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Crickets
For somebody who had only three Top 10 hits in his lifetime, Buddy Holly has had a profound influence on popular music that by far exceeds his chart presence. He arrived on the music scene at a time when most rock and rollers were beginning to sound predictable and formulaic. The major artists (Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Fats Domino,) lost their ability to surprise their audience, and their formats became contrived. "That'll Be The Day", released in the summer of 1957, was a breath of fresh air for a music scene that began to grow stale. The solid-body Fender Telecaster guitar, which Holly played, and a new instrument, the electric bass guitar, gave the Crickets a thoroughly modern, unique look and sound that eventually were used by virtually every rock-and-roll band that followed.
Born September 7, 1936 in Lubbock, Texas, Buddy Holly learned to play the guitar at a young age. At fifteen, he teamed up with his friend, Bob Montgomery, playing local shows as "Buddy and Bob," and soon they had their own radio show. Decca Records, looking for a singer who could compete with Elvis Presley, offered Buddy Holly a contract as a solo artist. At first he balked, but the supportive persuasion of his partner, Bob, and his parents led him to accept the offer. At Decca's insistence, Holly traveled to Nashville for his first recording session. Unfortunately, he soon learned that rock and roll was not what the Decca A&R people wanted. Eager to please, Holly did as he was told, changing his playing and singing style, but to no avail. The resultant single bombed and Decca subsequently refused to release anything else. One good thing that resulted from the Decca debacle was that it cemented the relationship between Holly and his drummer, Jerry Allison. The rest of the band departed, so Holly and Allison returned to Texas and played local dances with their drums and guitar being the only instrumentation.
Holly never gave up believing in his own abilities, and he decided to recut "That'll Be The Day", one of the songs that Decca originally waylaid. He completed his band by adding bass and rhythm guitar, then drove to Norman Petty's recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico. The atmosphere Petty provided was light-years away from the manipulations Holly had suffered at the hands of Decca. Petty allowed the group to record at a leisurely pace, taking as payment a share of the resultant publishing royalties. Although Norman Petty probably had some creative input, this arrangement is most likely the reason so many Buddy Holly songs have writing credits attributed to him.
Since Decca had the original "That'll Be The Day", it was determined to be unwise to use Holly's name in the credits. Grabbing a dictionary, they searched for an appropriate group name and decided to release the song as the Crickets. The tape fell into the hands of Bob Thiele at Coral Records, who loved the song, but the label heads at Coral had no interest in rock and roll. Thiele then arranged for Coral’s subsidiary label, Brunswick, to release "That'll Be The Day". By sheer coincidence, both Coral and Brunswick were subsidiaries of Decca, so when the song became a huge hit and Decca learned the true identity of the Crickets, a lawsuit would have been ludicrous, since they would essentially be suing themselves. "That'll Be The Day" eventually reached #1 on the pop charts, the only #1 hit of Buddy Holly's abruptly truncated career.
 
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