Buddy's Song.


I have been a fan of Buddy Holly since my childhood – and one of my favourites amongst his surprisingly prolific songbook is ‘Learning the Game’.

I first discovered his music whilst flicking through my mum and dad’s record collection. They only owned one Buddy Holly LP: a greatest hits compilation called ‘The Buddy Holly Story’, which was released a year after his untimely death at the age of twenty-two. I don’t know what it was about that particular record that caught my eye - it couldn’t really have looked more ancient – but I loved it from the moment the needle touched down onto it.



From an early age I suffered from painful ear infections – and as a result I was unable to learn to swim until a good few years after my school friends. I'd developed such a fear of water that my mum would bribe me with her vinyl as an incentive for taking lessons. Thanks to this scheme I received original copies of ‘Please Please Me’, ‘With The Beatles’, ‘Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and ‘The Buddy Holly Story’ in exchange for achieving basic swimming ability; I’m not sure how my mum benefited from this arrangement, but I certainly came out considerably better off. 

What I loved about Buddy was his versatility – and the honesty of his voice. It was hard to believe that a man of such tender years could sing with such maturity.

I discovered ‘Learning the Game’ a little later. Like a lot of Buddy’s work, it was released posthumously, with a hastily-overdubbed band augmenting his original recording. The accompaniment was messy – but listen to his demo and its beautiful simplicity shines through.

Close your eyes and you're sat in the front room of his Greenwich Village apartment in 1958; listening as he commits a new composition to tape before stepping out on his final tour: the fateful Winter Dance Party. 

He didn’t even want to go back on the road; he only agreed to do it for the money. 

God, I know that feeling. 
 

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