Read Buddy Holly: Biography for Free Online

New Mexico. The snow, tornadoes, and freezing rain were as punishing as the summer had been the previous year. South of Lubbock, a nine-foot-high tumbleweed rolled through downtown Midland. In the pastures around Clovis, New Mexico, ninety miles northwest of Lubbock, livestock stoically leaned into 70-mile-per-hour winds. Thermometers in the Panhandle read 10 degrees. On February 20, 1953, Westerner Round-up Day at Lubbock High, the capricious Texas weather was up to its usual tricks—64 degrees in the morning, dropping to 21 degrees at noon. All the homerooms held an election to pick Westerner Roundup Day Favorite Boy and Girl. The winners were to be announced at the main event that evening in the school auditorium. Buddy and a girl named Joyce Howard won in Miss Keeton’s homeroom, showing Buddy’s popularity had remained intact during the tricky transition from junior to senior high.
    By the spring semester he wrote in a school paper that he wanted to become a professional C&W singer, but he was realistic enough to know that the chances of that were slim. Niki Sullivan, later one of the Crickets but already a distant admirer of Buddy’s in high school, saw him perform during lunch hour, singing Hank Thompson’s C&W hit “Wild Side of Life” and Lloyd Price’s R&B classic “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy.”
    Not all the attention Buddy attracted was favorable. It was the first time his brother Larry had seen him wearing tight pants, and it struck Larry as absurd. Tight pants couldn’t be bought in Lubbock stores in the early fifties, a time when men concealed their bodies in loose-fitting gabardine slacks and tuniclike sport shirts. Buddy had prevailed upon his mother to take in the legs of his jeans, all the way from the crotch to the cuff, making them snug and form-fitting. Another Buddy Holley fashion innovation in Lubbock was the common T-shirt. At a time when T-shirts were regarded as underwear or something for laborers to wear, Buddy wore them with his jeans. He soon discovered that innovative style is often unrecognized or ridiculed, whether in music, fashion, or other forms of art. Newness triggers a strong response, which is generally negative, from those who are fearful of losing power or being left behind. Buddy’s detractors were mostly mediocre C&W pickers who envied his talent, but they had a shattering effect on his self-esteem. From a bubbly, irrepressible personality, he turned into a defensive loner when husky peers derided his slender build. He began to withdraw from the crowd, turning inward. “Buddy sidled along the hallway, clutching his books,” says Arlene Burleson, a member of the class of ’55 who was dating a football player. “Buddy looked like he was afraid someone would speak to him.”
    Despite his standoffishness, Buddy’s smart-aleck persona quickly reasserted itself anytime he felt secure, especially when he was with other musicians, a girl who liked him, or one of his tougher buddies, such as the dude who carried a chain. Toward the end of the 1953 spring semester, he carved his name on his homeroom desk. “He sat in the fourth seat down, over by the window,” Miss Keeton remembers. “I didn’t see him do it because he crunched down behind the guy in front of him. When school let out that summer he was just beginning to get his growing pains. Then he began to grow and he grew very tall in just a year’s time, from a little fellow as a sophomore to a tall boy. Growing that fast in just a little while is hard on a person, hard on the nervous system.”
    It was hard on Buddy’s scholastic record, too. In the last week of the semester, he was expelled from Plane Geometry and was derelict in his Biology assignments. Expecting to flunk out, he borrowed his father’s truck and gave a new meaning to the phrase hell on wheels. In a single day he totaled both the windshield and the hood. A few days later, on his way to a job interview at a drafting firm, he crashed into a Chrysler and