Buddy Holly: The singer Bob Dylan said was “everything I wanted to be”
The best way to understand Bob Dylan is through his music, but even then, he still magnificently blurs the line between authenticity and mystery. Since arriving in Greenwich Village and developing a new enigmatic image, the singer-songwriter has kept the public guessing. However, one topic that Dylan speaks with candour about is his love of music and the artists that inspire him the most.
Most notably, Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams moulded him from a musical perspective, teaching him the key structures of songwriting. Nevertheless, they were from a different generation to Dylan. Williams passed away at 29 in 1953, which meant that Dylan could only connect to his work through recordings rather than witness his brilliance in the flesh. Fortunately, he did strike up a valuable friendship with Guthrie after moving to New York in 1961, and he also inspired the first song he ever wrote, ‘A Song for Woody Guthrie’. Another early hero of Dylan’s was Buddy Holly, despite their musical differences.
When Bob Dylan was Robert Zimmerman, he was another teenager, awe-struck by the magnificence of Buddy Holly and The Crickets. Despite having a tragically short career due to his sad passing at 22, Holly’s impact changed the music industry forever. Alongside fellow forebearers such as Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, Holly helped bring rock ‘n’ roll into the mainstream, allowing it to take over in the 1960s. While Dylan had folk leanings rather than rock, he admired Buddy Holly greatly. If Dylan could have rocked out like Holly, he would have done. Instead, he knew that his musical instincts lay elsewhere, and if he tried to replicate his brilliance, it would have been an inauthentic impression of his idol.
They may have had musical differences, but few made an impression on Dylan as Holly did upon witnessing him perform in concert. During his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the singer-songwriter paid tribute to his first idol, who walked so he could run, explaining, “If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about 18, and he was 22. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues.”
As Holly was only a few years older than Dylan, the singer-songwriter felt a strong connection to the star. The concert occurred on January 31st, 1959, when an 18-year-old Dylan saw him perform in Duluth, Minnesota. Heartbreakingly, it would be one of the final times Buddy Holly would ever play rock ‘n’ roll, and it’s an evening which has lived long in Dylan’s memory.
Dylan continued: “Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before.”
After winning the Grammy for ‘Album of the Year’ with Time Out Of Mind in 1998, Dylan recalled the life-changing concert in his acceptance speech and explained how it inspired his award-winning album: “I just want to say that when I was 16 or 17 years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him…and he looked at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was — I don’t know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.”
Every music lover has a specific gig from their teenage years that stands out for sentimental reasons, and for Dylan, it was Buddy Holly in Duluth. From that moment on, he channelled Buddy Holly’s spirit into his craft by carving out his own archetype, just like his hero did.
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