was watching as the Apollo 11 astronauts became the first humans to walk on the Moon.

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Steamboat Sultana

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The greatest maritime disaster in United States history occurred on April 27, 1865, when the steamboat Sultana had a boiler explosion, sinking the ship and killing an estimated 1,800 of her 2,427 passengers.

Unfortunately, another event happened across the Mississippi River: the death of President Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

1959: U.S. and Soviets on Brink of War; Nobody Notices

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On Feb. 3, 1959, Soviet border guards stopped a convoy of four U.S. Army trucks headed from West Berlin, on a routine trip from the free section of the divided German capital, through communist territory to East Germany. After the Americans refused an inspection, the Soviets seized the trucks, along with five American personnel, and held them captive overnight. New York Times correspondent Arthur J. Olsen wrote this kidnapping “appeared to be a planned test” of the U.S. ability to support a garrison in West Berlin.

It took a high-level official protest from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to get the Soviets to finally release the prisoners and let their trucks through the checkpoint more than two days later

On a different day, the Soviet provocation might have dominated the newspapers. But a plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson also took off from Mason City, Iowa, and crashed, killing the rock ‘n’ roll stars and their pilot, Roger Peterson. Feb. 3 became known as “The Day the Music Died,” not a day when Cold War tensions simmered.

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Michael Chekhov

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As an actor, Michael Chekhov was probably best known for his role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, for which he was nominated for an Oscar (Best Supporting Actor.) As an acting instructor, Chekhov wrote a book called To The Actor, which is still cited as a developmental tool by actors such as Johnny Depp today. Chekhov would count among his students such luminaries as Marilyn Monroe, Lloyd Bridges, Anthony Quinn, Clint Eastwood, Elia Kazan, and Yul Brynner. But on September 30th 1955, Michael Chekhov’s death was not even a news story compared to another person who would become associated with method acting.

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When James Dean died in a car crash on September 30, 1955, the world stopped and nothing else happened for the rest of the year. Dean was only 24, and had primarily been a television actor. Dean was starting to break through in movies though, with moving performances in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. It was Rebel that catapulted Dean to icon status. He had just finished work on his final film, Giant. As a symbol of eternal youth, Dean would quickly become legend. And while even Dean himself would have probably admitted that Chekhov had the more influential career, it is his death, now Chekhov’s, that still resonates to this day.

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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