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BUDDY HOLLY, BEETHOVEN, AND LUBBOCK IN THE 1950S by Paul H. Carlson  I love the music of Beethoven—Ludwig van Beethoven. I also like Buddy Holly’s high energy songs, Waylon Jennings’s rebel sounds, Virgil Johnson’s doo wop, and, in part because I grew up in Minneapolis , I love Sonny Curtis’s theme song to the once-popular Mary Tyler Moore TV Show. We know—those of us gathered here know [at the 92nd annual meeting of the Texas Folklore Society, in Lubbock, Texas]—that Lubbock is a college town. It is not Ann Arbor or Palo Alto or New Haven, but it is a college town. We know that Lubbock is a sports town. It is not Chicago or Boston or New York City, but it is a sports town. We know—those of us gathered here know—that Lubbock is an agricultural community. It is not a meat-packing center or an implement manufacturer of any great renown, but it is an agricultural community. Outsiders don’t know this. Outsiders, rather, know that Lubbock is a music town. It is not a Boston Conservatory of Music town—although Texas Tech University and South Plains College have strong music departments—but it’s a music town. To outsiders , Lubbock’s music image is not the easy genius of a Mozart. It is not that kind of music town. No, Lubbock’s music image is that of the working man: the sweat, the hard work, the energy, and the fire of a Beethoven—and it is a Buddy Holly kind of town. You cannot doze, daydream, or chitchat during Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” Nor can you doze during Buddy Holly’s “Rave On” or “Peggy Sue” or “That’ll Be the Day.” Beethoven, said Bill Holm, interferes with the daily dullness of one’s life; he paid attention to the world, writes Holm, and he makes you pay attention to his music.1 Beethoven, writes Holm, is “the composer-laureate of blue collar life, of manual work, of fence-fixing and holedigging ”—or in Lubbock, I suppose, of cotton picking.2 85 Lubbock’s music tradition is often full of energy. And like Beethoven’s music it has often been composed only through hard labor and hard thinking. Beethoven’s music has more to do with the milk barn and Sears & Roebuck than, say, to do with the country club; similarly, Lubbock’s music has much to do with the cotton field and Wal-Mart or the oil patch and J. C. Penney. It is hard-working, plain-folk music—like Terry Allen’s “Amarillo Highway.” That’s the point. Beethoven and Lubbock music do not always behave well at the—well, at the local country club. You don’t sing the shirt-sleeve vulgarity of Roy Orbison’s “I Drove All Night” or Holly’s “Oh Boy” at the country club.3 Buddy Holly, Waylon Jennings, Sonny Curtis, Roy Orbison, and many others from West Texas have produced exceptional music. The list includes, for example, Mac Davis, Pat Green, Virgil Johnson, Tommy Hancock, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, and most recently Natalie Maines of the once-again wildly popular Dixie Chicks. It is music, such as Mac Davis’s “It’s Hard to Be Humble,” that is full of energy and grabs your attention. It doesn’t bore you, although sometimes it may irritate you. Holly and Orbison, particularly, give you goose bumps, stiffen your spine, and light a roaring fire in your soul. It’s Beethoven’s kind of music. Sometimes it’s lovely music and sometimes it isn’t. But a passive “It was OK, I guess” will never do. “It’s, like, you know, like cool, dude” won’t work either. You can’t describe Holly’s “True Love Ways” as “cool”—well, “way cool,” maybe. Why is it that Lubbock and the South Plains region of West Texas have contributed to the American music canon to the great extent that they have? Particularly, what was the cultural milieu of Lubbock in Buddy Holly’s time? What role, if any, did that cultural mix play in the formation of Holly’s music—or Virgil Johnson’s music—or the music of Mac Davis? In a socially and culturally conservative Lubbock, how was it possible for young musicians like Holly, Waylon Jennings, Terry Allen, and Mac Davis to produce their special music so full of shirt-sleeve energy and attentiongrabbing lyrics? 86...

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