Ninety years ago today, in Lubbock, Texas, in the middle of the Depression, Charles Hardin Holley was born into a family that sang. He kept the name and lost a letter of it somewhere along the way.
What I love is the room. Norman Petty's studio out in Clovis, New Mexico, a few hours' drive from home, where the clock wasn't ticking by the hour and you could stay until three in the morning chasing a take. Listen close to those records and there's tape hiss, and a little air, and not much else in the way of trickery. Two guitars, a stand-up bass, drums, and patience. On "Not Fade Away" that's Jerry Allison playing a cardboard box, and on "Everyday" he's slapping his own knees while Vi Petty plays celesta. Joe B. Mauldin's upright underneath, thumping away, doing the job bass players do: everything, thanklessly. I should know.
The publicity portrait below has the three of them stacked up in matching tweed, grinning, signed across the print. Boys with an idea about what a small band could sound like if you gave it a night and a good engineer.
Otis, he had a stage before he had a studio: Lubbock High shows and local radio spots, then the package tours where a band got fifteen or twenty minutes and had to land it before the next act came on. That discipline is all over those records — nothing wasted, the whole thing done before you've settled in your seat.
Otis, that lost letter is my kind of trivia — Holley became Holly on a contract, reportedly a typing slip, and nobody ever put the e back. A whole career spelled by someone else's fumbled keystroke.