Buddy Holly's death at the age of twenty-two in a plane crash on 3 February 1959 has served to immortalise his position within rock ‘n’ roll history. Frequently referred to as the ‘day the music died’, Holly's death has also empowered the notion that, along with Elvis' military service, Chuck Berry's imprisonment, Little Richard's religious conversion and Jerry Lee Lewis' blacklisting, rock ‘n’ roll itself had died by 1959. Furthermore, if the duration of Holly's brief career has also helped to define him as a ‘1950s artist’, then this limited perspective fails to address the originality of his music and his continuing popularity. As the first ‘beneficiary’ of a rock ‘n’ roll afterlife, Holly's music has transcended the narrow framework of the 1950s pre-rock era and now inhabits a significant position within the post-rock milieu of the twenty-first century. Dave Laing's book, the latest in Equinox's Icons of Pop Music Icons series, aims to assess Holly's short career within the context of the prevailing music scene of the 1950s and also endeavours to measure his extensive posthumous multi-media career.
Perhaps due to some aspects of this multi-media representation, Holly is often regarded as a talented solo artist who pursued a discrete trajectory en route to an eventual success that was not fully realised due to his sudden death at an early age. Rather than viewing Holly's legacy as emanating from a gifted individual, Laing suggests that a wide variety of contributors, both human and non-human, have all served to create the perceived ‘Buddy Holly’ entity. These contributors, says Laing, range from individuals (musicians, disc jockeys and producers), to technologies (radio, studios, instruments) and localities (Lubbock, Texas and New York). To underpin this approach and to help weave a path through the many complexities of Holly's career, Laing applies the actor-network theory (ANT), as outlined by Bruno Latour (Reference Latour1987), a process that analyses this heterogeneous network of factors, to provide a framework for the discussion that follows. Chapters are dedicated to the West Texas Musicscape that shaped Holly's development, his studio career, recordings, and on his posthumous memorialization and representation.
This ANT framework, which follows Holly through a series of texts and published interviews, works effectively when it examines Holly's formative career in West Texas within a context which highlights the key players and determining factors that helped to configure and influence the recognised Holly persona. Similarly, the chapters that cover his live appearances, recordings and studio career, all carry sufficient impact, with Laing's attention to detail clearly evident throughout these sections. However, less satisfactory is the overall clinical tone adopted by Laing, which, although necessitated by the ANT framing, tends to suggest a lack of engagement with Holly as an individual. This approach could perhaps leave the reader with an understanding of the elements that constituted Holly, but not Holly as an individual artist.
Another factor that conceivably tends to diminish the impact of an otherwise satisfactory addition to the Hollyology texts is the occasional transience of key points, which Laing fails to develop. Although Paul McCartney's acquisition of the Holly catalogue is mentioned, Holly's distinct influence on The Beatles, McCartney especially, could perhaps have been afforded more analysis, as could his influence on Elvis Costello's early career. The reader may also have wished to experience further examination of Holly's disputed relationship with producer and songwriter Norman Petty.
Nevertheless, Laing's analysis of several significant aspects of Holly's career deserves praise. Holly's multifaceted series of live appearances are clearly represented in a table that illustrates the performance itinerary between January 1956 and February 1959. This encompassed the USA, Canada, Australia and England and included appearances with his peers such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Of course, Holly's death followed his appearance at Clear Lake, Iowa, during a tour which he felt compelled to headline yet another tour by the financial implications of his contractual dispute with Norman Petty. Laing effectively highlights the unprofessional environment that the live music sector of the late 1950s inhabited. Constrained by frequent breakdowns of the tour bus and a requirement to acquire fresh laundry, Holly, along with other victims Richie Valens and The Big Bopper, felt compelled to take the fatal flight to the next tour stop at Fargo, North Dakota. Inconceivably, as Laing points out, in a further example of ill-considered judgement, the tour promoter refused to cancel the tour following the fatal crash, and the Crickets were forced to perform on the remaining six dates of tour, with Waylon Jennings replacing Holly in the line up. In another key example, Laing highlights Holly's bemusement at the showbiz tradition of the British touring circuit which he encountered when touring England as part of a variety bill that included jugglers and comedians in March 1958. Holly's continuing popularity in the UK, which tends to outrank his US popularity, also forms a strong discussion thread when his posthumous career is examined.
Laing skilfully discusses the impact of African-American musicians had on the formation of Holly's music, but perhaps the pivotal incident, which helped to shape the Holly performance persona, says Laing, occurred in front of an African-American audience. In a key section of the book, Laing describes how Holly, in an attempt to engage with an unresponsive crowd at the Harlem Apollo, adopted the jerky, hiccupping onstage gyrations that he became associated with for the remainder of his brief career. On occasion like there is a sense that the reader acquires an awareness of who and what ‘Buddy Holly’ constitutes. As mentioned, these moments tend to be somewhat fractional
The book concludes with a Timeline that lists the key events that mark Holly's life and after life, and the reader may well reflect that, overall, Holly's existence, now seventy-five years old, has been served effectively by Laing's book. They may also consider consulting other texts in order to complete a fuller picture of what Holly as an artist may have represented.
