That Will Be The Day

Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue - pretty pretty pretty pretty Peggy Sue.

Today was Buddy Holly Day, we're in Lubbock Texas and I've been a Buddy Holly fan longer then I can remember so we're just going to wander around and do Buddy Holly stuff. First on our list was the West Texas Walk of Fame to see the larger then life (could there be any other kind) statue of Buddy, but when we got there the cupboard was bare. Instead of a larger then life statue of my hero there were a bunch of city workers tearing everything up and this heart breaking sign.




Well we didn't get to see the larger then life statue of Buddy, but I'm pretty sure that it would have looked something like this.

OK, not a real good start for the day but this is Lubbock and I've been driving Cathy crazy for two days now signing “Peggy Sue” and I know Buddy's spirit isn't going to let me down, so it's onto the Buddy Holly Center. After driving around for about twenty minutes finding everything from the bus depot filled with homeless people to the county jail and Sheriff’s office, Cathy finely figured out the they had changed the name of the street form Q street to Crickets Ave. Now that makes sense so we just followed the Crickets and there it was about ½ a mile away from where their website said it was, but who cares this is Buddy Holly.

Here are some picture of what we saw inside, opps I guess not since they don't allow any photography inside the building, don't worry I'm not going to torture you with any more drawings.

If you love Rock n Roll then you gotta stop by this place if you ever get a chance, it's not real big, they have a short video about Buddy then a large guitar shaped room with artifacts and stories about Buddy. Now I have a copy of every song Buddy wrote and thought that I knew just about everything there was to know about him, but surprise I leaned a few more things today. When Buddy received his first contract from Decca Records they spelled his last name without the “E”, knowing that this was his big break and not wanting to void the contract he signed it without the “E” and used that spelling as his professional name. The standard story about how the Crickets got there name is that at the very end of one of their first recording you could here a cricket chirping, but I found out that another story is that they looked in the encyclopedia under insects to find a name, for awhile they were considering the name Beatles before deciding on the Crickets. NOTE: When Paul and John were starting up their band in London they went to see Buddy during his England Tour, they fell in love with his style of music and decided that they would form their band to be like the Crickets and play and write song like his. In fact they picked the name Beatles because Buddy was the Crickets. Another little note, Elton John never needed to wear glasses, he only did it because he thought that it made him more like Buddy.

As everybody knows, Buddy's career came to an end after only 18 months when the plane he was on crashed February 3, 1959, killing all four souls on board, Buddy, Rictchie Valens, J.P. Richardson “The Big Bopper” and pilot Richard Peterson, The Day the Music Died.

During that short period Buddy had 4 number one records, consider that the Beatles with all their years of writing and recording music only had 20, he also influenced every major Rock n Roll singer or band that followed. Imagine what he would have accomplished had he had not gotten on that plane.

From here it was only a short drive to the Lubbock Cemetery to visit Buddy's grave.

Another little note, after his death Buddy's mother left his bedroom the exact way it was when he was last in it and never allowed anyone other then herself to enter the room until her death in 1990.




OK, enough about the dead right, WRONG, on the way back to the motor home we stopped at the Lubbock War Memorial, which was just finished a few years ago. It was interesting to see that they had almost the same number of heroes in WW I as they did in Korea and that about 60 % were from WWII.

We spotted a statue across the park, it turns out that it was a statue of Commander William Cameron McCool, a resident of Lubbock and pilot of the Space Shuttle Columbia which broke up on re-entry over the sky’s of the Texas panhandle.









One last Buddy story, he originally wrote the song Peggy Sue using his neighbors name which was Enola Gay, but the record label decided that since that was the same name as the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima he should change it to Peggy Sue. NO! That one I made up.


Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue - pretty pretty pretty pretty Peggy Sue