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February 3 was the 66th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly. He was supposed to fly over my house in Fargo, except he never made it out of Iowa. And my house hadn’t been built. Other than that, I feel a deep and enduring bond.
Not at first, though. Growing up in the 1970s, we knew Don McLean’s “American Pie” was somehow about Buddy, albeit in a tortured and allegorical form. The singer was not particularly clear about things, except that he drove his Chevy to the levee, and the good old boys were drinking whiskey but also had some rye, which would come in handy as a rhyme for “die.” That’s all we really knew. We didn’t know that McLean’s refrain—“this’ll be the day that I die”—was a play off a Holly lyric [ [link removed] ]. To us, it was just a long, long song.
When “The Buddy Holly Story [ [link removed] ]” came out in 1978, though, we got it. Played in the film by Gary Busey, Holly was the gangly grinning rocker with the geek glasses, looking like a handsome version of the guy in the X-Ray Spex ad [ [link removed] ]. The songs were perfect, the story tragic—and a better end than other musicians’ early demise, which invariably resulted from barfing in a coma. The biopic shaped the short life into a tidy tale of talent and determination. He had a mix of Texas grit and pure instincts, and he died young, forever at the top.
It was made into a musical, which I saw a few years ago. Local production. The lead looked like Buddy, although you wonder if donning the glasses has the same effect as Superman putting on his Clark Kent spectacles: Some strange transformation makes everything seem plausible. The guy could’ve been a dead ringer for Buddy, but if he’d worn wire rims the audience would have been confused: Why is John Lennon on the stage? The story was the same as the movie, if I recall correctly. The same arc: the acme of the record charts, and the sad nadir of an Iowa cornfield.
You left the show wondering what would’ve happened if he’d lived. The hagiography suggests he might have matured into a serious artist, a fine songwriter and singer of solid American songs. Maybe. His last recording session included “Raining in My Heart [ [link removed] ],” a gentle little number twinkling with orchestral sweetenings. It is not rock and roll. It is music to make 15-year-old girls sigh or to trickle from supermarket Muzak speakers. He didn’t write it. He didn’t write “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore [ [link removed] ],” from the same session. It’s a Paul Anka tune. I love it. Not a lick of electric guitar on it, though. The only song in the session he wrote was “True Love Ways [ [link removed] ].” Any jangly treble Stratocaster on that one? No, a warm and rueful sax solo. You listen to it all and think either he grew up (despite the fact that he died at the age of 22) or sold out, or both.
Maybe he would’ve gone folk. It doesn’t seem likely he’d show up in ’69 in a Nehru jacket and smoked glasses and a headband, playing the sitar. He might have come back in ’73 with an unexpected single that rode the nostalgia vibe and had a nice comeback that made people forget he’d been doing Vegas three times a week since ’62. He would’ve been guaranteed to join the Traveling Wilburys, trading licks with George Harrison and Tom Petty, and harmonizing with Roy Orbison and letting Dylan blow mouth harp on a tune he’d had in the drawer for 10 years. If the multiverse theory is true, this actually happened and would be proof we’re not living in the best of all possible worlds.
But I mentioned Fargo. Buddy’s next show after his Iowa gig was supposed to be in Moorhead, Minnesota. It’s where Highway 10 ends on the western side of Minnesota. It’s not a straight drive from Clear Lake, Iowa—you’d either take 27 North and pick up 10 north of Minneapolis, or zig-zag your way through southwestern Minnesota. Either option made the idea of taking a plane instead of a bus sound appealing: It probably would be the same long slog no matter which route you took, and then you’d end up at the destination cold (the bus heater was busted) and stinky (they needed to do laundry) and tired. Instead, you fly, you get some shut-eye and you can do laundry at the hotel.
So they flew. They would’ve landed at Hector Field, a few blocks from the field where my childhood home would be built a few years later. A few people on the north side of town might have been lying awake in the early hours for some reason and heard his plane drone overhead. I might have been behind one of them in line at the grocery store a decade later. My uncle was a custodian at the airport for a while; maybe he knew a guy who’d taken Buddy’s bags or gassed up the Cessna. He might have told me a story. Maybe Buddy would’ve stayed at the Graver Hotel, where I got my haircuts, and the barber would tell the tale. Maybe one of my high school teachers would’ve seen the concert. Holly would’ve been hometown lore.
I used to make fun of my hometown when I was preening around peers in the big city college. But now I remember that Buddy Holly died trying to get there, and I’m abashed I ever ran it down.

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