Buddy Holly music was very different during his time, the producers tried to make him play country but he wanted to play his beat, fast and full of energy. Holly helped win over an all-black audience to rock and roll/rockabilly when the Crickets were booked at New York’s Apollo Theater for August 16–22, 1957. Unlike the immediate acceptance shown in the 1978 movie The Buddy Holly Story, it actually took several performances for the audience to warm up to him. In August 1957, the Crickets were the only white performers on a national tour including black neighborhood theaters. I am watching the Buddy Holly Story and it is a good movie, also the way he broke the culture barriers between white and black, amazing. Buddy Holly and the Crickets were light years away then the rest of the music. Peggy Sue and That will be the Day were two of their best hits.
Following a performance at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake,Iowa on February 2, 1959, Holly chartered a small airplane to take him to the next stop on the tour. Holly, Valens, Richardson and the pilot Roger Peterson were killed en route to Moorhead, Minnesota, when their plane crashed soon after taking off from nearby Mason City in the early morning hours of February 3.There was a snowstorm, and the pilot was not qualified to fly by instruments only. Bandmate Waylon Jennings had given up his seat on the plane, causing Holly to jokingly tell Jennings, “I hope your ol’ bus freezes up!” Jennings shot back facetiously, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!” It was a statement that would haunt Jennings for decades.] “Although the plane came down only five miles northwest of the airport, no one saw or heard the crash”, wrote rock performer, archivist and music historian, Harry Hepcat, in his article about Buddy Holly. “The bodies lay in the blowing snow through the night…… February indeed made us shiver, but it was more than the cold of February that third day of the month in 1959. It was the shiver of a greater, sometimes senseless, reality invading our sheltered, partying, teenaged life of the 50’s.”The Beatles, Elvis Costello, The Rolling Stones, Don McLean, Bob Dylan, Steve Winwood, and Eric Clapton, and exerted a profound influence on popular music.. Holly was one of the inaugural inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame in 1986. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Holly No. 13 among “The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time”.
In an August 24, 1978 Rolling Stone interview, Bruce Springsteen told Dave Marsh, “I play Buddy Holly every night before I go on; that keeps me honest
Don McClean’s popular 1971 ballad “American Pie” is inspired by Holly and the day of the plane crash. The American Pie album is dedicated to Holly.
On September 7, 1994 (Holly’s 58th birthday), Weezer released their single “Buddy Holly”.
