Episode 61: “That’ll Be the Day” by The Crickets

Episode sixty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "That'll Be the Day" by The Crickets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" by Gene Autry Errata I say in here that Larry Welborn lent Holly a thousand dollars. That money was actually lent Holly by his brother, also called Larry. I also at one point say "That'll Be the Day" was co-written by Joe Allison. I meant Jerry Allison, of course -- Joe Allison was also a Texan songwriter, but had no involvement in that song. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud mix with all the recordings excerpted here. I've used two biographies for the bulk of the information here -- Buddy Holly: Learning the Game, by Spencer Leigh, and Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly by Philip Norman.  There are many collections of Buddy Holly's work available, but many of them are very shoddy, with instrumental overdubs recorded over demos after his death. The best compilation I am aware of is The Memorial Collection, which contains almost everything he issued in his life, as he issued it (for some reason two cover versions are missing) along with the undubbed acoustic recordings that were messed with and released after his death. A lot of the early recordings with Bob, Larry, and/or Sonny that I reference in this episode are included in Down The Line: Rarities, a companion set to the Memorial Collection. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript And so, far later in the story than many people might have been expecting, we finally come to Buddy Holly, the last of the great fifties rockers to appear in our story. Nowadays, Holly gets counted as a pioneer of rock and roll, but in fact he didn't turn up until the genre had become fairly well established in the charts. Which is not to say that he wasn't important or innovative, just that he was one of the greats of the second wave -- from a twenty-first-century perspective, Buddy Holly looks like one of the people who were there when rock and roll was invented, but by the time he had his first hit, Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, and Gene Vincent had all had all their major chart hits, and were on their way down and out. Little Richard was still touring, but he'd already recorded his last rock and roll record of the fifties, and while Fats Domino was still making hit records, most of the ones he's remembered by, the ones that changed music, had already been released. But Holly was arguably the most important figure of this second wave, someone who, more than any other figure of the mid-fifties, seems at least in retrospect to point the way forward to what rock music would become in the decade after. So today we're going to look at the story of how the first really successful rock group started. Because while these days, "That'll Be The Day" is generally just credited to "Buddy Holly", at the time the record came out, it didn't have any artist name on it other than that of the band that made it, The Crickets: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "That'll Be the Day"] Charles Hardin Holley grew up in Lubbock, Texas, a town in the middle of nowhere that has produced more than its fair share of famous musicians. Other than Buddy Holly, the two most famous people from Lubbock are probably Waylon Jennings, who briefly played in Holly's band in 1959 before going on to his own major successes, and Mac Davis, who wrote several hits for Elvis before going on to become a country singer of some note himself. Holly grew up with music. His elder brothers performed as a country duo in much the same style as the Louvin Brothers, and there's a recording of Holly singing the old country song, "Two Timin' Woman", in 1949, when he was twelve, before his voice had even broken: [Excerpt: Charles Holley, "Two Timin' Woman"] By his mid-teens