Free Buddy Holly: Biography by Ellis Amburn

“I wasn’t able to travel with him,” Hi Pockets later told Griggs, “and I did not want to hinder his success in any way.” Making the first big mistake of his career, Buddy let Hi Pockets go. In the treacherous days ahead, he would need a devoted and honest manager as the breaks started coming fast. In January 1956, Hank Thompson signed Buddy for a two-week tour of the South. Buddy had attracted Thompson’s attention at the Cotton Club in 1955, when he’d played intermissions for Thompson’s Brazos Valley Boys. Waco-born Thompson was famous for his hit records “Humpty Dumpty Heart” and “The Wild Side of Life,” better known as “I Didn’t Know God Made Honky Tonk Angels.” He expected Buddy not only to open his show but to play backup for other stars on the bill, including George Jones, Hank Locklin, Glen Reeves, and Justin Tubb.
    Buddy had to assemble a band quickly, not only for the tour but for the recording session that would immediately follow it in Nashville. Don Guess agreed to play bass fiddle. He couldn’t afford to buy the instrument, so Buddy rented one from the Lubbock public school system for $6 a year, signed up Sonny Curtis to play lead guitar, and began to rehearse his new band, often working at Lubbock High. Jerry was always around, playing drums, but he was still in school and wouldn’t be able to go on the road.
    After a rehearsal at the high school one afternoon, Buddy rushed out of the band room with his guitar in one hand and his amplifier in the other. He bumped into a blond beauty, knocking her to the floor. Peggy Sue Gerron, baton twirler and first-chair alto sax player in the high school band, was never out of Buddy’s life for long after that. In the days that followed, he thought of her often and scribbled her initials “PSG” in his notebook. Unlike Echo, Peggy Sue listened to rock ’n’ roll and loved to dance. She also liked to spend time with boys who were fun-loving and had entertaining personalities. Born in Olton, Texas, forty-five miles north of Lubbock, Peggy Sue moved to Lubbock when her father, a serviceman, was stationed at Reece Air Force Base. She first met Jerry Allison at R. W. Matthews Junior High School, when Jerry was dating her best friend. It was the beginning of one of the most important—and troublesome—relationships of her life.
    Peggy Sue soon got a crush on Jerry and often stood in the band room, watching him play his drums. “I thought he was absolutely darling,” she told Griggs in 1987. In high school she called Jerry “Jivin’ Ivan.” Eventually Jerry dropped her friend and started dating Peggy Sue. When Echo McGuire came home on visits from Abilene Christian College, they’d double-date with Buddy and Echo. Peggy Sue described Echo as “Buddy’s first crush,” adding, “for a brief time he was just wild about her. She was a darling thing, just precious.”
    Peggy Sue and Jerry soon quarreled and broke up. “Our relationship was stormy from the first,” she said in 1994. “I started going with Doyle Gammill, the drum major in the band. I performed as a twirler in state competitions and was the only sophomore to make it into the senior band.”
    When Peggy Sue and Jerry later resumed their relationship and started going steady, her parents disapproved, considering her much too young at fifteen to be serious about a boy. They threatened to send her away to a parochial school in California. Her mother was very protective of Peggy Sue, believing she’d had a touch of polio as a child. “It was probably lupus, not polio,” says Peggy Sue today. “I have lupus now, so my childhood sickness was the first sign.”
    Peggy Sue often saw Buddy outside the Hi-D-Ho Drive-in, standing beside his car and kicking the tires. In her father’s Ford Fairlane, she and her girlfriends spent “a lot of time driving around the Hi-D-Ho in circles, hanging around, checking out the cars,” she says. “When the boys didn’t have anything else to