Buddy Holly
Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Buddy Holly as the number 13 on their 100 greatest artists of all time. This is quite a considerable achievement for a man with a mere three year career, who died in an air crash when only twenty-two years old.
He was born Charles Hardin Holley on September 7th 1936, to Lawrence and Pauline in Lubbock, Texas. They were a musical family, typical of the south-western, United States. Charles learned to play violin, piano and guitar and sang in his high school choir.
Seeing an Elvis concert in Lubbock during early 1955 changed his life completely. A few months later Charles, better known as Buddy appeared on the same bill as Elvis in his home town of Lubbock. A little later Buddy appeared with Bill Haley and His Comets and his career was launched. It was as a result of the Haley concert that Buddy was offered a recording contract and ironically where he became Buddy Holly and not Holley because of a spelling error on his contract. The contract was with Decca as a solo country singer. Not really his style.
Holly formed his own band, the Crickets and started to work with the producer Norman Petty in his Clovis, New Mexico recording studio. This very fruitful collaboration generated another recording contract, this time for the Crickets and with the Decca subsidiary Coral. A string of hits followed as recordings made with Petty made Buddy very popular around the world and across the racial divide. One time in New York he was booked to play at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem he went on stage despite initial apprehension and won over the audience with his music. Buddy and the Crickets had a very successful tour of the United Kingdom in 1958. The Beatles never saw Buddy Holly but acknowledge that his music had a great influence on them.
After a string of hits, Buddy became less interested in working with Norman Petty in New Mexico and decided to go to the New York music scene. Here he met and married Maria Elena and decided that he should let the Crickets return to Lubbock, while he found new musicians to work with. Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup were the replacements he toured with right up until the end came in February 1959.
Despite the passage of almost fifty years, Buddy Holly’s music is still very popular with audiences of all ages and his influence on the work of others immeasurable.
8th to 12th May 2007 at the City Varieties, Leeds
REVIEW:
In this terrific production Stuart Woolf has drawn on the talents of half a dozen professional or semi professional performers to play the lead roles of Buddy, Joe Maudlin, Jerry Allison, the 4th Cricket, J P Richardson (The Big Bopper) and Ritchie Valens. When I spoke to him at the halftime interval he made no apologies for this. “The audience expect a professional performance these days, even from amateur societies like ours, and therefore it has been necessary to bring in music students and professional musicians to play these demanding roles.”
Richard Aldham who plays the title role is certainly a very accomplished musician – both vocally and instrumentally. He is extremely well supported by Jonny Hick as Joe Maudlin. Jonny is a professional base player and I was knocked out by some of the sequences he produced. In the introduction to this review I mentioned Sir Paul McCartney and it is appropriate therefore that James Newton, playing the role of Jerry Allison the drummer in The Crickets, should be studying at the Paul McCartney Institute in Liverpool at the moment. I thought his drumming was great, particularly on “Peggy Sue”. Another great performance came from Joe Gallagher on lead guitar whose licks were note perfect.
Jonathan Tate and Johnny Rookes were also outstanding as The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens respectively, as was David Kirk, a regular member of the Potato Room Players, whose Texan accent was perfect in the role of Hipockets, the local DJ in Lubbock. Others providing excellent support were Katrina Wood as Maria Elena (with a very seductive Spanish accent), and married couple Raymond & Mollie Williams in the roles of Norman Petty and his wife Vi.
No successful show can operate without a great production team and this is certainly true in this case. Stuart Woolf the Director, Jim Lunt the Musical Director and Jacqui Drake-Sweiss the choreographer make up a trio that is second to none in the theatrical world in this area. Their combined talents, with over sixty years of theatrical experience between them, ensure that although the society may be amateur in status, it is truly professional in all aspects of performance.
I for one thoroughly enjoyed the show on the opening night and was only disappointed that the auditorium was not entirely full on this first evening. I hope the numbers pick up later in the week as on this performance, the actors and actresses deserve to be playing to full houses.
John Burland
Dine Direct Theatre Reviewer
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