“A beautiful writer”: When Keith Richards fell in love with Buddy Holly’s ‘Learning the Game’
There are certain names in music that exist in a whole other realm or a whole other tier of respect. They’re the true pioneers that helped shape music. They’re your favourite artist’s favourite artist.
They’re the names that come up time and time again when musicians discuss the people who influenced and inspired them, acting as the start of a grand lineage of history-shaking performers. Buddy Holly is undeniably one of them, and Keith Richards counts himself among his disciples.
There’s a reason why the day Buddy Holly died was dubbed ‘the day the music died’. On February 3rd, 1959, at age only 22, Holly, along with Ritchie Valens and JP Richardson, were all killed in a tragic plane crash that essentially wiped out the blossoming new generation of talent. But despite his young age, Holly was making a real name for himself. As part of The Crickets and then as a solo performer, he was a phenomenon that was going head-to-head with some of the biggest stars.
In Richards’ memory, it was Holly versus Elvis Presley in the music world at the time. “He was in England as solid as Elvis. Everything that came out was a record smash number one. By about ’58, it was either Elvis or him. It was split into two camps,” he said, suggesting that if it wasn’t for that fatal accident, and if Holly had been spared to keep releasing more and more music, potentially he would have been The King instead.
But either way, the short life Holly lived changed music forever. His guitar playing proved deeply influential as one of the key players in early rock and roll. “John and I started to write because of Buddy Holly. It was like, ‘Wow! He writes and is a musician,'” Paul McCartney once said, with The Beatles being another act in the line of Holly’s legacy. The Stones are in it too, as Mick Jagger also said, “You could learn from Buddy Holly how to write songs, the way he put them together. He was a beautiful writer.”
For Richards, Jagger, the Beatles boys and a whole other legion of acts coming of age at the time, Holly’s ability to not only sing, play guitar but also write his own songs was a revelation. It was the first brick laid in the road to them all becoming some of the world’s best and most beloved songwriters as Holly showed them all how to do it.
In particular, the song ‘Learning The Game’ stood out as Richards’ favourite. Its title is incredibly apt, given that the guitarist literally learned the game from him. It’s a simple but catchy song, proving that a track doesn’t need to be flashy to be effective as a key lesson Richards, his band, and his peers all took away from Holly.
“When he came to England, I caught him on TV through a neighbour’s window. We didn’t have a TV at the time, so they were kind enough to open their curtains so we could see,” the guitarist recalled of the humble way he first got inspired by Holly, serving as the ultimate image of Richards’ hunger for music and desperation to be involved. Seeing Holly on the screen, wielding his guitar and singing a song he wrote, it was a revelatory moment that shaped Richards’ life from that second onward.
