Buddy Holly’s recording career lasted only four years, from 1955 to 1959. In that four years, though, Holly created some of rock’s most enduring classics, including “That’ll Be the Day,” “Rave On,” “Peggy Sue,” “Words of Love,” “It’s So Easy,” “True Love Ways” and many others.
All those tracks and more are preserved beautifully in the new release “The Buddy Holly Collection (MCA).”
While all of the material on the set has been available on other collections, this is the largest CD package of Holly’s work available in the United States, and the CD transfer is excellent.
It sidles up beside essential non-hit and early tracks of the established classics and allows listeners to hear how Holly developed.
Like Elvis Presley, Holly was a white Southern kid who knew black rhythm and blues. Unlike the attractive and seemingly dangerous Presley, Holly was gangly and bespectacled. While he borrowed from black music, he didn’t try to sound black. Instead, Holly sang with an energetic country quaver. And Holly often wrote his own songs.
Listening to the discs makes it obvious that Holly knew his own best course from the beginning. Early tracks are being badly recorded, but they have far more fire than tracks that Holly recorded with legendary Nashville producer Owen Bradley. Bradley quashed Holly’s distinctive vocal quaver and refused to record Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day.” It later became Holly’s first No. 1 hit.
In the song “American Pie,” Don McLean sang that the day Holly perished in a plane crash was “the day the music died.”
Holly’s music has little chance of dying.