The one rock star Graham Nash could relate to: “One of us”
Almost from its inception, rock and roll was able to captivate millions of people by being simultaneously otherworldly and accessible. Elvis Presley and Little Richard might as well have been comic book superheroes with the kind of fan following and charisma they strutted around with, but they had contemporaries who distilled a similar sound down to the ground level. So much so that any kid with a guitar or a drum kit could see how the mechanics worked and realistically follow that blueprint.
One of those kids getting his rock education in the 1950s was Graham Nash, whose childhood home in Salford, England, was thousands of miles away from Memphis, both geographically and spiritually. Like his schoolmates, Nash was bewitched by Elvis and the other superstars of American rock, but there was one figure that resonated on a deeper level.
“Buddy Holly was one of us,” Nash told MusicRadar in 2012, noting, “He wasn’t Elvis Presley, he wasn’t James Dean, he didn’t have slicked-back hair, he didn’t swivel his hips. He was one of us, a fucking nerd with glasses.”
Born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1936, Buddy Holly was also one of rock’s first great singer/songwriters, adding to his physical relatability with tracks that had a singular country-tinged charm to match: ‘Peggy Sue’, ‘That’ll Be the Day’, ‘Not Fade Away’, ‘Everyday.’ In stark contrast to Elvis, who didn’t pen his own songs and famously remained anchored to North America as a touring performer, Holly and his band The Crickets controlled their own output and traveled far and wide during their tragically short career, even touring small venues all over the UK in the spring of 1958. This made them one of the first major US rock ‘n’ roll acts to tour overseas, further raising Holly’s star power in the process.
Holly was still only 23 years old and just hinting at his potential when he died in a plane crash in Iowa on February 3rd, 1959, a day later immortalised as ‘The Day the Music Died’.
“I remember standing with Allan Clarke [from The Hollies] on that day,” Graham Nash recalled to Musicradar, “having just heard that Buddy had been killed, and we were in tears”.
Just a few years later, when Nash and Clarke’s own band, The Deltas, were playing some of their earliest shows, the two friends and their bandmates decided that a rebranding was in order. In December 1962, they took the stage in Manchester for the first time as The Hollies. The name was a direct homage to their fallen Texan hero Buddy Holly, with an admitted extra jerk of the head to the decorations of the Christmas season.
The Hollies weren’t the only rock band from the North of England paying their respects to Holly via a name choice. Two years earlier, a Liverpool band known as The Quarrymen had started calling themselves the Silver Beetles, and later, The Beatles, both intended as subtle insect-based nods to one of their biggest influences, Buddy Holly and The Crickets.
The young musician might not have been a “punk rocker” in the more flamboyant sense of the term, but if the cornerstone principle of punk is its open-door policy, eliminating any and all blockades based on class, training, or grandiose stage personas, then Buddy was certainly a pioneer for the movement and a massive influence on what was to come.
