50 years since the death of Buddy Holly
Buddy Holly is remembered by Terry Grimley, half-a-century after the singer’s death.
On January 31 1959 a teenager named Robert Zimmerman went to see Buddy Holly perform on his ill-fated Winter Dance Party tour at the National Guard Armory in Duluth, Minnesota. It was just three days before Holly died in a plane crash.
Twenty-nine years later, in the course of an award acceptance speech, Zimmerman – now much better known as Bob Dylan – recalled: “I went to see Buddy play and I was three feet away from him and he looked at me!” adding: “He was a poet, way ahead of his time.”
You have to be pretty long in the tooth now to have seen Holly play. I never saw him in person, but I did see him play live on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, then the most popular light entertainment show on British television. This was in the spring of 1958, when Holly and his band The Crickets made their only tour of the United Kingdom. I was only ten years old at the time, but I was already a huge Holly fan.
The first record I bought was It’s So Easy/Maybe Baby on the Coral label. I can still feel the rough texture of the brown cover of the 45 rpm single,, a new format which had recently replaced the breakable 78 rpm 10-inch disc.
That exhaustive, and no doubt exhausting, tour brought Holly to no fewer than three venues in the West Midlands – The Gaumont in Wolverhampton on March 7, Birmingham Town Hall on March 10 and the Gaumont in Worcester, on March 11. Each of these dates featured two performances and the second Town Hall show was, apparently, quite thinly attended. Someone took photographs and there is one particularly striking one, taken close to the high stage and looking up at Holly with the Town Hall’s organ behind him.
As I write this, I’m looking at the tour programme, and it makes bizarre reading. The evening was hosted by Des O’Connor, “the comedian with the modern style”. Also on the bill were Ronnie Keene and his Orchestra, The Tanner Sisters and “Pye Nixa recording star” Gary Miller. In the second half, a medley sung by O’Connor including Oh You Beautiful Doll and Shine on Harvest Moon was followed by Holly and the Crickets, who in turn were followed by God Save the Queen.
Their set lasted about half-an-hour and consisted of “items selected from” a list of
