Best Buddy Holly Song

The basic Buddy Holly songbook is strongly country-influenced!

yeah his earliest stuff is straight country. not sure if that's been officially released?

oh wait it as http://www.amazon.com/Gotta-Roll-Early-Recordings-1949-55/dp/B000G04UK0

Oh cool, I'd never heard of that before!

I've never heard that early stuff. I just don't hear Holly's first two albums as being as countryish as Cash's or Jerry Lee's stuff, but logically, it makes sense; he was, after all, from Texas. So yeah, it's quite possible he would have ended up in Nashville.

Not like Cash or Lewis, but you can definitely hear some Hank Williams or Hank Snow in there (and lo, it turns out Holly's first known recording is a Hank Snow song).

I mean, he's obviously rock, but his country roots shine through.

I'm underrating what the Everlys accomplished the mid/late-'60s; they made some good albums like Roots, and I think they still had some medium-sized hits.

yeah i can see Holly doing a Roots-style thing in the late 60s. whether it'd be good, i have no idea. it is weird, he would've still been a pretty young guy when all that was happening, but probably would've seemed ancient. guess that was how elvis and the others were in the late 60s too.

55 years ago today...

Where does this love for Rave On come from? That's genuinely baffling to me. Was it in a movie or something?

It's proto-Ramones.

It was a bigger hit in the U.K. than in the states.

More like proto Bobby Fuller. Although I like Let Her Dance a lot better. Considering how many great songs he wrote, it just seems super challopsy to vote for something he didn't even write.

"Rave On" is a catchy tune, nothing baffling about that.

Where does this love for Rave On come from? That's genuinely baffling to me. Was it in a movie or something?

― wk, Monday, February 3, 2014 11:52 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It is the best!

Home movies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSsiG8bSGkE

The upload was five years ago, so maybe they've been posted already--just encountered them today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBZz3enPqzQ
woah his rhythm section

Slippin' And Slidin' isn't here but that's such a good one. Probably my favorite Buddy Holly song of all time.

My favorite is the first demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWTl_LPfh-U

This is the overdubbed version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEwZNXN6HCc

Interesting question, interesting response. (First one--eventually you'll have to search for it, so I'll quote some text.)

http://greilmarcus.net/ask-greil-2/

"...the home recordings he made in the weeks before he died, from 'Peggy Sue Got Married,' 'Crying, Waiting, Hoping,' and more, all but promise music ready to hit a new world head on, to the point that it would have been Holly, not Johnny Cash, accompanying Bob Dylan on Nashville Skyline."

Marcus has a whole chapter on 'Crying, Waiting, Hoping' in his History of Rock 'n Roll in Ten Songs.

Didn't notice until after I posted that there was the same kind of speculation upthread, and that some people said the same thing.

"Learning The Game" wuz robbed.

Hollies version of "Take Your Time" is wonderful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QF0ZPucId0

have always meant to pick up a good holly collection but have never figured out which one was the best and most comprehensive -- any recommendations?

I think this was considered the best to date when it came out in the mid-'80s--not sure if something better came along since.

http://img.discogs.com/d76Wzozyn0vNEhCq_N96S-YjizY=/fit-in/300x300/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(40)/discogs-images/R-2158796-1267184876.jpeg.jpg

I'd highly recommend the two albums he did while alive--one with the Crickets, one on his own--although you'd miss a few songs from the posthumous LP

I think the 3-disc/60 track "Memorial Collection" is the the most comprehensive, non-Public Domain collection that's easily available. It's kind of an annoying set though in that it could easily have been a 2-disc not by cutting anything, but simply by utilizing disc space better. I turned it into two CDRs for the car, and still had room to add some Holly covers to end of disc 2.

There's a guy down here with a vinyl warehouse open for once a month sales. He's got a couple copies of that late '70s complete recordings vinyl box that Marcus wrote about in Stranded. I kind of pine for one despite knowing they're probably hella expensive (one of 'em is still sealed).

That entry was where I learned the word "draconian."

The best single-disc collection: The Definitive Buddy Holly.

https://www.discogs.com/Buddy-Holly-The-Definitive-Collection/release/1383882

That's a nice enough set, but it slights his worthwhile pre-fame stuff, and completely shorts the posthumous stuff.

RIP Tommy Allsup: http://lubbockonline.com/entertainment/2017-01-11/tommy-allsup-guitarist-who-toured-buddy-holly-dies

I just heard Slippin' and Slidin' for the first time yesterday and I can't stop listening to it. Just so astonishingly good and weird and cool.

Yeah, that's a good one - another gem uncovered from those home demos that were among his last recordings. Given how young he was (22!), his good physical and mental health, and the quality of his final recordings, Holly's death ranks way up there as one of the most incalculable losses in rock.

Yeah, incalculable is the word for it. These demos really bring home to me how much range he had, and how much potential to keep developing as an artist. He's 22, he has this huge oeuvre of perfect pop songs already behind him, and yet there's so much of his incredible talent that he's only starting to explore. Who knows where he would have gone, given the time?

btw I can't believe "Oh Boy" didn't get any votes at all in this poll. And yet I can't argue with any of the winners.

“True Love Ways” is def a sentimental favorite, when I was little I used to sit in front of the hi-fi system & listen to it. It’s like a lullaby.

not that it’s my number one but it’s def a favorite

i think “Everyday” is my fave? maybe?

There's some discussion on the YT Slippin and Slidin video concerning whether or not it's psychedelic. Apparently Jason Pierce has said it's the most psychedelic song ever.

The riff is all major chords which I think contributes to the proto-psych quality.

There's a similar part in 'Arnold Layne'

Kinda day-glow

Not sure which version of "Slippin and Slidin" everyone is listening to on YouTube. I can only find two versions. One has a '60s rock band backing overdubbed on it. The other is an acoustic demo.

I will admit the overdubbed version is a clever mash-up that does sound psychedelic.

I've been listening to the two slow versions that are on the Down the Line: Rarities compilation that's on Spotify. One is dubbed and the other not, so probably the same thing you're seeing on Youtube.

I assumed the dubbed version was based on a different demo from the one that's included in the compilation? It has some weird wordless vocal stuff at the end that isn't in the undubbed version. I like them both.

They're interesting, though would not dislodge the Little Richard original recording in my mind as the definitive interpretation.

Buddy Holly's most psychedelic moment is the use of "True Love Ways" in the Never Say No to Panda series of cheese commercials.

Some interesting wikipedia details on the overdubs:

Besides their own recordings, the Fireballs were studio musicians for other recording artist projects... Norman Petty had been Buddy Holly's main recording producer; after Holly's death, he obtained the rights to Holly's early rehearsal and home demo recordings. From May 1962 until August 1968, Petty had the Fireballs overdub the Holly material, making them the band he never knew he had, though the band had met Holly at Petty's studio in 1957. The overdubs were originally released on four albums of "new" Holly material throughout the 1960s with four of the efforts, released as singles, charting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fireballs

I quite like some of those overdubs

Same here. The two-cd, 50-track The Buddy Holly Collection from 1993 used the versions with the Fireballs' overdubs, and I think they made the right call. That set is still probably the best Buddy Holly collection you can find in terms of cost (very cheap now), consistency and overall quality. If you want more, you might as well spring for the complete box set.

That seems to have been re-released (with the same tracks) as Buddy Holly Gold, which was the first CD of his I heard.

UME's Gold series is kind of weird because most of those simply repackage previous two-CD compilations, but with different (usually much less) artwork. It looks like a lame money-saving repackaging scheme where they slap the same art template on to every release.