Buddy Holly

Buddy Holly was an American singer, songwriter, and rock-and-roll pioneer whose 18-month commercial career — abruptly ended by his February 3, 1959 plane crash death at age 22 — produced a defining body of late-1950s American rock-and-roll songwriting. He was born Charles Hardin Holley on September 7, 1936, in Lubbock, Texas, into a working-class American family. His father Lawrence Odell Holley was an American carpenter and short-order cook and his mother Ella Pauline Drake was a homemaker. He acquired the nickname "Buddy" from his older brothers in early childhood.

His teenage music career across 1953–1956 in Lubbock — including his Lubbock High School duo with Bob Montgomery ("Buddy and Bob") and his October 1955 opening-act performance for Elvis Presley at the Cotton Club in Lubbock — shaped his rock-and-roll-genre transition. His February 1957 Decca Records New Mexico session — at producer Norman Petty's Clovis, New Mexico studio — produced his Crickets band recordings.

His 1957 single "That'll Be the Day" — released by The Crickets on May 27, 1957 — became his first US Billboard Hot 100 number-one single in September 1957. The single was co-written with The Crickets drummer Jerry Allison and producer Norman Petty, with the title borrowed from a recurring John Wayne line in the 1956 John Ford film The Searchers. His 1957–1958 hit-single sequence — "Peggy Sue" (1957), "Oh, Boy!" (1957), "Maybe Baby" (1958), "Rave On" (1958), and "It's So Easy" (1958) — shaped late-1950s American rock-and-roll songwriting.

His February 3, 1959 death — in a Beechcraft Bonanza plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, alongside Ritchie Valens, J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, and pilot Roger Peterson, during the Winter Dance Party tour — has been continuously called "The Day the Music Died" following Don McLean's 1971 song "American Pie." His 1986 induction in the inaugural class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recognized his early-rock-and-roll influence on subsequent acts including The Beatles (whose name was patterned after The Crickets) and Bob Dylan.

His name Buddy derives from the English noun "buddy" meaning "friend" or "comrade." Buddy was a popular American boys' name through the mid-20th century.