Buddy holly biography book

Find yourself a good quality Walkman, a nicely remastered copy of a Buddy Holly hits CD, and a pair of headphones with better-than-average treble response and sonic transparency and listen to Buddy's May 1957 recording of Not Fade Away and tell me it's not the most perfect and beautiful thing in all of rock and roll.

That recording (the b-side of the hit "Oh Boy") was never a hit in its own right in its time; only becoming so after the cultic "legend" of Buddy Holly grew following his sudden death at age 22 on a wintry evening in the middle of nowhere Iowa in February 1959.

But, listening to this record, with its sparse, unpolished, raw quality, its incessant beat, its overall improvised air -- the cracking of Holly's voice on the line "Your love for me has got to be real" and his recovery from it with a screeching upward swoosh on the word "real" -- says rock 'n' roll better than anything else in existenc