By: Dale M. King
I’m fascinated by the life of singer Buddy Holly. And I feel very sad when I think about his untimely death in a plane crash when he was in his mid-20s. His career was about to soar, and I know he would have been a great success.
Actually, he has been a fantastic posthumous success, and his music is still played to this day.
Buddy Holly’s life and death come into focus at this time of year. Holly lost his life in a plane crash, along with singer Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, while en route from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Moorhead, Minn., to continue a concert tour. The date was Feb. 3, 1959.
I was just 10 years old on that fateful day, and knew Holly from some of his hit songs I had heard on the radio – “That’ll be the Day” and “Peggy Sue” among them. But I knew nothing of his legend which would grow as time passed. And I never knew that I would meet two people who had a vivid interest in Holly and his career – one of whom who knew the man personally.
Actually, my interest in Buddy Holly peaked in the early 1970s after a singer named Don McLean released a tremendously successful song called “America Pie.” That tune told the cryptic tale of “the day the music died” – referring to Holly and his tragic end. But when McLean was at the height of his career, he utterly refused to discuss the meaning of that song.
That much I heard from the man himself. In 1980, I was a member of a volunteer group that booked summer entertainment programs in my home town, and during the off-season, we raised money to pay for them.
We contacted Don McLean, who had just revived his career with a cover of the Roy Orbison tune, “Cryin.’” He agreed to do a show for us at the local high school auditorium.
In advance of the show, I did a phone interview with him about the song. He told me he would not talk about the meaning. I tried to avoid asking him. But he referred to the line, “But February made me shiver/ With every paper I’d deliver.”
“You mean you were that newspaper delivery boy in the song?” I said. To which he snapped, “I told you, I’m not going to talk about it.”
It’s obvious that “America Pie” told mystical things about a lot of people: the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin and – of course, Buddy Holly. (It’s often said the Beatles created their name as a tribune to Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets.)
By this time, I had begun to collect Buddy Holly albums – nothing original, rather, remixed and re-releases of his tunes. Unfortunately, my album collection was tossed out when we moved south. But I have managed to find a couple of CDs of Holly’s music – including one that features his original tracks backed by a group called The Picks.
Anyway, about eight years ago, I arranged to interview Dion DiMucci, who lives in Boca Raton, and who I knew from his tunes with his backup group, the Belmonts, and later, on his own in the 1960s.
I was sitting with Dion in one of the offices at St. Jude Church, where he is an active congregant. He was strumming his guitar and picking out some tunes that sounded very familiar – like “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue.”
I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly we were talking about Buddy Holly. Dion said he was one of the singers on that Midwest concert trip that ended with the fatal plane crash. Dion said he actually turned down a seat on the plane because the ticket cost too much – and he said his mother would never have abided him paying the price (the cost was about $35.)
Suddenly, I was whisked back to the day the music died, to Don McLean and his legendary song. And if you looked at the Internet this week, you might have seen Dion’s story printed online as we mark the anniversary of that tragic day.