Buddy Holly: Biography (4 page)

“Hell, we may be wilder than a peach-orchard boar, but we know there’s a God and a hereafter,” said his friend.

“Yeah, looks like ever’ time you screw up, God is there to put His arms around you and say, ‘Let’s get goin’ again,’” Buddy said.

Buddy was baptized by Ben D. Johnson at the old Tabernacle Baptist Church that was located at Fifteenth and N Streets before moving in 1955 to its present location at 1911 Thirty-fourth Street. A schoolmate of Buddy’s, Ken Johnson (no relation to pastor Ben D. Johnson), was baptized around the same time. The baptistry, Ken remembered, was behind the pulpit and the choir, in full view of the congregation. Buddy’s favorite Biblical author was St. John, who wrote of baptism, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him. Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world.”

According to Ken, who later became a minister, baptism means that “you are dead to sin, buried in the watery grave, and raised to walk in newness of life. That is a walk that portrays the Christian teaching of the New Testament.” Like Hank Williams, whose “I Saw the Light” is one of his finest recordings, the influence of the Lord and Jesus, as well as the sound of gospel, would influence Buddy’s music.

In the months and years after his baptism, Buddy often rose from his pew during the “Invitation” at the close of the church service, as the congregation sang, “Just as I am, O Lamb of God, I come! I come!” He would go down to the altar and face the congregation, often with his family. “Their lives in serving the Lord in the church this way was always very open and conspicuous,” explains Ken. “Many times in revival meetings or just a regular church service on Sunday morning the Holleys would become burdened about doing more for the Lord and would openly or publicly dedicate themselves to do more for the Lord.”

The unity and dynamism the family displayed at church was not always reflected in their home life. In 1951, when Buddy was fifteen and in his final year at Hutchinson Junior High, he came home from school and told his mother that he needed glasses. His mother’s response, by her own description, was scatterbrained. “He didn’t talk a lot, he was a quiet boy, and I didn’t pay him any mind,” she said. A few days later he again asked for glasses, and his mother again did nothing. All of her other children had demanded glasses, but when she’d taken them to the optometrist, “they didn’t need them very bad,” she explained. “I thought that this would turn out the same way.” The third time Buddy mentioned his vision problem, he at last got her attention.

“Why do you think you need glasses?” she asked.

“Because the school nurse examined my eyes and told me so,” Buddy said.

An optometrist’s examination revealed that Buddy’s vision was 20/800 in both eyes. After the test the optometrist turned to Mrs. Holley and said, “This boy needs glasses pretty bad. He should have had them several years ago.”

Buddy loved his mother, but sometimes she could be obtuse. His father left his parenting to Mrs. Holley and then complained that Buddy was “tied to his mother” by “his umbilical cords,” L. O. Holley later said in John Goldrosen and John Beecher’s book
Remembering Buddy.
Not equal to the job of handling the difficult, headstrong boy Buddy was, his mother left the job to her older son Larry. Buddy turned to Larry for guidance “on many things, some private,” Larry revealed in his autobiographical booklet “The Buddy I Knew!” “Buddy seemed to think that I hung the moon because I was an older brother and had been around a little.”

It never seemed to have occurred to L.O. that if Buddy was a “mama’s boy” it was due to the absence of a strong father figure. The situation would have far-reaching consequences for Buddy, who would make the mistake of relying on stronger personalities who were not always trustworthy.

Chapter Two

KDAV’s “Sunday Party”

Around 1951, L. O. Holley was in charge of a construction crew putting up a house in Lubbock. One of the young men working for him as a carpenter’s helper, Jack Neal, was also a gifted musician. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Neal had moved with his family to Tahoka on the South Plains in 1940 and then to Lubbock in 1942. He could play banjo, guitar, steel guitar, and piano, and his favorite singers were Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Webb Pierce, and Ray Price. One day at work, during lunch break, Jack took his guitar from his car and joined the rest of the construction workers on the porch of the house they were building. He started to play and sing. L. O. Holley walked over to him and stood listening intently.

“My son plays the guitar,” L.O. said as they started back to work. “It sounds like you oughta get together.”

Neal met Buddy that evening and was immediately intrigued with his guitar playing. “We liked the toe-tapping type,” Neal later told Bill Griggs. “We had that feeling in our blood.” The pair sang some C&W and a couple of gospel songs and discovered that they sounded good as a duo. It was a period of musical growth that marked the beginning of Buddy’s dream to become a professional musician.

Neal was also a lot of fun. Two years older than Buddy, he liked the rugged outdoors and knew his way around the South Plains, showing Buddy a side of life that was the birthright of every plainsman but remained foreign to many of the city folk of Lubbock, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Amarillo, and San Antonio, Texas’s major urban areas. Neal took Buddy to Tahoka, 110 miles south of Lubbock, where Jack still had relatives. They rode horses across the prairie and shot rabbits with their .22s. Sometimes they went fishing and duck-hunting. “We wore out the road going back and forth to Tahoka,” Neal said. A member of the Texas Wild Varmint Association, Neal’s father encouraged the young men to go after bigger game, and soon they were bagging coyotes, foxes, and bobcats. On their way to shoot ducks one day, Buddy poked his rifle out the car window.

“Look at that coyote,” he said, taking aim.

Betraying a streak of cruelty, Buddy grazed the animal and “was tickled to death,” according to Neal, when the injured, disoriented creature started running around in circles. Fortunately, it managed to escape with its life, but only because Buddy “was too far away to hurt him,” Neal added. In some respects Buddy was a typical West Texan, especially when it came to guns.

Buddy and Neal practiced their music as hard as they played. Both were passionate, compulsive aficionados of the guitar. Buddy’s style was “unique,” Neal told Griggs. In an interview with Philip Norman, Neal explained: “I played rhythm. Buddy played lead.… We’d go out to these black cafés on the other side of the tracks and just sit and listen. They mostly served barbecue, which we liked as well. He’d say, ‘Jack, I don’t want to be rich. I don’t even want to be in the limelight. But I want people to remember the name Buddy Holley.’” Buddy and Jack developed into such an entertaining C&W act that when Lubbock’s movie theaters announced a new policy of live entertainment for Saturday morning kiddie shows, they went onstage and had the children calling for encores. After that, they became a regular attraction. Proud of his ability to hold the attention of restless, fidgety tykes, Buddy, now pushing sixteen, began to think seriously of a singing career.

During the blisteringly hot Texas summer of 1952, just before Buddy entered high school, the temperature regularly hit a hundred degrees in Lubbock. Overseas, the Korean War was raging. In Chicago, Ike won the Republican presidential nomination, and President Truman saluted the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson. Millions of people were singing “High Noon” that summer and reading
The Power of Positive Thinking.
On September 7 Buddy turned sixteen and reported for his first day at Tom S. Lubbock High School, named after one of Texas’s Civil War heros. In a theme he wrote for his English class he expressed pride at being a Lubbock High Westerner. Standing in assembly with his classmates, he sang the school song, which exhorted the students to conquer the Texas plains, waving the Westerner banner of black and gold.

“He was still just a little fellow, very short,” says Lois Keeton, who’d been his playground director during grade school recesses and was now his homeroom teacher at Lubbock High. “Buddy Holley was rather hyper—bubbly and vivacious,” she remembers. “He didn’t want to study. He bounced around in his seat, refusing to open a book. I worked with him gently, and after the first few days, he settled down.”

On Wednesdays the homeroom students were expected to elect committees and set up programs as a way of learning organization and responsibility. Listless and lazy, Buddy’s class was so lacking in initiative that “Wednesdays came around too often for those kids to have a program ready,” Lois recalls. At Christmas they were allowed to have refreshments in addition to staging a program, but again no one made the necessary arrangements.

“Well, it’s not too late—why don’t
you
go get us some refreshments yourself?” Buddy cheekily suggested to Miss Keeton. His charm was such that Miss Keeton trudged over to a grocery store across the street and loaded up on candy and cookies while the class, no doubt under Buddy’s direction, hastily improvised a Christmas program. “He was pretty bold to say that to me,” she says, laughing, recalling the incident over forty years later. “He was a bit of a smart aleck, but he was sweet. He wasn’t ugly or belligerent or I would have taken care of
that.
”

The winter of Buddy’s sophomore year, 1952–53, was frigid and violent throughout Texas and New Mexico. The snow, tornadoes, and freezing rain were as punishing as the summer had been the previous year. South of Lubbock, a nine-foot-high tumbleweed rolled through downtown Midland. In the pastures around Clovis, New Mexico, ninety miles northwest of Lubbock, livestock stoically leaned into 70-mile-per-hour winds. Thermometers in the Panhandle read 10 degrees. On February 20, 1953, Westerner Round-up Day at Lubbock High, the capricious Texas weather was up to its usual tricks—64 degrees in the morning, dropping to 21 degrees at noon. All the homerooms held an election to pick Westerner Roundup Day Favorite Boy and Girl. The winners were to be announced at the main event that evening in the school auditorium. Buddy and a girl named Joyce Howard won in Miss Keeton’s homeroom, showing Buddy’s popularity had remained intact during the tricky transition from junior to senior high.

By the spring semester he wrote in a school paper that he wanted to become a professional C&W singer, but he was realistic enough to know that the chances of that were slim. Niki Sullivan, later one of the Crickets but already a distant admirer of Buddy’s in high school, saw him perform during lunch hour, singing Hank Thompson’s C&W hit “Wild Side of Life” and Lloyd Price’s R&B classic “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy.”

Not all the attention Buddy attracted was favorable. It was the first time his brother Larry had seen him wearing tight pants, and it struck Larry as absurd. Tight pants couldn’t be bought in Lubbock stores in the early fifties, a time when men concealed their bodies in loose-fitting gabardine slacks and tuniclike sport shirts. Buddy had prevailed upon his mother to take in the legs of his jeans, all the way from the crotch to the cuff, making them snug and form-fitting. Another Buddy Holley fashion innovation in Lubbock was the common T-shirt. At a time when T-shirts were regarded as underwear or something for laborers to wear, Buddy wore them with his jeans. He soon discovered that innovative style is often unrecognized or ridiculed, whether in music, fashion, or other forms of art. Newness triggers a strong response, which is generally negative, from those who are fearful of losing power or being left behind. Buddy’s detractors were mostly mediocre C&W pickers who envied his talent, but they had a shattering effect on his self-esteem. From a bubbly, irrepressible personality, he turned into a defensive loner when husky peers derided his slender build. He began to withdraw from the crowd, turning inward. “Buddy sidled along the hallway, clutching his books,” says Arlene Burleson, a member of the class of ’55 who was dating a football player. “Buddy looked like he was afraid someone would speak to him.”

Despite his standoffishness, Buddy’s smart-aleck persona quickly reasserted itself anytime he felt secure, especially when he was with other musicians, a girl who liked him, or one of his tougher buddies, such as the dude who carried a chain. Toward the end of the 1953 spring semester, he carved his name on his homeroom desk. “He sat in the fourth seat down, over by the window,” Miss Keeton remembers. “I didn’t see him do it because he crunched down behind the guy in front of him. When school let out that summer he was just beginning to get his growing pains. Then he began to grow and he grew very tall in just a year’s time, from a little fellow as a sophomore to a tall boy. Growing that fast in just a little while is hard on a person, hard on the nervous system.”

It was hard on Buddy’s scholastic record, too. In the last week of the semester, he was expelled from Plane Geometry and was derelict in his Biology assignments. Expecting to flunk out, he borrowed his father’s truck and gave a new meaning to the phrase hell on wheels. In a single day he totaled both the windshield and the hood. A few days later, on his way to a job interview at a drafting firm, he crashed into a Chrysler and destroyed the front of the Holleys’ car. He got the job and started drawing blueprints for Panhandle Steel. Around this time he considered electrical engineering as a profession. During his last two years of school he dreamed of becoming a recording artist, but he was enough of a realist to know that the chances against this happening were overwhelming. He knew he had to have something to fall back on.

Working every angle to break into local radio, he boldly invaded station KSEL one day and informed a startled employee that he wanted to see Ben Hall, the DJ who was taking the one-to-three-
P.M.
shift. Impressed with Buddy’s moxie, Hall, a singer-songwriter, invited Buddy to perform with him at a local sports arena where occasional musical programs were held. For their first gig together Buddy arrived carrying an electric guitar and wearing a large white cowboy hat. Weldon Myrick, an outstanding young steel guitarist who’d played with Jim Reeves and Ferlin Husky by the time he was sixteen, performed with Buddy and Jack Neal that night. The gig went so well that, afterwards, Hall frequently used Buddy as a backup instrumentalist. In 1953, Hall and the entire staff of KSEL bolted and moved to KDAV, establishing America’s first all-C&W radio station. Buddy had his heart set on appearing on KDAV’s popular “Sunday Party,” hosted by station owner Dave Pinkston, whose professional name was “Pappy” Dave Stone. Pinkston once explained that his surname was too hard for callers to the station to pronounce, so he dropped the first syllable of his surname and changed “ston” to Stone.