"Good Just Barely Morning ... "

How WNEW in New York Remade Radio and Became The Place Where Rock Lived: Chapter 16

Chapter 16

"Hello everybody. How are you all tonight? This is the old king of the Moondoggers and it's time again for another of your favorite rock and roll sessions ... blues and rhythm records for all the gang..."

— Alan Freed opening his show on WJW radio in Cleveland, Ohio, April 6, 1953.

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Albert James Freed, later to be better known as Alan Freed, was born on December 15, 1921, near Johnston, Pennsylvania, and spent his formative years in Salem, Ohio, in a small town located about midway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Pa.

Several biographies note that he loved the swing sounds of the late 1930s and 1940s and even took up the trombone and formed a small combo before disabusing himself of thoughts of musical stardom. He later enrolled at Ohio State University to study mechanical engineering.

It was there that Freed stumbled upon the campus radio station, and in short order was holding down his own show.

What followed was a stint in the U.S. Army, during which he worked as a DJ on Armed Forces Radio, and upon his discharge, a series of jobs at small-time radio stations in Youngstown and Akron, Ohio and New Castle, Pennsylvania.

At each stop along the way, Freed distinguished himself as an announcer, while largely playing the jazz and the pop standards of the day. Then, after a move to Cleveland for a job in television, he met a record store owner named Leo Mintz, who changed the course of his life.

Mintz' Record Rendezvous served a largely black clientele, but he noticed over time that more and more white kids were coming into his shop to purchase the latest rhythm and blues records.

Mintz also had an in with WJW-AM radio, and not long after meeting Freed, he persuaded the young disc jockey to host a show, which he would sponsor, and which would feature the artists whose work he was selling.

The show, called “The Moondog House” after the offbeat instrumental that would serve as its theme, debuted on July 11, 1951. As the “king of the Moondoggers,” Freed was an exciting and excitable host — a stark contrast to the competition, who tended to sound far more staid and "announcer-ly."

Very quickly, Freed found himself to be the most popular disc jockey in the city.

Hoping to build on his success, he and a few associates organized a multi-act concert called “The Moondog Coronation Ball.”

Held on March 21, 1952, the show had a $1.50 ticket price and was headlined by Paul Williams and his Hucklebuckers.

The other acts on the bill were Tiny Grimes and his Rockin’ Highlanders, the Dominoes, Varetta Dillard and Danny Cobb.¹

To this day, it's known as the world's first rock and roll concert. It would also be notorious for the large number of tickets sold — numbers far beyond the arena's 10,000-person capacity — although Freed and others would say this was because many of the tickets purchased by attendees were counterfeits.

Whatever the truth, the overflow crowd caused the authorities to shut the concert down early, and a small riot ensued. Rather than admonish its deejay, WJW responded to the explosion of publicity that followed the mayhem by immediately increasing the amount of time he was on the air.

Freed, of course, wasn't the only disc jockey in the country playing ostensibly black music for white audiences. Others included Hunter Hancock in Los Angeles, Gene Nobles in Nashville, Zenas Sears in Atlanta and Phil McKernan in San Francisco.

But he was far and away the hottest radio commodity of the group, and his influence was spreading.

In 1954, WNJR-AM in Newark, New Jersey, adopted a rhythm and blues format featuring Freed's show on tape, and quickly followed his addition with taped presentations of Sears and Hancock's show. The switch in format quickly proved attractive to advertisers, including those located in nearby New York City.

Recognizing a good thing — and dollar signs — when he heard it, Bob Smith, program director at WINS-AM in New York offered Freed a $75,000 a year contract.

Freed went on the air in New York on Sept. 8, 1954, and after a brief stint on late nights, moved to 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. slot. He also began promoting concerts, his first New York shows, billed as “Alan Freed's Rock and Roll Party,” being held on January 14 and 15, 1955.

The move to the nation's biggest radio market was complimented by numerous magazine profiles that heralded the new radio “star” while also playing up the music’s alleged connections to juvenile delinquency and riots.

They also threw a spotlight on the fact that in Freed’s “world,” young blacks and whites were finding common ground and otherwise "mixing."

Ironically, the one magazine that did not cover the arrival of the polarizing disc jockey was one that shared a midtown Manhattan building with WINS at the time, The New Yorker.

Still, it’s tantalizing to think of Freed arriving for work each evening, crossing paths with the likes of E.B. White, James Thurber and cartoonist Charles Addams, as they made their way to and from the elevator in the lobby that stretched from 43rd to 44th Streets.

The move to WINS-AM also led to a lawsuit by a New York City musician, Louis Thomas Hardin, who had written the song Freed used as his theme, and who claimed he owned the rights to the “Moondog” name. The songwriter ultimately collected a $6,000 judgment from the disc jockey.

Often treated as a footnote to Freed's story, “Moondog” Hardin deserves more than a passing mention. Born in Maryville, Kansas on May 26, 1916, he was already well on his way to becoming a professional musician, poet and inventor when, at 17, he lost his sight in a dynamite accident.

Relocating to New York City, Hardin lived primarily on the streets, continuing all the while to write his avant-garde compositions — in Braille — and churning out a series of hand-made instruments.

But Hardin was destined to be more than just another forgotten character on the streets of the big city.

Among those who came to know Moondog during the 30 years he lived in Manhattan was Tony Schwartz, the urban folklorist and media consultant who gained enduring fame by creating the infamous "Daisy" political advertisement for Lyndon Baines Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign.

Often called the most famous political ad ever to appear on television, the minute-long spot aired only once, on September 7, 1964, during a showing of NBC-TV's “Sunday Night at the Movies.”

So powerful was the advertisement, which began with a little girl plucking petals from a daisy and ended with a countdown and an atomic explosion, that it is said to have effectively ended the presidential chances of Johnson's opponent, Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

In his book “Media: The Second God,” Schwartz described seeing Hardin at his usual haunt, the sidewalks along the Avenue of the Americas.

“Moondog wore sandals and draped himself in a flowing garment with a leather thong belt, all homemade,” Schwartz wrote. “He was bearded, and he wore his hair long even in the days when the crew cut was standard.”²

Somehow Schwartz neglected mentioning the other feature of Hardin's ensemble — a homemade Viking helmet.

“Moondog would materialize before the plaza of some new glass-walled skyscraper — and just stand there. Anyone who stopped to talk to him discovered that he could have an intelligent and involving conversation,” Schwartz wrote. ³

Intrigued by Hardin and his story, Schwartz would make several recordings of him and eventually gave his unusual friend his phone number.

This would prove fortuitous for both men years later, when Schwartz was working on his "Sounds of the Cities" ad campaign for American Airlines.

On a foggy spring night, Hardin called Schwartz to alert him to the sounds of foghorns on the East River. Inspired, Schwartz suggested they immediately do a recording session in his apartment.

As Schwartz waited for Hardin to arrive, he clamored to the roof and set up a microphone to capture the foghorn sounds and then attached the mike to a speaker so that the sound of the horns would fill the book and recording-lined room.

After Hardin arrived, Schwartz said he realized the unique sound of the instrument the Moondog had brought with him was a dead ringer for the sound of a trolley car. In short order he had a performance on tape and ultimately used it as the sound of San Francisco in the American Airlines campaign.

“Thus, I was able to construct a sound pattern that people really felt was San Francisco,” Schwartz recalled. “In fact, many have asked me in what part of San Francisco I made that recording.”⁴

A few months before Freed signed with WINS, Bill Haley signed with Decca Records and made his way to New York with his band the Comets for the inaugural recording session with the label. The producer on the session was Milt Gabler.

The plan was for the band to record a novelty titled “Thirteen Women (and Only One Man in Town),” which Gabler had slated as the combo's first single on its new label. For the B-side, Haley and the band were to record another song, “Rock Around the Clock.”

In the years since, numerous legends attached themselves to “Rock Around the Clock,” and a final, trustworthy accounting of the April 12, 1954, session is hard to come by.

By some accounts, several attempts were made to capture a version of the song everyone was happy with, and the version most people know today is actually an edited combination of two takes.

Other discrepancies include conflicting accounts of who played what on the record.

What is clear, however, is that the single “Thirteen Women” backed with “Rock Around the Clock” was not a hit, and the session would have been forgotten had fate not intervened.

Like everything else about the song, there is much disagreement over how “Rock Around the Clock” wound up being used under the opening credits of the movie “Blackboard Jungle.”

The most reliable version comes from Jim Dawson’s “Rock Around the Clock: The Record that Started the Rock Revolution,,”⁵ which states the record was chosen from the collection of Peter Ford, son of “Blackboard Jungle” star Glenn Ford.

According to Dawson, the producers wanted a song to represent what teenagers were listening to at the time, and “Rock Around the Clock” was simply picked from a pile of records.

It was a choice that all but ensured rock and roll would be more than a passing fad.

On July 9, 1955, “Rock Around the Clock” became the first rock and roll recording to hit the top of Billboard’s pop singles charts, and it would stay in that position for eight weeks.

The song that had once been a disappointment was also number one on the Cashbox pop singles charts for seven weeks and rose to number three on the nation's rhythm and blues charts.

Suddenly, everyone was paying attention to rock and roll. Among those who benefited from the rise of new sound was a young man out of Lubbock, Texas, named Buddy Holly.

Unlike Elvis Presley, who was nearly struck speechless during his appearance with Dewey Phillips, Holly was a radio pro by the time he cut his first record, having first performed on all-country KDAV in Lubbock during his junior year in high school.

At the time Holly was half a duo with longtime friend and classmate Bob Montgomery, but with the encouragement of an announcer known as “Hipockets” Duncan, the group was quickly expanded to a trio with the addition of a bass player named Larry Welborn, and the revamped group was soon given a regular Sunday afternoon slot on KDAV's “Sunday Party” program.⁶

The station and the program were solidly country and western, but Holly was no more immune to rhythm and blues than most of his fellow teenagers, and he is known to have performed Hank Ballard and the Midnighters' suggestive “Work With Me Annie” more than once on the show.⁷

The popularity of the “Buddy and Bob Show” soon led to live performances around town, but otherwise, Holly's high school years were unexceptional. He was an average student, and when not in school or making music, he worked with his father and brothers in the family's residential construction business.

Then in early 1955, largely on the strength of “That's Alright, Mama’s” popularity on KDAV, Elvis, Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black were booked into the Cotton Club, then Lubbock's most popular country music dance club.⁸

Buddy Holly and Bob Montgomery attended the show, and afterward Holly had a friendly chat with Elvis, remarking later that the star of the show was “a real nice, friendly fellow.”⁹

The initial effect of the encounter was that “Buddy and Bob,” as they were billed, began playing Elvis’s songs the next week on their show. In the longer term, however, the concert would serve as one of the key catalysts for the formation of Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

In the wake of Elvis' first appearance in Lubbock, Holly, Montgomery and Welborn began to aggressively pursue “opening act” spots on the rock and roll and country shows that were moving through town.

During one of these shows, a package show headed by Bill Haley himself, Holly caught the attention of Nashville talent agent Eddie Crandall. Two weeks later Crandall caught the act again, as they opened a show for Marty Robbins.

Feeling there was something in Holly’s sound, if not that of his partners, Crandall asked the singer to record four demos and to send them to him right away. Although an abortive attempt was made to entice Elvis' new manager, Col. Tom Parker, to represent the Texan, the fate of Buddy Holly ultimately fell into the hands of Jim Denny of Decca Records' country music division.

Almost amazingly, Montgomery and Welborn encouraged Holly to go on without them, and “Hi Pockets” Duncan, who was serving as their manager, tore up the contract he had with him, fulfilling a promise he made when he first took the combo under his wing.

However, Buddy Holly’s “Nashville sessions,” as they would later come to be called, were not a success. As with Elvis Presley, the initial reaction to Holly’s sound was that it was unclassifiable, and while attempts were made to record a suitable song with the singer and the band he’d hastily assembled for the sessions, something saleable — in the record company's view — was not forthcoming.

Ultimately Holly was dropped from Decca — ironically to go down in history as the label that turned down the Beatles several years later — but within weeks he was headed to a tiny studio in Clovis, New Mexico to meet with a producer named Norman Petty.

Throughout 1956, Holly, his new band The Crickets, and Petty worked on various interpretations of the singer's distinctive songs, but nothing turned out quite right. Then, in the early morning hours of February 25, 1957, the band turned its attention to “That'll Be the Day,” a song originally recorded for Decca in Nashville, and came away with a monster hit.

With “That’ll Be the Day” and the string of hits that followed over a remarkable two year period, including “Peggy Sue,” “Oh Boy,” “Rave On,” “It’s So Easy” and “Everyday,” Holly and his bandmates put themselves on the top of the charts and put their hometown of Lubbock on the map as a hotbed of creativity.

They also created a distinctive musical genre within the early framework of rock and roll. With melodic, but heavily rhythmic songs powered by two guitars, a bass and drums, they almost single-handedly created the template for what a band was supposed to look and sound like.

So it was something of a surprise when I tracked down Holly's drummer, J.I. “Jerry” Allison, and got him to talk about the early days of the group that he sounded so matter of fact about it all.

“To tell you the truth [making music] was all there really was to do in Lubbock,” he said in his warm and easy-going way as we spoke in 1990.

“And that’s the one thing that kind of bothered me about [the movie] “The Buddy Holly Story,” he said. “You know that scene where they had his parents yelling at him to knock off the noise during a band rehearsal? Well, that was just bull.

“A parent — any parent — would rather you were trying to make music than hanging out on the street drinking beer,” he said.

For Allison, the desire to make music took hold in the fifth or sixth grade (he apologetically couldn’t remember which) and quickly led to his playing drums in the school band. A year of private lessons followed, by which time he had begun playing with Holly, bassist Joe B. Maudlin, and a second guitarist, Niki Sullivan.

The group rehearsed either at Holly’s parent’s home or in the back room of Allison’s family’s house at 2215 6th Street in Lubbock.

There, the group decided to call themselves The Crickets, inspired by another musical group called The Spiders. It was also in that house, which has long since been demolished, that Holly and Allison collaborated on the writing of “That’ll Be the Day.”

In this case, Allison said, the legend does hold true. The night before the aspiring musicians had gone to see the movie western “The Searchers” and heard John Wayne repeat the phrase time and again throughout the movie.

“We wrote the song the very next day,” he said.

Allison also confirmed that it was Elvis' repeated performances in Lubbock during the Sun Record years that both fired Holly's imagination and helped shape The Crickets.

“We’d go to see Elvis whenever he played,” Allison said. “There was a bar that the acts used to come to after their shows, and we played at it. I asked him one time why he didn’t have a drummer, and Elvis said, ‘If I did, I would sound like Bill Haley.’ But the next time he came he had D.J. Fontana on drums.”

Allison remembers Elvis and Holly getting along well.

“Elvis was, by that time, in a different class; he was already on the verge of major stardom. But the one thing I do remember clearly is Buddy teaching Elvis how to play ‘Money Honey’ on the guitar, which eventually showed up on Elvis’ first album,” Allison said.

For all their success locally, however, Buddy Holly and the Crickets' accent to the “big time” did not come easily. In rapid succession, the band was turned down by both Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts,” then one of television’s highest rated variety shows, and Roulette Records.

They would also be signed and unceremoniously dropped by the Decca label, which had tried to cast them as a country music combo, before finally hitting pay dirt with Brunswick Records – ironically a Decca subsidiary – in the spring of 1957.

“The truth is, I always thought we would be signed by a record label and be successful,” Allison said. “I thought Buddy had a lot of talent. We’d go to shows pretty often and we thought we were as good as or better than the people we saw. Buddy was pretty confident. I guess we were all kind of cocky.”

The contract they did finally land was unique in two respects: With it they became the first rock and roll band to record without direct supervision from their label. When the songs were done, the band simply sent the finished product to the label.

“We recorded at Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico, and basically what had happened was we went in and rerecorded ‘That’ll Be the Day,’ which we’d done for Decca in a much different style, thinking it was just going to be a demo as we tried to get another record deal.

“Well, we sent it to Coral [another Decca subsidiary which would issue Holly “solo recordings” throughout his career], and they liked it. They said, ‘That’s fine. Send some more.’ It sure was fun doing it that way.”

The other unique arrangement was the contract called for dual distribution, for the band and Holly as a solo artist, through Brunswick and Coral.

“The beauty of it was we put out twice as many records that way,” Allison said. “What distinguished them was that the Buddy Holly cuts had no backup vocals, while on The Crickets’ records they would overdub the background voices.

“The Crickets didn’t actually sing on the records; we would cut the instrumental tracks and Buddy’s vocals and then the backup vocals would be added by Petty later,” he said.

But providing the pulse for Holly’s songs on what today would be considered a very rudimentary drum kit, was only one of Allison’s contributions to the music the band made.

As already noted in the case of “That’ll Be the Day,” he also had a significant hand in the songwriting, ranking him among Holly’s very few collaborators in that regard.

“Basically, I could collaborate with Buddy when the occasion arose because I could play other instruments [besides the drums],” Allison said. “I could play guitar well enough to write a song. I play the piano, although I don’t play much anymore.”

Among the songs that Allison co‐wrote with Holly were “Not Fade Away” and “Well, All Right.” And it was Allison who suggested Holly change the name of a song he was working on from “Cindy Lou” to the now famous “Peggy Sue,” in honor of the drummer’s then girlfriend and later wife.

Although the couple’s relationship would be immortalized again by Holly with “Peggy Sue Got Married,” the two would later divorce.

“It was a childhood romance that went afoul,” Allison said.

But if Holly and the Crickets were determined to make a mark in the record business in the mid‐1950s, they were also increasingly serious about taking their show out on the road.

“We played a lot of joints, frankly. “Bars, roller skating rinks – even from the back of a truck at a supermarket opening,” Allison said.

And everywhere they went was courtesy of Holly’s ’55 Oldsmobile.

“The biggest problem was Joe [Maudlin]’s stand‐up bass,” Allison chuckled. “It was a big car, so we’d take the drums and two amplifiers and just pack them inside and sit on them if we had to. The bass on the other hand, had to be tied to the roof.”

But as the records came out, the bookings – and presumably, the transportation to them – got decidedly better.

“We played the Brooklyn Paramount and even played the Apollo for about a week in August 1957 because they thought we were a black group when they booked us,” Allison said. “And we used to go out on those big package shows, where there’d be something like 20 acts on the bill and each group would do one or two songs.

“The first time we did it we played one song, then the next record would come out and we’d get to do two songs. I was 17, just out of Lubbock – it was lots of fun,” he said.

On stage, Buddy Holly was “one of the very best,” in Allison’s estimation.

“In those days, a lot of people tried to copy Elvis, to try to generate that response, but Buddy never did that. He’d do his own stuff,” Allison said.

Behind him, the band “would be as silly as we could be, cutting up all the time, Joe B. ‘riding’ the bass and so forth,” Allison said. “As for the stage setup, all we had was the one microphone, for Buddy, and maybe the bass would be miked sometimes, but never the drums. Looking back on it, the funny thing is that people complained that we played too loud.”

And it was while on the road, during dates in New York, that Allison first heard a Buddy Holly and the Crickets record being played outside Lubbock.

“I remember we were in a restaurant and one of our songs was playing on the jukebox,” he said. “I turned to Buddy and the guys and said, ‘We are happening! We have made it!’

But for all success the Cricket’s enjoyed, strains emerged in their partnership as Holly’s interests began to diverge from those of his band mates.

In June 1958, Holly met Maria Elena Santiago, a receptionist for New York music publisher Peer Southern Music, and the couple quickly married. By then, Holly had become enamored with the New York music scene and wanted to explore it. The band, meanwhile, decided to head back to Lubbock.

Goodbyes said, the Hollys moved to an apartment on 9th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York’s Greenwich Village. It was there that he recorded a series of acoustic songs and song fragments, known as the “Apartment Tapes,” which were released after his death with extensive overdubbing and additional musicians added to the mix.

Although bootlegs of the recordings circulated for years, it would be decades before most fans heard Holly’s takes on “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” and “What to Do,” not to mention a countrified turn on Little Richard’s “Slippin’ and Slidin’” as he originally recorded them in the fall of 1958.

By all accounts, the last six months of Holly’s life were a time of exploration, with the Texas musician frequenting New York Jazz clubs like The Blue Note, The Village Gate and the Village Vanguard.

He also reportedly registered for acting classes with Lee Strasburg’s Actor’s Studio, hoping that walking in the footpaths of Marlin Brando, James Dean and other Studio artists would pave the way to a film career.

“Movies were something we talked about, almost from the very beginning,” Allison said. “We had offers to do those Allen Freed movies, like “Go Johnny Go,” but we held out for a starring role that never came.”

“Whenever somebody asks about the movies, I always say, ‘I wish we had,’” he said.

But if Holly’s time in New York was beginning to expand the breadth of his artistry, it also took an enormous toll on his personal finances.

Just as in the case of the Crickets, Holly’s relationship with Norman Petty had frayed with his move to the East Coast; Petty responded by withholding his royalties.

The situation dragged on for months. Finally, Holly hired attorney Harold Orenstein, who had previously represented the Everly Brothers in a contractual dispute. Despite Orenstein’s efforts, Holly still couldn’t get his hands on his royalties fast enough to keep up with expenses.

Then, as Christmas 1958 approached, Maria Elena learned she was pregnant. Seeing touring as his only alternative, Holly signed up to perform on the Winter Dance Party tour with Dion and the Belmonts, Valens and Richardson, and assembled a backing band consisting of Tommy Allsup on guitar, Waylon Jennings on bass and, briefly, Carl Bunch on drums. By January 23, Holly was once again on the road.

But the brutal conditions and dreary string of very modest dates in a frozen Midwest soon took its toll. After a week of crisscrossing Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa in a poorly heated bus, Bunch had to quit due to frostbite. For the remaining dates, Carlo Mastralango, bass singer for the Belmonts, filled in for him.

By the time the tour pulled into Clear Lake, Iowa on February 2 for a date at the Surf Ballroom, Holly had also had enough, and fatefully decided to lease a plane from Dwyer’s Flying Service in nearby Mason City to fly he, Allsup and Jennings to the tour’s next stop in Fargo, North Dakota.

That night, before a crowd that had paid $1.25 a head to attend, Holly walked out on stage alone to perform a country tune, “Gotta Travel On,” before calling the band onstage to play a 25 minute set that including “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” “It’s So Easy,” “Everyday,” “Oh Boy,” “Early in the Morning,” “Rave On,” and a new number written in New York, “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.”

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Holly’s leasing of the plane had become the talk of the performers. After Holly’s set ended, Richardson waylaid Jennings and quickly talked the future country music legend into relinquishing his seat.

Allsup initially resisted Valens’ efforts to trade a seat on the bus for a seat on the plane but eventually agreed to toss a coin for it on condition that if he lost, he would get to use the large sleeping bag Richardson had purchased for the tour. Valens won the toss. Holly then called home, either from the Surf Ballroom or the airport, a detail lost to history.

What is known is that by about 10 p.m., pilot Roger Peterson was preparing the Flying Service’s Beechcraft Bonanza for the flight. While most forecasts for the night indicated there would be acceptable conditions for the flight, by the time the party was ready to take‐off at 12:55 a.m., advisories had been issued for reduced visibility due to heavy snow and fog.

It is believed Peterson never saw those advisories. The flight lasted all of about five minutes. Hubert Dwyer, the owner of the plane, later told investigators that he watched from the tower and the plane rose and banked to the left, and saw the taillight of the single engine aircraft “descend until out of sight.”

It wouldn’t be until 3:30 a.m., by which time the plane should have been in Fargo, that anyone sensed something had gone terribly wrong. Officials at Hector Airport in North Dakota called Dwyer to tell him Peterson hadn’t been heard from. Six hours later, Dwyer took off in a second small plane intending to fly Peterson’s intended route. He was likely only in the air a few minutes when he saw the wreckage of the plane in a cornfield less than five miles from the airport.

Investigators would later conclude that poor weather conditions and pilot error caused the crash in which the plane barreled into the ground at 170 miles per hour, and then tumbled end over end another 600 feet before coming to rest against a wire fence. A coroner said all aboard died instantly of massive trauma.

Back in Lubbock the same night the Crickets had once again assembled in Allison’s house. Having decided to break with Petty themselves, they were anxious to talk to Holly about reuniting.

Allison recalled that he and Mauldin called Maria Elena, who told them Holly was playing the Surf Ballroom that night, and provided details on the rest of the tour’s itinerary. Allison said they then called the ballroom, only to be told Holly had already left. They then called ahead to Fargo, leaving a message Holly would never get.

The next morning, like everybody else in Holly’s hometown, the Crickets learned about the crash from the radio. Maria Elena would suffer a miscarriage two weeks later.

The surviving Crickets played the remaining Winter Dance Party dates, and have stayed together for years after, playing four or five dates a month as the spirit moved them. But like all survivors of tragedy, they were also left with a nagging sense of what might have been.

“Waylon told me that Buddy said he was going to get us back together to tour England,” Allison said. “Even after all these years, it’s still unbelievable to me,” he added. “We learned to play rock and roll together. He was my best friend.”

© 2013

1. "How the world's first rock concert ended in chaos" by Jude Sheerin. BBC News Magazine. March 20, 2012.

2. Schwartz, Tony. "Media: The Second God." Anchor Books. 1983.

3. Schwartz, Tony. "Media: The Second God." Anchor Books. 1983.

4. Schwartz, Tony. "Media: The Second God." Anchor Books. 1983.

5. Dawson, Jim Rock Around the Clock: The Record that Started the Rock Revolution (Backbeat Books, 2005)

6. Goldrosen, John and John Beecher. Remembering Buddy: The Definitive Biography of Buddy Holly. Penguin Books, London. Page 19.

7. Goldrosen, John and John Beecher. Remembering Buddy: The Definitive Biography of Buddy Holly. Penguin Books, London. Page 19.

8. Goldrosen, John and John Beecher. Remembering Buddy: The Definitive Biography of Buddy Holly. Penguin Books, London. Page 29.

9. Goldrosen, John and John Beecher. Remembering Buddy: The Definitive Biography of Buddy Holly. Penguin Books, London. Page 29.