Buddy Holly: Biography (3 page)

Buddy’s guitar playing progressed with such remarkable speed that his family was astonished at his proficiency and individual style, and by the fact that he’d memorized the words to all the traditional Texas cowboy songs, such as “Home on the Range” and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” Like Williams, he was deeply influenced by the spiritual sound of the old country church. He loved Mahalia Jackson’s “Move On Up a Little Higher.” The Baptist gospel singer with the deep, emotion-drenched voice, astonishing control, and awesome inflections was Buddy’s introduction to the glories of black music. Adapting both Jackson’s and Hank Williams’s bizarre vocal feats, Buddy learned to mimic Williams’s yodel-like falsetto and the elaborate jazz spins Mahalia had picked up while marching in New Orleans funeral parades as a child. He blended in his own vocal tricks, which included hiccuping or stuttering in the middle of a word or stretching it until he shattered it to pieces. The word “Well,” for example, became the multisyllabic “Weh-eh-eh-eh-el.”

In 1949, when Buddy was thirteen, the Holley family moved back to Lubbock, renting a house at 3315 Thirty-sixth Street. The move provided him with an introduction into a faster, more socially aggressive world. He entered J. T. Hutchinson Junior High School and met Bob Montgomery, Don Guess, and Jerry Allison, precocious musicians who played important roles in his life for years to come. A multitalented youth just a year Buddy’s junior, Don Guess could play stand-up bass and steel guitar and was beginning to write songs. From Lampasas, Texas, dark-haired Bob Montgomery could play guitar and sing C&W and rhythm and blues.

R&B, the precursor of rock ’n’ roll, was the creation of black musicians and was known as “race records” or—in Texas in the late forties—“nigger music.” Buddy Holley was racially prejudiced in his youth but overcame it, his brother Larry revealed in a 1992 interview. This family secret, heretofore unknown, emerged as Larry recounted Buddy’s falling out with a famous bluegrass singing star in 1958. The star had “a bigoted attitude, like Buddy used to be,” Larry said. It was in Buddy’s adolescence, as he listened to R&B on Gatemouth Page’s radio program on KWKH from Shreveport, Louisiana, that he began to question his racial intolerance. How could he be better than anyone who left him so far behind musically, in the dust of simplistic hillbilly and bluegrass? Blacks were cool. Their music was dirtier than sin, with titles like “It’s Not the Meat, It’s the Motion,” “Sixty Minute Man,” and “Big Long Slidin’ Thing.” Unlike the segregated whites at Tabernacle Baptist, blacks knew the score. He wanted to be like them. So he shed those bigoted Texas ways.

Bluegrass has been called C&W in overdrive, and Buddy and Bob cooked up a sensational act around it—a combustible mix of R&B and bluegrass that sometimes shocked the staid Protestants of the prairie. Buddy’s mother later told Bill Griggs that Buddy and Bob were “big hams … [W]here there are two, there is more enthusiasm and push.” By 1949 they were making home recordings such as a cover of Hank Snow’s “My Two Timin’ Woman,” using equipment that a friend who worked in a local electronics store temporarily “borrowed.”

In 1950 when they were in the eighth grade, Buddy and Bob scandalized half of Lubbock by singing a notorious C&W novelty song, “Too Old to Cut the Mustard,” at a PTA open-house program. Jerry Allison, a transfer student from Plainview, Texas, who was a grade below Buddy, heard them sing the suggestive Jumping Bill Carlisle tune and was “really impressed,” he later recalled, by Buddy’s gutsy singing and guitar playing. Jerry had been playing drums since the fifth grade. One day he asked Buddy to come home with him after school and played Fats Domino’s record “Goin’ to the River.” When Buddy heard rock ’n’ roll, he saw his future; it was as if the heavens had opened. But it was more than just the music. From that moment on, Buddy identified closely with blacks. At first Buddy just wanted to be uninhibited, black from the waist down—hip, cool, sexy, and rhythmic. Later this would become the essence of his whole being and culminate in the most important relationship of his life—an interracial marriage. Fortunately, Buddy’s moral development out of prejudice started early, freeing him for personal and artistic growth. Ultimately, all Americans are defined by the attitude they take toward race; until that is right, nothing can be right.

Though he was coming of age in a segregated town before the beginning of the civil rights movement, Buddy identified with blacks so much that when he acquired his first cat, he named it after Booker T. Washington, the founder of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute and the first published black author. The small black kitten began life as “Booker T” but eventually became known simply as “Booker.”

When Buddy’s first sexual urges hit during his junior high school years, he was thrown into confusion. Tabernacle Baptist had taught him that sexual desire without marriage was evil. His parents, typically reticent Baptists, were no help. “I was ten years older than Buddy, and he looked to me for a lot of his fathering,” Larry says. “He had his ornery side and his good side.” When asked in a 1992 interview how Buddy learned the facts of life, Larry responds, “I just talked to him a little bit about it. I was more wild myself than I should have been at that time.”

Buddy broke out of his Baptist shell in his teens when he began to disobey his parents and stay out late, hanging out with his gang in front of the Tech Café, smoking, and drinking. Friends from that period say they “stole, cussed, and chased little ol’ girls.” Around the time his drinking began, Buddy sprouted an ulcer. Since he and his friends were underage, they depended on the older boys in the group to acquire the beer, and they’d split a quart between five or six people. A quart of bootleg cost about three dollars.

Buddy smoked Winstons. A photograph taken of him at the time shows a pack of Salems clearly visible through the transparent material of his shirt pocket, but he only smoked menthols when he had a cold. Occasionally he bummed unfiltered Camels from his boyhood friend Tinker Carlen, but “choked to death on them,” Tinker remembers. The older boys had cars and often drove to Mexico in groups looking for a good time. They returned from Acuña or Ojinaga complaining of “crotch crickets”—crabs—and the clap. “I went down and got fucked for
dos pesos,
” one of them remembers in 1992. “She got the pesos and I got the dose.”

Buddy’s first sexual encounter was a “gang bang.” For many young men growing up in West Texas in the fifties, this was a common rite of passage to sexual maturity. For Buddy Holley, it was a significant turning point, marking his transformation from God-fearing Baptist boy into prototypical fifties teen rebel. Tinker Carlen described the gang bang in a 1992 interview in Lubbock. He and Buddy were with several other boys one night when they spotted a girl standing in front of Tom Halsey’s Pharmacy on the corner of Broadway and Avenue K. “She just had on a little halter top and a pair of Levi britches,” Tinker recalls.

In the fifties, at least in West Texas, such girls were not prostitutes. They were just rebellious, and they sometimes came from the families of the clergy, high school teachers, doctors, or other prominent local citizens. When they became pregnant, as they frequently did, they had to drop out of school and were often sent into permanent exile by their parents, to live with relatives in distant cities such as Galveston or Houston.

“We drove by in a car and there was six boys of us in there,” Tinker remembers. “We was out lookin’, because Buddy hadn’t been to bed with anybody and wondered what it was like.… Back then they called it gang bangin’. There was very few little ol’ gals who’d put out and the ones that did, you could really bang ’em.

“One guy was on the rough side. He’d been used to all this wild and reckless stuff. Back then we didn’t call it ‘gettin’ laid’; we said, ‘We’re going to get him bred.’ We stopped at the Hi-D-Ho to get a Coke or something. Over here by Fourth Street, there’s this little underpass and all of us old boys got out and in underneath a little bridge there.”

The more experienced boys took the girl one by one. Tinker remembers that Buddy was uncircumcized and “had to skin it back to pee.” When the other boys had finished and it was Buddy’s turn, he said, “How do I do it?” Tinker says. Evidently Buddy figured it out by the time he joined the girl in the car. “He quickly became so passionate he started kissing the girl,” Tinker recalls, “and one of the boys stuck his head in the window and poked Buddy in the ass with a cotton stalk. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘are you a pervert or something? You’ve got your mouth where my dick was.’ The guy had had the girl give him a blow job.”

After making the rounds of the easier girls around Lubbock, Buddy’s attendance at Tabernacle Baptist Church dropped off noticeably. Some of the guys he was running with were shoplifting. One night Buddy was in a crowd that ended up at someone’s “grandmother’s house,” Tinker remembers. “It was about four maybe in the morning when we got there. She got up and cooked us a nice breakfast. A real down-to-earth grandma. She took care of her little grandson. He was about ten years old [and was] so delighted to see us. Wonderful little kid. They made pallets on the floor for us. We were laying down there and that little kid was showing us all his toys. He made the mistake of showing us ten dollars that he’d saved up. Next morning it was gone.”

Buddy and some of the local boys would shoplift when they stopped for gas at service stations, loading up on food while the attendant was outside pumping gas. Larry Holley noticed that musical instruments started disappearing from the house when Buddy realized they could be hocked for pocket money. When a banjo worth $10 couldn’t be found, Larry “wondered if Buddy had hocked it,” but decades later, after Buddy Holly became a legend, it turned up in a storage room in the home of Buddy’s parents. “We sold it in the auction for a tremendous price,” Larry reveals. “Buddy’d hocked every other instrument around the house. I had a mandolin that was the keenest thing you’d ever seen, one of them gourd-shaped [ones, with] different-colored wood, and I could play it. Buddy couldn’t. The mandolin disappeared. I had a Steiner fiddle, a really pretty one. I could play it, but Buddy couldn’t play it. It disappeared, and I know where. He’d hock them every time he needed some money. Mother and Daddy were poor and couldn’t help him any.”

In our 1992 interview, Larry reflects, “Baptists seem like a wilder bunch of people. They realize that they’re not good and can’t be good enough to get to heaven on their own merits.” Looming before Buddy and his brothers was Baptism, which Baptist youths customarily undergo as the path to salvation. It involves a physical dunking in water in front of the whole congregation. Larry was the first to face it and says he was initially reluctant. “When I was a little boy of fourteen,” he recalls, “we was havin’ a revival. I mean we had a good preacher. It was in my heart and my mind that I needed to take Christ as my savior sometime, but not right now. Mother got us in the room over there—me and Travis and Pat. Buddy was too little to know. Mom said, ‘I want to read something to you in the Bible—the plan of salvation God has for us.’

“‘Mother, I don’t want to hear it,’ I said. ‘I’m readin’ a book,
Silver Chief.
’

“‘Well, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I’m goin’ to read to Travis and Pat.’

“I got in there and covered up my ears with pillows and I tried to read that book and I went over and over the same lines. Directly I got up and went in and listened and I could see that I was a sinner. I went to church and confessed that I’d done this and was baptized into the church.… It’s showin’ the world that you’ve died the old life and took Christ as your savior.”

Even as Buddy outgrew his church’s narrow-minded dogma and ran wild, he never lost his spirituality. This was confirmed by Bill Griggs during the 1992 interview in Lubbock, when he displayed some of Buddy’s keepsakes from this period, which Buddy’s parents had given to him over the years. They included spiritual literature and copies of hymns that Buddy had carefully saved. Buddy studiously underlined his copy of the Gospel of John, his favorite book of the Bible. That he highlighted the lines “
These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God and that believing ye might have life through his name
” indicates that Buddy’s faith was strong and that he felt it would bring him everything he needed.

Another key teaching of St. John that Buddy heeded was “
He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.
” Despite the white-supremacist, homophobic society he grew up in, he cleansed himself of racial prejudice and macho snobberies and began to embrace people who were different from him, notably blacks, Hispanics, and gays.

Along with the Gospel of John, he always kept a copy of the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” handy. Like Hank Williams, he loved hymns and was fascinated by “What a Friend,” in which the composers Joseph Scriven and Charles C. Converse describe a way to turn over worries and achieve inner peace. According to Scriven and Converse, all anxieties and guilts can be unburdened regularly on God, who is better equipped to dispose of them than human beings. Peace of mind comes from devoting a portion of each day to meditation or prayer, according to the wise old hymn. Buddy discovered that when he turned his trials, temptations, troubles, sorrows, weaknesses, and pain over to his higher power, as prescribed in the song, even if he had to do so over and over, they went away. The hymn gave him a powerful weapon for dealing with a life that would be anything but easy. As Scriven and Converse put it, “Take it to the Lord in prayer, in His arms He’ll take and shield thee, thou wilt find a solace there.”

Not long after his sexual initiation, Buddy told Tinker Carlen, “I think I’m going to get baptized. I’ve been putting it off since I was twelve.” The fact that he considered it carefully and discussed it with a friend shows Buddy knew exactly what he was doing. Despite his differences with Tabernacle Baptist, he felt good enough spiritually to want to declare in public that he believed in and trusted his higher power. And that was
all
he intended by his baptism—he wasn’t about to give up the newly discovered pleasures of sex. “I’m ashamed of a lot of the stuff we do, but it’s not going to stop me,” Buddy said. “I like girls and like to git out and be noticed.”