The Day The Music Lived – How Buddy Holly Changed It All
The Legend of the Winter Dance Party circa 1959 and the story of Bobby Vee
Buddy Holly
Buddy Holly was the great ray of hope on the rock & roll soundscape following scandals and diversions involving its major artists that suggested the fledgling genre may have been running out of gas, even though it had just left the garage. Elvis had been drafted into the army in late 1957 and was leaning heavily toward a Hollywood movie career that rendered his rock & roll edge dull. Little Richard became a preacher, Jerry Lee Lewis was mired in the scandal of his marriage to his 13-year-old second cousin, and Chuck Berry, when he should have been at the top of the ladder of success, went to prison following a sex-related scandal.
Since he entered the scene Buddy Holly came on clear-eyed, innocent and ready to breathe fresh and original life into the genre, even as he drew from such diverse influences as Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Elvis. In appearance, he was non-threatening, with his glasses, his lanky build, and his signature hiccup vocal style. But even if he was public-friendly, he was also subversive, as his Clovis recordings became a call to bring rock & roll back to its roots. In 1959, Buddy Holly held the future of rock & roll music.
It was the business end of the music industry that led to Holly booking the grueling and nonsensical Winter Dance Party Tour. The tour became necessary because producer and self-proclaimed collaborator Norman Petty, in Clovis, New Mexico, held back critically important publishing and songwriting royalties from Holly. He was out of money and needed income. The tour was grueling because it was booked during one of the coldest winters in the history of the country. The booking company decided to cut costs by renting battered school buses with faulty heating systems. The tour was nonsensical logistically with dates booked in a way that required the musicians to crisscross the hard Midwestern winter landscape without rhyme or reason.
In spite of these obstacles eyewitnesses to the tour describe how entertaining and memorable the shows were. YouTube is scattered with touching stories from audience members who were there for the shows. One story occurred on January 29th when an 18-year-old Robert Zimmerman and his friend Louis Kemp braved the storm to see Holly at Duluth Armory. Dylan later wrote that he was standing so close to Holly they made eye contact. He said, “He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. I didn’t know what. And it gave me chills.”
A few days later, when the caravan reached Clear Lake, Iowa, after the show, Holly enlisted The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens to charter a plane rather than make the three-hour trip on broken-down and frigid buses. The tired 21-year-old newly licensed pilot Roger Peterson had not passed his instrument rating and could fly safely only when route visibility was clear. At 12:30 a.m. on February 3, a blizzard was moving across the flight path Peterson had planned. The oncoming storm had not been reported to Mason City Municipal Airport. After many years of speculation, it it is clear the pilot’s lack of skill on the instrument panel led to such confusion that he thought he was climbing when he was actually heading toward the ground.
But those who were left behind carried the icy memories of ash and fire igniting their passionate love for the music. Fate drove them into new possibilities that may not have existed before that blue winter morning tragedy. 19-year-old Dion DiMucci would go on to lead the Belmonts into great popular success. Lubbock bass man-for-hire, Waylon Jennings, traded away his seat on the plane to flu-ailing J.P. Richardson, and rockabilly guitarist, Tommy Allsup found their way into legends of their own.
But it is Bobby Vee whose story remains the most compelling of all.
If the age-old adage “the show must go on” inevitably had to come into play in the aftermath of the sudden deaths of these legends, the thought of carrying on with the February 3rd show in Moorhead, Minnesota, took that advice to new extremes. But the shock of the event triggered ticket demand, and audiences were curious about what remained of the once stellar package show.
Some wait a lifetime for an opportunity to take a shot at fame, but 15-year-old Robert Velline from Fargo, North Dakota had no idea his time would come so young. When he heard the announcement of the accident and the opportunity to audition for the show, he already had tickets for that evening. He called his older brother and guitarist, Bill, along with a couple of other musicians, and within a matter of hours the young performers were booked to take the place of Buddy Holly at the Winter Dance Party show in Moorhead, Minnesota, on February 3, 1959. Within a matter of weeks, he would become nationally known as Bobby Vee.
In a recent phone conversation with Vee’s youngest son, rockabilly singer-songwriter Robby Vee, it was clear that his father’s memory of the events remained vivid throughout his life. He said Bobby Vee referred to it as a bittersweet life experience in which “one star went down, another one went up.”
According to Robby Vee, his father described the Moorhead event on February 3 as subdued. He said, “Waylon Jennings and Dion looked like life had been taken out of them. Like zombies.” Vee told his son that he borrowed a guitar strap from Waylon Jennings for his set, which included songs by Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and The Everly Brothers.
Purely inspired by Buddy Holly’s music, he also wrote an original song, “Suzie Baby.”
A local manager was impressed enough by Vee’s performance and the song to purchase studio time and record a demo of “Suzie Baby.” That session yielded Vee’s first nationally charted song and a regional hit. It also became his calling card to greater success.
The story of the Moorhead concert and the historic recording was impressive enough to garner an invitation from Vee’s cousins in San Diego to perform at a sock hop, an informal dance party capable of attracting large numbers of teens and generating publicity. Promotional radio spots featuring clips of “Suzie Baby” had enough spark to attract the attention of Los Angeles record producer Snuff Garrett, a native of Lubbock, Texas, and a friend of Buddy Holly’s. He heard the promotional clips and was moved by the resemblance to Buddy. Jerry Allison, Buddy Holly’s drummer, heard them as well and was haunted by the soulful echo of his missing friend, who seemed to be singing through this 15-year-old from Fargo, Minnesota.
The natural thing for Jerry Allison and Snuff Garrett, both successful music figures from Lubbock who were grieving the loss of Buddy Holly, was to put young Bobby Vee in the same studio where Buddy had found musical success in Clovis, New Mexico. Several demos were recorded at Norman Petty’s historic sonic laboratory. However, when Snuff Garrett and Norman Petty came to blows, Garrett moved Bobby Vee’s future to Los Angeles, where he signed with Liberty Records.
The rest is rock and roll history, especially with the release of “Devil or Angel” and “Take Good Care of My Baby.” Over the next decade, according to Robby Vee, his father spent most of his time making records, touring, and raising a family. According to Billboard, he scored 14 Top 40 hits during those ten years. Yet throughout his career, Vee remained devoted to rockabilly and drew his greatest inspiration from the rock & roll of the 1950s that fired his teenage imagination and led him to the Moorhead stage in the wake of Buddy Holly’s death.
The turn toward pop-based music for Bobby Vee is not a surprise, considering it was the direction Buddy Holly was headed when he moved to New York City. Holly’s last recordings, especially “True Love Ways” and his cover of Paul Anka’s “Raining in My Heart,” may have pointed the way for Vee’s evolution. But with a close listen to Vee’s vocals on these early songs, Holly’s influence becomes crystal clear. He even brought in the trademark hiccup on the hit song “Rubber Ball.” In the first year of his successful career, Bobby Vee, while taking live bookings throughout the Midwest, ran across a young musician who went by the name Elston Gunnn. The musician offered his services as a pianist, warning that he could only play in the key of C. According to Vee, Dylan played two shows and then disappeared. A few years later, while in New York City, Vee saw Elston Gunnn’s face on a poster in a record store under the name Bob Dylan. Later, Vee would learn that in 1960, following the regional success of “Suzie Baby,” Bob Dylan had introduced himself as Bobby Vee. According to Robby Vee, Dylan told Bobby in 2013 that Vee taught him how to connect with an audience. While most of the survivors of the 1959 Winter Dance Party tour have been accounted for and have either retired or passed on to their heavenly reward in rock and roll heaven, they left legacies that demonstrate the tour’s influence. Beyond those witnesses who were there in 1959, the enduring effects of the music that followed can be seen in the next generation. This became clear when four lads in Liverpool, England, decided to bring Holly’s influence into their music and even into their name: The Beatles. Not to be left out of Britain’s love affair with Buddy Holly, The Rolling Stones counted Holly’s “Not Fade Away” among their first hits. Graham Nash’s original band was even less subtle, naming themselves The Hollies. In America, The Bobby Fuller Four scored a major hit in 1965 with “I Fought the Law,” a song originally written by Sonny Curtis and recorded by his band, The Crickets, five years earlier. Waylon Jennings, who would later lead the groundbreaking Outlaw Country movement, did one better by including The Crickets on the album I’ve Always Been Crazy while revisiting Holly classics. Dion and the Belmonts forged a hard-edged New York sound of their own that influenced iconic artists such as Bruce Springsteen and Lou Reed, while Dion eventually found some of his finest work in 1961 with hits like “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue.” But Bobby Vee’s role in the aftermath of Buddy Holly’s demise is less well known. The extent of his success from 1959 to 1967, including a long-term association with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars, is often overlooked. He continued touring and eventually found his way onto nostalgic package shows. Yet throughout the years, he experienced periods of remarkable creativity that have largely gone unnoticed. In 1972, he stripped away the pop veneer on the album Nothin’ Like a Sunny Day, which featured nine original songs blending country, rock, and gospel with a clear singer-songwriter sensibility. The session work is subtle and authentic and flows with fine harmonies, including contributions from Les Emmerson of Five Man Electrical Band on harmonica and session legend Dean Parks on lead guitar. Vee’s voice is at ease as he broadens his style, comfortably breaking away from the pop-rock sound for which he was best known. It is an overlooked gem that richly deserves rediscovery by today’s Americana and roots-music audiences. Eventually, Vee returned to Minnesota, where he raised his family and established Rockhouse Promotions and a recording studio, a roots-music paradise managed today by members of his family, including his daughter and three sons. In 2011, Bobby Vee was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Even so, his love for music and his joy in making it continued until his passing in 2016. During our phone conversation, Robby Vee, Bobby’s son and a singer-songwriter who has carried on both his father’s legacy and his own with grace and tenacity, was engaging and told his stories with such love, respect, and commitment to preserving his father’s legacy that it was palpable. Robby Vee is a fine rockabilly artist who is equally adept at surf guitar and pop ballads worthy of his father’s legacy. His talent, his love for his father, and his dedication to the music are strong and well articulated. This was never more evident than when he told the story of his father’s reunion with Bob Dylan in St. Paul in 2013.
The story of Buddy Holly and the aftermath of the tragedy of The Winter Dance Party is as much about grace as it is about art & music. If music is a stream that runs from the heart of the Divine, from God, then these moments that still resonate 65 years later, from the fireball in the Winter sky in 1959, to the warm embrace by Bob Dylan for Bobby Vee when he was in the grip of Alzheimer’s disease, are an awakening into a universal spirit that overcomes tragic loss and runs with love and healing through life. The music that streamed from Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Richie Valens, then went down in flames and became known as “the day the music died.” It is much more than this. It is in truth the day the music lived. It merely changed directions and flowed out in other forms into the heart of America and its most cherished music.
Robby Vee is currently promoting his new album, Double Spin, which includes the single he co-wrote with Bobby Vee, “Good Morning.” He is also working on a collaborative release with John (“Beej”) Chaney of the Suburbs on an album to be released in 2024.
There will be a Winter Dance Party tribute show: The Day the Music Lived, at the Fret House in Covina on February 3rd featuring Ronnie Mack, John York and Matt Cartsonis.
The Day The Music Lived – How Buddy Holly Changed It All
The Legend of the Winter Dance Party circa 1959 and the story of Bobby Vee