Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story in Concert @ The Surf Ballroom

By arrangement with Alan Janes & Maria Elena Holly
Written by Alan Janes
Buddy is a musical celebration of the legendary singer/songwriter Buddy Holly, who shot to stardom in 1957, only to die in a plane crash two years later alongside 17-year-old Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson – ‘the Big Bopper’.
Starting out as a Country & Western singer in Lubbock, Texas, Buddy and his two friends from ‘The Crickets’ and with the support of local radio DJ, ‘Hipockets’ Duncan, they start to carve out a career in music.
After an inauspicious start at Decca Records in Nashville, Buddy & the Crickets sign a contract with innovative up-and-coming record producer Norman Petty. Within hours of meeting they start to record Buddy’s biggest hit, “That’ll Be The Day” at Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico, which rockets up the chart and reaches number one within weeks. Buddy Holly & the Crickets suddenly became the hottest act in the country, performing at home and abroad and becoming the first white act to win over the notoriously hard-to-please crowd at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre.
Now successful, the Crickets start to record in New York, where Buddy meets and proposes to Maria Elena Santiago, the Puerto Rican receptionist of his record publisher, after a courtship which takes all of five hours. Newly married and ambitious, Buddy completely shifts his focus to New York and the inevitable rift develops between him and the Crickets. After a declaration of home truths during a recording session in Clovis, the band split and Buddy unexpectedly finds himself having to pursue a solo career.
‘The Winter Dance Party’ of 1959 is a tour travelling by bus through the Midwest, quenching the teenage thirst for this ‘new music called Rock & Roll’. The tour is hard work, the weather conditions appalling and the performers are alternating between sleeping in the luggage racks and dropping into hospital to be treated for frostbite.
On February 3rd 1959, after a concert at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, Buddy breaks his promise to his pregnant wife not to fly as he and the other two headliners (Ritchie and the Bopper) board a small plane and fly off into the night for the next leg in Moorhead, only to crash shortly after take-off into a ploughed field. There are no survivors.
This was a tragedy that shocked the world. In Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, the accident snatched away three of the most dynamic talents the world had known, and as the legend says, it was “the day the music died...”
Buddy Holly’s brief life has become the stuff of legend. Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story is a celebration of that legend and catches that unique mixture of innocence, determination, humour and charm that was Buddy Holly, and wraps it into a package that truly deserves the billing: “The World’s Most Successful Rock & Roll Musical”
buddythemusical.com