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Buddy Holly
A Rock & Roll Collection
MCA Records
MCA2-4009
(Formerly DXSB7-207)

All selections previously released on Decca album old number DXSB7-207
entitled A Rock & Roll Collection
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From the original vinyl double LP set

Record One
Side One
(7-13066)

1. Rave On (1:45) BMI

2. Tell Me How (1:56) BMI

3. Peggy Sue Got Married (1:47) BMI

4. Slippin' And Slidin' (2:30) BMI

5. Oh, Boy! (2:07) BMI

6. Not Fade Away (2:19) BMI
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1. Bo Diddley (2:19) BMI

2. What To Do (1:52) BMI

3. Heartbeat (2:07) BMI

4. Well All Right (2:12) BMI

5. Words Of Love (1:53) BMI

6. Love's Made A Fool Of Me (2:00) BMI
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1. Reminiscing (1:55) BMI

2. Lonesome Tears (1:46) BMI

3. Listen To Me (2:19) BMI

4. Maybe Baby (2:00) BMI

5. Down The Line (2:01) BMI

6. That'll Be The Day (2:14) BMI
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1. Peggy Sue (2:28) BMI

2. Brown Eyed Handsome Man (2:04) BMI

3. You're So Square (Baby I Don't Care) (1:34) BMI

4. Crying, Waiting, Hoping (2:10) BMI

5. Ready Teddy (1:29) BMI

6. It Doesn't Matter Anymore (2:01) BMI
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“My life has been what you might call an uneventful one, and it seems there is not much of interest to tell … I have many hobbies. Some of these are hunting, fishing, leatherwork, reading, painting and playing western music. I have thought about making a career out of western music if I am good enough but I will just have to wait to see how that turns out…”

Thus did Charles Hardin (Buddy) Holley express his ambition when he was 16 years old, authoring a paper for a sophomore English course while a high school student in his home of Lubbock, Texas.

Six years later he was dead, killed in the crash of a small plane in which he, singer Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper (J.P. Richardson) were flying from Mason City, Iowa, to an engagement in Fargo, North Dakota. In rock circles February 3, 1959, is still recalled as “the day the music died.”

Still, young Holly’s achievements are unarguable.

He was the first rock singer to overdub his guitar with his voice.

He was one of the first performers to rely on his own songs almost exclusively.

He did more than anyone else to popularize the electronic Fender Stratocaster guitar.

He and his Crickets were among the first to feature the now-common instrumentation of lead guitar, bass guitar, rhythm guitar and drums.

And Buddy was the first young rock star to affect eyeglasses while performing.

Born in Lubbock September 7, 1936, Holly was 5 years old when he made his first public appearance as an entertainer.

“My mother,” he later recalled, “taught me a song called ‘Down the River of Memories’ and I sang it on an amateur show in Lubbock. I won five bucks, too.”

Decca Records (later to become MCA Records) signed Buddy to a recording binder shortly after he completed high school, where he had worked with his boyhood pals Larry Welborn and Bobby Montgomery.

Slender, tall, shy offstage and modest in demeanor, Buddy created little attention nationally until he began a collaboration with Norman Petty, who served as his manager.

“More than any other singer of that era,” Lillian Roxon wrote in her celebrated “Rock Encyclopedia” (Grosset & Dunlap, New York), “Holly brings back a time when music was fun, when rock was fun, when no one was trying to push it as an art form and when sheer animal exuberance was what counted. As well as his own material, he did all the standards of the day … you only have to listen to know where a lot of the early Beach Boys and Beatles come from, not to mention the hundreds of groups that literally wouldn’t have been possible without him.”

“At the time, of course, there was no such thing as the serious rock appreciation that sprang up in 1967 and 1968. People didn’t know much about music, they just knew what they liked. Adults put Holly down with the rest of the Presley era as shock rock. Kids just remembered it was impossible not to dance, not to groove, while he sang.”

Holly, in his pitiably brief career, scored seven Top 40 hit records over the 1957-58 period and in England he enjoyed several additional smashes.

Shortly before his death, Buddy split with Petty and his Crickeets accompanying combo, became a resident of New York City’s Greenwich Village and, despite his identification with a mythical (?) Peggy Sue, married Maria Elena Santiago. Just a few months later she was Holly’s widow.

Jonathan Cott has written:

“It is Buddy Holly’s childlike vocal timbre and phrasing, suggesting the insouciance of a choirboy who doesn’t realize his voice is changing, which serves to express his almost prayerful expectancy of a love that will surely come his way … because it already exists in his heart.”

And Bob Dylan:

“The music of the late fifties and early sixties when music was at that root level – that for me is meaningful music. The singers and musicians I grew up with transcend nostalgia – Buddy Holly and Johnny Ace are just as valid to me today as then.”

And more from Cott in the lavish, superbly illustrated “Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll” (Rolling Stone Press – Random House, New York):

“Holly was one of the few fifties rock ‘n’ roll stars never to have been filmed. So we remember his photographs – all variations of the archetypical high school graduation yearbook picture showing the ‘shy Texan’ in his horn-rimmed glasses.

“And like one of those figures in a Picasso painting, this conventional image has become blurred, transformed through his music into forms and colors. And uniquely radiant they were and are.

“For unlike Bo Diddley (who defined and embodied himself in terms of rhythm), Elvis Presley (who adopted and transmogrified the experiences and values of black sensuality and alienation), or Chuck Berry (who took on and extended Walt Whitman’s visionary embrace of American geography). Buddy Holly perfected, almost obsessively, communicated in song after song his joyful acceptance of ‘true love ways,’ his indivertible expectation (‘crying, waiting, hoping’) of someday finding a love ‘so rare and true’.”

There are those today who flatly assert that Holly’s old Coral-Decca tapings are so important, so significant, that it is impossible to hear a song on the charts today that does not owe something to the bespectacled Lubbock youth who emerged from the spacious Lone Star state as a country-western musician and glided into the popular rock field just as had Presley, Johnny Cash, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins before him.

“Most of the rock giants of ten years later, of the booming scene of the late sixties, were teenagers when Holly was king and their music reflects it,” Lillian Roxon wrote.

“Looking back from the twin peaks of psychedelia and electronic gadgetry, he comes through fresher than ever. It would be nice to speculate where Buddy Holly would be today if he had lived. But he didn’t, and there are people who still weep at the thought of the talent that went down that day in 1959.”

So much for the tributes.

The 24 tracks herewith plainly speak for the quality of Buddy’s musicianship.

Production of a full-length theatrical-release motion picture woven around the BH career was begun in January, 1977 by Ed Cohen, Steve Rash and Fred Bauer in Texas on a $2 million budget.

With or without accompanying Crickets, Holly’s sound was distinct in an era that was in itself distinct – the placid Eisenhower years that preceded John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the British rock group invasion of the U.S. led by the Beatles.

A young, naïve Holly wrote that he was thinking about making a career out of music “if I am good enough.”

He found out for sure a couple of short years before he died.

And the best of that music is now on tap between the covers of this album.

Dave Dexter, Jr.

Mr. Dexter, author of the recent book “Playback” and copy editor of Billboard Magazine, for more than 40 years has written about and produced records by America’s most popular musicians, singers and orchestras.
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MCA Records, Inc. 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, California – U.S.A. © 1977 MCA Records, Inc. (P) 1977 MCA Records, Inc. – Printed in U.S.A.
WARNING: All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.