Buddy Holly: Biography by Ellis Amburn

Lubbock bus station with Sonny Curtis, Weldon Myrick, and Roy Orbison. Standing in front of a beat-up jukebox, Buddy said, “Who’s got a quarter? We gotta hear this Chet Atkins record.”
    Everyone was broke but Sonny Curtis, who sacrificed his last quarter. “That’s all we had,” Waylon recalls.
    “I wish we could take in the Sonny James–Jim Reeves show,” said Orbison.
    “I know,” said Waylon, “let’s sneak in.”
    All five managed to crash the show. Sonny James and Jim Reeves fascinated them as C&W singers who crossed over into pop, something the boys all wanted to do. Sonny James had scored a No. 1 crossover hit with “Young Love.” Reeves’s “Four Walls” and “He’ll Have to Go” appealed equally to hillbillies and international fans.
    Somewhere around 1953 or 1954 a representative of Columbia Records heard Buddy and Bob, raising their hopes for a recording contract. They rounded up Sonny Curtis, Larry Welborn, and Don Guess and drove to Wichita Falls, Texas, two hundred miles east of Lubbock, to cut a demonstration record, or “demo”, at the Nesman studio. The songs they recorded were Bob Montgomery’s “Gotta Get You Near Me Blues” and “Flower of My Heart.” Although they never heard from the Columbia man again, the Nesman tapes did survive. They are flat-out, free-flying hillbilly romps that stand up today as pure and timeless, despite Montgomery’s odd dismissal of them as “embarrassing.” Sonny Curtis’s zesty hoedown fiddling is outstanding.
    Soon the Buddy and Bob band was playing the West Texas honky-tonk circuit. One night in San Angelo they were heckled by oil-field roustabouts in the audience. Buddy finished the show barely able to conceal his rage. According to Larry Welborn, someone bought them a six-pack. “Of course we couldn’t buy it at the time ourselves, being too young,” says Larry. Driving out to the country, they popped open their beers, and started rehashing the performance. After a few beers Buddy said, “Well, less go back. I wanta whip them son of a bitches that didn’t like us.”
    “He was ready to go back and get after it with them,” Larry Welborn recalls. “He’d have that little bit of mean streak to him. He was just standin’ up for his own self. He wouldn’t let anybody tear him down. If he thought anybody was goin’ to say anything, he just beat them to the punch. Buddy believed in hisself, stood up for hisself.”
    Sonny Curtis also found Buddy to be aggressive and reckless. “Though in appearance Buddy was very neat and always wore tapered jeans, he was not shy,” says Sonny. “He was a drinker—loud, a smart aleck, headstrong.” Jack Neal remembers being in a car with Buddy one time when he pulled a crazy stunt. Jack was driving and Buddy was sitting next to him, being very quiet. Suddenly Buddy decided Jack wasn’t going fast enough and stomped on Jack’s foot, sending the accelerator to the floorboard. “Scared me half to death,” Jack recalls.
    One day at Lubbock High, Buddy got into a violent fight with another student in Robert Knight’s distributive education class. The boys flew at each other and fought their way across the room until they were hanging out of a third-floor window. “I had to grab them both by the collar,” recalls Knight, who hauled them in and let everyone cool down. Only a few years older than his students, Knight didn’t take the boys to the principal’s office.
    “Buddy was cocky, but he had a lot to be cocky about,” says Knight. “He was aggressive, what experts in interpersonal relations call a ‘bipolar 8.’ He was very self-confident and got things done. Students who weren’t that self-confident were irritated by him and took the attitude: ‘I’ll knock your head off.’ Buddy was a visionary young man and had difficulty with them.”
    The brawl in Knight’s class demonstrated that Buddy thought of himself as almost invincible. He had the kind of determination known only to