Free Buddy Holly: Biography by Ellis Amburn Page B

$1,000 loan from Larry, Buddy bought a Pro Amp for his new electric guitar. Finally the trio pulled out of Lubbock, Don’s bass fiddle strapped on top of the Olds. The boys made it out of town just in time. A collection agency was after the car because Buddy’s parents had turned the payments over to him, and he hadn’t been making them. Buddy’s hasty exit from Lubbock marked the end of his apprenticeship and the beginning of his life as a professional singer. He was well prepared for the challenges that lay ahead in the demanding world of show business. Solidly grounded in bluegrass and country singing, he’d learned rock ’n’ roll from the master himself, Elvis Presley, and was ready to conquer the airwaves and jukeboxes as the latest rock sensation. He took it as a good omen that he and Elvis were going to be in Nashville at the same time. Elvis had moved from Memphis when Sam Phillips sold his Sun Records contract to RCA in November 1955, and now both Elvis and Buddy were scheduled for Nashville sessions in January 1956. At RCA, where Chet Atkins had the good sense to say, “Just go on doing what you been doing,” Elvis sailed through his first session, which produced the No. 1 hit “Heartbreak Hotel.” At Decca, Buddy’s mentors would prove less amenable to the new music; in fact, they hated rock ’n’ roll.

Chapter Five
    The Hillbilly Backlash
    Unfortunately, Buddy’s initial forays into professionalism—the Thompson tour at the beginning of January 1956 and the Nashville recording session at the end of the month—were out-and-out disasters. The C&W establishment had been thrown into panic by the sudden ascendancy of rock ’n’ roll and Buddy caught the full impact of the hillbilly backlash, an explosion of C&W paranoia and rage. On the road as a backup player, he immediately clashed with hard-drinking C&W recording star George Jones, who poked fun at Buddy’s and Glen Reeves’s loud clothes and boozily denounced rock ’n’ roll. Buddy took it for a while and then struck back, informing Jones that he’d probably like rock ’n’ roll if he were capable of singing it. One night Buddy broke into a rock beat as he accompanied Jones, who was singing his Top 10 C&W hit “Why Baby Why.” Like all singers in the middle of a performance, Jones was at the mercy of his accompanist. Somehow Jones managed to complete the number as a rocker.
    The situation didn’t improve when Buddy arrived in Nashville and found the conservative hillbilly capital reeling from the onslaught of rock ’n’ roll, which was decimating C&W on the charts. The old guard resisted rock ’n’ roll with all its might. Buddy was immediately embroiled in the growing conflict between C&W and rock ’n’ roll; eventually country music would be split down the middle, RCA and at least half of the C&W establishment fleeing to rockabilly—the term that was universally applied to the new rock ’n’ roll hillbilly style—and the other half remaining straight country singers. The rockabillies adopted Elvis’s style and mannerisms. The traditionalists took their lead from Hank Williams, Sr. Decca’s Paul Cohen and Owen Bradley, instead of recognizing Buddy Holley as a potential rockabilly star, tried to force him into a C&W mold, completely disregarding his wish to sing rock ’n’ roll. Buddy resisted, and Cohen got nasty, sniping, “You don’t have the voice to be a singer. You should forget about a musical career.” Jim and Dolly Denny had their hands full restraining a volatile and combative Buddy until the miserable session could be completed.
    Of the four songs he cut on January 26 at Bradley’s Barn, a quonsethut annex to Bradley’s house at Sixteenth Avenue South, “Midnight Shift” and “Love Me” come off best, but the beautiful “Blue Days, Black Nights” was wasted, vitiated by inferior sound engineering and an arrangement that was hard-edged where it should have been soft and tender. (Ben Hall’s own