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contractor. This was absorbing most of his time and interest, and eventually he got married and moved to Ruidoso, New Mexico. Buddy then teamed up again with Bob Montgomery, his old friend from J. T. Hutchinson Junior High, and sang with him on KDAV’s “Sunday Party.” Buddy and Bob’s high-pitched harmonies resembled those of the Everly Brothers, who were still living in Knoxville, Tennessee, singing on their parents’ C&W radio show on station WROL. But Buddy and Bob had more of a rustic C&W flavor than the Everlys and were closer to Bob Wills’s western swing. Born in Kosse, Texas, in 1905, Wills produced numerous hits such as “Mexicali Rose,” “Faded Love,” and “Steel Guitar Rag.”
    “The ‘Sunday Parties’ were always about whoever showed up to pick,” said Sonny Curtis, a multitalented musician from Meadow, Texas, a small town thirty miles south of Lubbock. Anyone who had the tenacity to come across the plains to Lubbock and the nerve to sing into a microphone was welcome at KDAV. Sonny remembers broadcasting with Buddy and Bob, singing duets with Ben Hall, and sometimes doing solos. Weldon Myrick, who turned into a “real hot steel-guitar player,” was also around the “Sunday Party,” Sonny told Bill Griggs in 1980.
    Sonny Curtis was a good-looking youth with pixie eyes, a sexy-sounding voice that derived some of its quality from a slight underbite, and poetry flowing in his veins. “Sonny started performing when he was eight years old, playing and singing bluegrass with our brother, Dean, and me,” Sonny’s older brother, Pete, said in 1995. Sonny was also a songwriter and could upstage just about anyone with his hoedown fiddling. He worked at Adair Music Store in Lubbock, and after hours he’d bring “race” records to Buddy’s house “where we’d spend the night listening to R&B,” he says. Then they’d go out to the Holleys’ Oldsmobile and listen to Gatemouth Page on the car radio until they fell asleep. When they weren’t practicing in someone’s garage, depriving whole neighborhoods of sleep, Buddy and Sonny drank beer and chased girls.
    “Sonny Curtis was very helpful to Buddy,” Larry recalled. “The boys all had lots of fun playing and learning together.”
    In his seventeenth year Buddy grew to five-foot-eleven but still weighed only 145 pounds. Just after he started his junior year, he and Bob Montgomery told Dave Stone that they were ready for their own radio show. It was a brash announcement that Buddy offset with impeccable manners. When Buddy turned on his charm, radiating sincerity and deference, “Pappy” Stone was impressed. Auditioning Buddy and Bob and pronouncing them “very good,” Pappy booked them into their own 2:30 P.M. , thirty-minute segment on KDAV’s “Sunday Party.” “The Buddy and Bob Show” went on the air in late 1953.
    “I had a bit of an ulterior motive,” Stone later admitted. As Lubbock High students, Buddy and Bob were sure to increase KDAV’s audience among local youths, who were demanding raunchier songs. When Buddy and Bob sang the sexually explicit R&B tune “Work With Me, Annie,” which clearly describes a couple in the throes of passion—the man instructing the woman to give him plenty of “meat”—West Texas teenagers flipped. “They were hits almost immediately from the time they went on,” Stone said. “Believe me, they didn’t any more than get that show started when the phone would start ringing off the wall.”
    Most of the callers wanted more songs like “Work With Me, Annie.” Buddy was completely in tune with a generation that was rapidly tiring of Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, and Patti Page and demanding music that was as raw and wild as their own feelings.

Chapter Three
    A Girl Named Echo
    When Roy Orbison, a homely, bespectacled kid from Wink, Texas, 125 miles south of Lubbock, heard Buddy on KDAV, it altered his life. Roy had had his own TV show, but was convinced he’d never succeed on stage