The size of the J.I. Allison House is a surprise. Just a tiny one-story early 20thcentury ranch house, it is barely big enough to accommodate a group of tourists walking through. Yet this is where Buddy Holly wrote “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue,” where his band, the Crickets, practiced and where some of rock and roll’s most influential music was born. Once the home of Jerry Allison, the Crickets’ drummer, it is now part of the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, Texas.
Where would rock be if not for Buddy Holly? If he had not named his band the Crickets, would those Liverpool lads have become the Beatles? Would we ever have heard the Rolling Stones if not for their first hit, “Not Fade Away,” written by Buddy Holly? Elton John adopted oversized glasses that he didn’t need in order to emulate Holly, in the process ruining his eyesight. Elvis Costello’s Buddy Holly glasses gave him serious street cred. The Beatles said that they based their early 1960s look of wearing tailored, collarless suits on the sartorial choices of the Crickets.
But it’s not just for his style that we remember Holly. In fact, Buddy Holly was the first rock ‘n’ roller who was not a scowling pretty boy like Elvis Presley. He was geeky, angular, with bad skin, and he really did need those glasses. He loved his family, went to church. He was not a rebel.
But he was a musical genius who synthesized gospel, rhythm and blues, country, western and rockabilly music into a delightful catalogue of hiccupy, percussive songs that you couldn’t get out of your head. He was the first rocker both talented and strong-minded enough to insist on the artistic control his musical heirs now take for granted. He was the first to not only to write his own songs, but also to arrange them. He was the first to experiment with studio technology, achieving effects with echo, double-tracking and overdubbing on primitive Ampex recorders which still sound incredible. He is generally credited as the artist who defined the traditional rock-and-roll lineup of two guitars, bass and drums.
The more we learn about Buddy Holly, the more we mourn his early death. In 1959, just 18 months after the Crickets had their first big hit, “That’ll Be the Day,” he died in a plane crash on what has become known as “the day the music died.” He was no self-destructive rocker obsessed with death: he got on that small plane instead of spending the night on a freezing bus because he thought it would give him time to do his laundry. He was 22 years old.
The Buddy Holly Center
One of the most affecting objects in the collection is Holly’s famous black horn-rimmed glasses. Found in the plane wreckage after his death, they were placed in an evidence locker and forgotten. Discovered in the 1980s and given to the museum in 1999, they are just as they were found, without their lenses.
