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‘He knew he was going to die’: Buddy Holly's widow on keeping his memory alive
Buddy Holly’s grave is in a sprawling, well-maintained cemetery in Lubbock, the Texan city where the rock’n’roll star was born. Lying flat on a patch of grass next to a small road, the headstone features engravings of a musical scale and a guitar alongside a modest inscription that betrays nothing of the musician’s astonishing achievements. “In loving memory of our own Buddy Holley,” it says, using the original spelling of his surname. “September 7 1936, February 3 1959”.
María Elena Holly, the musician’s widow, has never seen the grave. Nor did she attend his funeral, which was held shortly after the 22-year-old’s death in a plane crash 60 years ago.
Why not?
“Because Buddy’s not there,” she tells me when we meet in her home in Dallas, a 45-minute flight from Lubbock. She points skywards. He is in heaven, she believes.
But the spirit of the star who defined early rock’n’roll with hits such as That’ll Be the Day, Peggy Sue and Everyday is very much evident in María Elena’s capacious 14th-floor penthouse. Married to the musician for only six months, she nevertheless inherited the rights to his name, his music and his iconic bespectacled image. Sir Paul McCartney, a shrewd businessman as well as an ardent Buddy Holly champion, bought the near-worldwide rights to his song catalogue, some 40-plus songs, in 1976. But María Elena still owns them in the United States.
Any commercial exploitation of Holly has to be approved by his widow, whether the 1978 biopic The Buddy Holly Story starring Gary Busey, the stage musical of the same name, a planned new film about a cross-racial tour Holly undertook in the civil rights era, or a new album, such as the recently released True Love Ways.
It features original recordings of 12 of his best-known songs artfully embellished in a London studio by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – a nod to Holly’s final recording session in New York in October 1958, which featured an 18-piece orchestra. “They did a good job, the Philharmonic,” María Elena notes approvingly.
Judging from the plush high-rise apartment we’re sitting in, with its breathtaking views of the Dallas metropolis, the revenue from all this is not insubstantial.
She has a reputation as a fierce protector of her husband’s legacy and is known as a tough negotiator. But it’s obvious she is holding on to his memory for her own personal reasons, too.
Silver and gold discs for Holly’s short run of classic singles are propped against the wall (María Elena is still unpacking after recently downsizing from a four-storey townhouse). On a table are photographs from the couple’s honeymoon in Mexico. And carefully preserved and displayed in a large glass sideboard is the head of the rose Holly handed to her on their first date, 60 years and eight months ago.
María Elena Santiago was a receptionist at Holly’s music publishers in New York’s Brill Building, and on that first date in 1958 the musician asked her to marry him. She remembers him leaving the table to buy the rose from the cigarette girl.
“He came back with it behind his back, and he said: ‘Will you marry me…’ I said: ‘Oh my God, my aunt was right, these guys are not well!’” she smiles, twirling a finger by her temple.
The young Puerto Rican replied that she had to get her aunt’s permission – which Holly sought, the very next morning, turning up at their apartment first thing.
“I thought he was just kidding, that he was not gonna come back…”
Two months later they were married and moved into an apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village.
María Elena says their time together was blissful and busy. Holly would regularly write at home; she remembers him playing True Love Ways on guitar for the first time.
“He was composing one time and I was making noises in the kitchen with the dishes. And he said, ‘Ssshhhh!’ I said: ‘Don’t “sshhh” me! I’m washing the dishes!’ And he said: ‘Yeah, but I’m recording!’ So I stopped, and he continued working.”
Her husband was a man in a hurry: writing, performing live, producing other artists – even considering acting, going so far as to enrol at Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio.
“One of the things that Buddy always said was: ‘I have to finish this – I don’t have the time.’ He knew he was going to die.”
“You think so?” I ask.
“The way he said it,” she nods. “He kept insisting he didn’t have the time.”
To the horror of millions of music fans around the world, Holly was right. Eighteen intense months after first experiencing success with That’ll Be the Day, Holly was on a tour of the American Midwest when the Beechcraft Bonanza light aircraft he was in crashed. All those on board, including teenage singer Ritchie Valens and the appropriately nicknamed “great big guy”, the Big Bopper, died.
María Elena had been due to travel with Holly on the tour. It was only when she discovered she was pregnant that she changed her mind (she tragically lost the baby after hearing the news of her husband’s death).
“I’d kept telling him: ‘Don’t take small planes,’” she says. “And up to this day sometimes, I sit here and I think: ‘Why didn’t he listen to me?’ If I had gone on that tour, he would still be alive, because he would have not got on that plane.”
Her comments echo those of Holly's 93-year-old brother Larry, a former US Marine and Second World War veteran, who I met the day before María Elena. "I wouldn’t have got in that Bonanza, and I’m a pilot," he said to me. "When you can feel ice all over an airplane, then you put a great big guy in the back…I never dreamed that Buddy would get killed like that, but God took him home.”
Another Lubbock native, 81-year-old Sonny West, was working the night shift in a uranium mill in New Mexico when he heard the news. The co-writer of two of Holly’s defining hits, Oh Boy and Rave On, West had got himself into debt waiting on proceeds from the songs.
“It was early morning and I stopped to get a cup of coffee, and the woman that ran the newsstand told me about it – she had the radio on. I was just in disbelief. I thought, 'This is not supposed to happen.'
“I always thought I had a chance at immortality by writing music. Now I was totally confused. But I guess everyone thought that way.”
They did, and not just at the time: 12 years later Don McLean wrote American Pie, his yearning tribute to what he dubbed “the day the music died”.
Holly, of course, had a legion of fans in the UK at the time of his death.
I read to María Elena portions of a letter I’d seen in the Buddy Holly Museum in Lubbock. It was written by Holly’s grieving father, Lawrence, to the editor of the New Musical Express two months after the crash, expressing his gratitude to his son’s UK fans.
“How has this loss of one so dear affected Buddy’s beautiful little wife?” asked Holley rhetorically. “She’s been very brave and courageous but she, like us, will never get over such a great loss.”
“That’s true, even right now,” María Elena acknowledges. “That’s why sometimes I don’t like to do interviews, because I have to go over the things I just don’t want to.”
Holly’s premature death means the relationship has been frozen in time and even though María Elena did get married again, to a Puerto Rican academic, and go on to have three children before divorcing, Holly remains the love of her life.
“There’s no question about that. Even right now, a lot of people say: ‘Why don’t you go out, go on dates, meet people?’ ” she says, laughing. “No, I don’t need to. I already have somebody.”
Such intense devotion also explains her antipathy towards Peggy Sue Gerron. The Lubbock woman was the girlfriend of Jerry Allison, drummer in Holly’s band the Crickets, and the inspiration for the song Peggy Sue. And even though Gerron died last year, aged 78, María Elena is still fuming about the claims she made about Holly in a memoir in 2008.
“Oh my God, that book!” she exclaims. “But I stopped her. It was published, but she couldn’t get much out of it. She went to London, then I called the [journalists] who were interviewing her and I said, ‘That will be the last time you hear from me!’ So they just stopped…
“She claimed that Buddy was in love with her, and that Jerry knew about it. Buddy hated her guts! When we were in his father and mother’s house, she came in and said: ‘I don’t know why Buddy would marry this woman because she’s not from the same [background] – she’s more up there,’” she relates, a seeming reference to her supposed higher-class status, “ ‘and Buddy’s down here.’ What? I was already married!”
So might we say María Elena had mixed feelings on hearing of Peggy Sue’s death? She shrugs.
“I didn’t think about it. She did what she did.” Still hurt, the lady, clearly, is not for turning.
In contrast, she says she is constantly heartened by all the fans, famous and otherwise, who still remember Holly. The musician inspired a 17-year-old Bob Dylan and a 15-year-old Paul McCartney, and the Buddy Holly Educational Foundation, an organisation run out of Yorkshire by businessmen and superfans Peter Bradley and his son, is this year presenting replicas of Holly’s Gibson J-45 to “ambassadors” – musicians who are indebted to Holly - including Dylan, Ronnie Wood, Linda Ronstadt, Joe Walsh of the Eagles and Taylor Swift. (Previous recipients include McCartney, Dolly Parton, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen and Ed Sheeran.)
Getting into a room with one of those would be impressive. Scoring them all speaks to the persuasive powers of María Elena and the Bradleys, and of the enduring power of Buddy Holly’s music.
When I ask María Elena to name her most treasured possession, she doesn’t mention the rose or any of her photographs.
“I just said it: that his fellow musicians remember him, talk about him, play his music. That, to me, is very unusual, but they did it with Buddy.”
This weekend, as there is every February 3, there will be a special event in the frozen field near Clear Lake, Iowa, where Buddy Holly’s plane crashed. Crowds will gather, as will musicians, among them Chubby Checker and the Chiffons, despite anticipated temperatures of -9F.
His widow has attended in previous years, but she won’t be going this time. How will she mark the 60th anniversary of his death?
“Like I always do: pray,” she says. “For Buddy. And for the fans to continue loving him.”
True Love Ways (Decca) is out now