The Day the Music Died

guest-posted by Armadillo Joe

I went to college in Lubbock, Texas. Students call it "Buttock, Texas" and besides the accoutrement that every 20K+ student, large and sprawling university enjoys, it has little else going for it.

If you have heard of this pathetic burg at all, then you know that Buddy Holly and the Crickets came out of Lubbock in 1956. If you know that much, then you know that he died three years later with Richie Valens and The Big Bopper in a plane crash in Iowa.

Fifty years ago today.

A big "What If...?" always surrounds the death of someone so young, which is why they so often become icons -- James Dean, I'm looking at you -- and it is no different with Buddy Holly. Austin is the music hub of Texas today, and it was made that way by Willie Nelson rejecting Nashville's buttoned-up corporate music culture and Stevie Ray Vaughn's popularization of Texas Blues. Of all the iconic early rock-n-rollers, Holly was probably the most naturally gifted musician, so what if he had lived to come home to Lubbock? What if he had lived to mature as a musician, and what a musician he already was at the tender age of 20? What if?

But those are questions for the ages. Rather than do the cliched thing and re-print the lyrics of the famous Don McLean song (although it is a great song and me and it were "released" on the same day in 1971) I want to link this: