The Buddy Holly Story

Written By: Alan Janes & Rob Bettinson

March 5 - 30

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 as a Country & Western singer in Lubbock, Texas, Buddy and his two friends formed the ‘The Crickets’ and with the support of a local radio DJ, Hipockets Duncan, they started to carve out a career in music.

After an inauspicious start at Decca Records in Nashville, Buddy & The Crickets signed contracts with an up and coming innovative record producer Norman Petty. Within hours of meeting they started to record Buddy’s biggest hit, “That’ll Be The Day”, which rocketed up the chart and reached number one within two weeks. Buddy Holly & the Crickets suddenly became the hottest act in the country.

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 took 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 1959 is a tour that is travelling by bus through the mid west, 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 the hospitals 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 head-liners board a small plane and fly off into the night for Moorhead only to crash an hour later into a ploughed field. There were no survivors.

This was a tragedy that shocked the world. In Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, this tragic 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. 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 all into a package that truly deserves the billing.

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