Song title: ‘Everyday’
Artist: Buddy Holly
Featured in the Trailer for: “We need to talk about Kevin” (Opens: 1-27-12)
Wikipedia.com Bio: Charles Hardin Holley (September 7, 1936 – February 3, 1959), known professionally as Buddy Holly, was an American singer-songwriter and a pioneer of rock and roll. Although his success last0ed only a year and a half before his death in an airplane crash, Holly is described by critic Bruce Eder as "the single most influential creative force in early rock and roll." His works and innovations inspired and influenced contemporary and later musicians, notably The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Eric Clapton, and exerted a profound influence on popular music. Holly was among the first group of inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Holly #13 among "The Fifty Greatest Artists of All Time".
Holly was always called "Buddy" by his family because he was so nice to everyone.
Holly saw Elvis Presley sing in Lubbock in 1955, and began to incorporate a rockabilly style, similar to the Sun Records sound, which had a strong rhythm acoustic and slap bass. On October 15, 1955, Holly, along with Bob Montgomery and Larry Welborn, opened the bill for Presley in Lubbock, catching the eye of a Nashville talent scout. Holly's transition to rock continued when he opened for Bill Haley & His Comets at a local show organized by Eddie Crandall, the manager for Marty Robbins.
Following this performance, Decca Records signed him to a contract in February 1956, misspelling his name as "Holly". He thereafter adopted the misspelled name for his professional career. Holly formed his own band, later to be called The Crickets, consisting of Holly (lead guitar and vocals), Niki Sullivan (guitar), Joe B. Mauldin (bass), and Jerry Allison (drums). They went to Nashville for three recording sessions with producer Owen Bradley. However, Holly chafed under a restrictive atmosphere that allowed him little input. Among the tracks he recorded was an early version of 'That'll Be The Day,' which took its title from a line that John Wayne's character says repeatedly in the 1956 film "The Searchers." (This initial version of the song played more slowly and about half an octave higher than the later hit version.)
On May 27, 1957, "That'll Be The Day" was released as a single, credited to the Crickets to try to bypass Decca's claimed legal rights. When the song became a hit, Decca decided not to press its claim. "That'll Be the Day" topped the Billboard US "Best Sellers in Stores" chart on September 23, and was on the UK Singles Chart for three weeks in November. The Crickets performed 'That'll Be the Day' and "Peggy Sue" on The Ed Sullivan Show on December 1. They also sang 'Peggy Sue' on The Arthur Murray Party on December 29 and were given a polite introduction by Kathryn Murray. The kinescopes of these programs are the only record of their 1957 television appearances.
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.
As Holly was signed both as a solo artist and a member of the Crickets, two debut albums were released: The "Chirping" Crickets on November 27, 1957 and Buddy Holly on February 20, 1958. His singles 'Peggy Sue' and 'Oh Boy!', with backing vocals later dubbed on by The Picks, reached the top ten of United States and United Kingdom charts. Buddy Holly and the Crickets toured Australia in January 1958 and the UK in March. Their third and final album, That'll Be the Day, was put together from early recordings and was released in April.
In the liner notes to Buddy Holly: The Definitive Collection, Billy Altman notes that "Peggy Sue" was originally written as "Cindy Lou," but Holly later changed it prior to recording as a tip of the hat to Crickets drummer Jerry Allison's girlfriend (and future wife), Peggy Sue Gerron.
Death: Holly was offered a spot in the Winter Dance Party, a three-week tour across the Midwest opening on January 23, 1959, by the GAC agency, with other notable performers such as Dion and the Belmonts, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson. He assembled a backing band consisting of Tommy Allsup (guitar), Waylon Jennings (bass) and Carl Bunch (drums), and billed as The Crickets.
The tour turned out to be a miserable ordeal for the performers, who had to endure long overnight travel in a bus plagued with a faulty heating system in −25 °F (−32 °C) temperatures. The bus also broke down several times between stops.
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. He, Valens, Richardson and the pilot 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. 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.
The first song to commemorate the musicians was “Three Stars” by Eddie Cochran. This song was recorded just a single day after the disaster occurred. Years later, in 1971, Don McLean released his single, 'American Pie,' to commemorate Buddy Holly’s death and further accentuate the loss of the United States’ innocence. Don McLean’s song began the reference to the tragedy as "The Day the Music Died".
Influence (Excerpts taken from Wikipedia.com): Holly set the template for the standard rock and roll band: two guitars, bass, and drums. He was also one of the first in the genre to write, produce, and perform his own songs.
Holly managed to bridge the racial divide that marked music in America. Along with Elvis and others, Holly made rock and roll, with its roots in rockabilly country music and blues-inspired rhythm and blues music, more popular among a broad white audience. From listening to their recordings, one had difficulty determining if the Crickets, the name of Buddy's band, were white or black singers. Holly indeed sometimes played with black musicians Little Richard and Chuck Berry. The Crickets were only the second white rock group to tour Great Britain. Holly's essential eyeglasses encouraged other musicians, such as John Lennon, also to wear their glasses during performances.
In his biography of rock legend Elton John, Philip Norman recounted that by his early teens, John (then known as Reg Dwight) was wearing glasses "not because he needed them, but in homage to Buddy Holly." After wearing glasses for a while, his eyes became adjusted to the lenses, and at that point he became nearsighted and really did need glasses, which would years later establish John as one of the most famous "four-eyes" in rock and roll, though Holly is widely considered to be the first.
Contrary to popular belief, teenagers John Lennon and Paul McCartney did not attend a Holly concert, although they watched his television appearance on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, Tony Bramwell, a school friend of McCartney and George Harrison, did. Bramwell met Holly, and freely shared his records with all three. Ian Whitcomb said "Buddy Holly and the Crickets had the most influence on the Beatles." Lennon and McCartney later cited Holly as a primary influence. (Their band's name, The Beatles, was chosen partly in homage to Holly's Crickets.) The Beatles did a cover version of "Words of Love" that was a close reproduction of Holly's version, released on late 1964's Beatles for Sale (in the U.S., in June 1965 on Beatles VI). During the January 1969 sessions for the Let It Be album, the Beatles played a slow impromptu version of "Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues" — although not written by Holly, it was popularized by him — with Lennon mimicking Holly's vocal style; the recording was eventually released in the mid-1990s on Anthology 3. In addition, John Lennon recorded a cover version of 'Peggy Sue' on his 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll. McCartney owns the publishing rights to Holly's song catalogue.
A 17-year-old Bob Dylan attended the January 31, 1959, show, two nights before Holly's death. Dylan referred to this in his 1998 Grammy acceptance speech for his Time out of Mind being named Album of the Year.
"And I just want to say that when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him...and he LOOKED at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was — I don't know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way."
Holly influenced many other singers during and after a career that lasted barely two years. Keith Richards once said Holly had "an influence on everybody." 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."
And that influence even carries into film where Holly’s own 'Everyday' is heard at the front and back of the new trailer for “We need to talk about Kevin,” helping set the mood for the upcoming thriller.
To hear ‘Everyday,’ click here
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