Buddy Holly's Influence on Rock and Roll

2006-07-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

When dawn broke on a windswept February morning in 1959, authorities in Clear Lake, Iowa discovered the wreckage of a private plane jammed against a fence in a rural cornfield. Pilot Roger Peterson and singers J.P. Richardson, Richie Valens, and Buddy Holly all lost their lives in that accident, a tragedy that has come to be known as ‘The Day The Music Died’.

Buddy Holly’s chart hits were rather prolific. He scored 12 singles on Billboard in just a year and a half, two of them posthumously. However, it was the incredible versatility, innovative technique and style, and personal charisma in concerts, movies, and TV appearances that allowed Buddy Holly to captivate a phenomenally loyal audience that has endured through nearly half a century!

Holly’s last recording session was in New York in the Fall of ’58. He recorded his first sides in a new technology called stereo and added a string section to several of the cuts. By then having moved to New York, with his new bride Maria expecting their first child (she would later miscarry) and new projects awaiting…the future seemed bright. As the 50’s drew to a close, the music world mourned the industry’s first calamity and the legend of Buddy Holly began. It remains so to this day.

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