One Ghost Too Many: Buddy Holly Lives On

The author goes where many have gone before and can’t tell if his story is different or the same.

First, there’s me. The new me.

THE FIRST TIME I HEARD Buddy Holly’s 20 Golden Greats, the standard collection that was still in all the record shops, even the ones in the malls, twenty years after he died, was around 1978. I bought the album somewhere or other and played it some time or other. I don’t recall the details.

I know whenever I did play it, it was in my bedroom in the big old frame house we were renting in the middle of Campbellton, Florida while my dad went to bible college. I know I bought it with my own money, because any money I ever had growing up, it was my own.

I remember the first time I played it through I liked it a lot and I didn’t know any of the words to any of the songs except a couple I had heard Linda Ronstadt sing on the radio.

I remember the second time I played it through I knew all the words to all the songs. I remember that because, quick study though I was, it had never happened before and it never happened again.

These days, I still remember some of the words. Every word to some songs, most of the words to most of the songs, a few of the words to a few of the songs.

Knowing all the words the second time through was how I knew I was Buddy Holly’s reincarnation, which was odd because I was and am a Southern Baptist (which was and is nothing like you think it is if you get your news from the news, being sometimes better and sometimes worse but never what you’re told) and we do not believe in reincarnation, the transmutation of one person’s soul to another, from the old, dead, soul to some new soul that carries on in this vale of tears, unless, of course, you count rebirth in Christ as reincarnation, which I suppose some misguided souls do.

I did not get hung up on the distinction.

If Charles Hardin Holley wanted — or was forced — to live on through me, I did not see a purpose to letting a doctrinal point or two stand in his (or was it God’s?) way.

I could sing his songs, even the few I wasn’t crazy about, after I heard them once.

If that’s not the purpose of reincarnation what is?

Nothing as good, I can tell you that.

20 Golden Greats is as good as the New Testament. There are folks who believe in reincarnation with no excuse, but what is fetching up again wearing the shape of George S. Patton or Shirley MacLaine or a Bombay cow or a Texas mosquito compared to that?

I did not get hung up on doctrine or distinctions, so, forty years later, here I am, in my new body. All the way to Clear Lake, Iowa. Hunting a piece of myself. The piece that got left in a frozen cornfield in 1959 and was bound to stay nearby even after they took my old body back to Lubbock, Texas, and pieces of my soul transmigrated everywhere on God’s green earth only to turn up as the new me, the one who knew all the old me’s songs the second time through, with only a smidgen of help from Linda Ronstadt.

I did not get hung up on doctrine or distinctions, so, forty years later, here I am, in my new body.

The new me first heard the old me at the moment when not just the new me but anybody needs to feel like they will matter somehow, not to their parents or family or any friends they will make along the way, and not even to the world at large, like the old me did, but to themselves. Hearing the old me just then force multiplied the impact and the songs and the voice (or was it voices . . . it was Buddy Holly after all) grabbed me, but the one that really grabbed me, even then, was “Not Fade Away,” which grabbed me even though I already knew I was never going to get the chance to say those words to anybody as the new me, maybe because I already knew the old me had used them up and, in the process, used up a piece of any and all new souls that dared to transmogrify into his place).

All of which is why I’ve come at last to take this journey. And for me, it is almost by accident, because, believe it or not, when I booked a trip to John Wayne’s birthplace, two hours away (for a fiftieth anniversary showing of True Grit, which is not the John Wayne movie — the new me’s favorite movie — where the old me got “That’ll be the day” from), I wasn’t even thinking about this.

I had to be reminded I was going to be so close to me. There’s age creeping up on you.

Anyway, it’s happening.

Thanks to the kindness of friends, so much more reliable than strangers, I’ve come in my own odd, roundabout way to take the journey taken by thousands of others, some of whom are probably Buddy Holly reincarnated themselves.

I’ve long since learned to accept that I can’t possibly be the only one.

The author in front of the Surf Ball Room. The last place the old me played. Where the ghosts still walk. (Unless otherwise indicated, all images courtesy of Dan and Kim Watson)

Or come sit on the bench beside you in the sun.

The road in.

Which leads to the crossroads.

The crash site lies half-a-country-mile directly behind me. Even five years ago it would have been an easy walk. No longer. Now, it’s a hike. Will I make it all the way, or is this close enough?

Convergence leads to a simple answer.

I may only pass this way once and I know what I have to do. But is that really me? Or is the ghost already walking?

Half-a-mile in . . . mementos.

A thousand miles from nowhere and all the memorial there is.

Except for this, Memories of a young man trying to earn a buck, flying when nobody should.

My friend Dan takes a picture of his wife Kim taking a picture of me. Which me is an open question.

Wait, you still think I’m not the reincarnation of Buddy Holly? Want me to sing “Oh Boy” for you? “Wishing?” “Rave On?” “Maybe Baby” is too obvious. Besides, it’s been running through my head all day. That and “La Bamba.” Go figure. I wonder if Ritchie hangs around here too?

These are my folk singer poses, like I might have been on my way to Greenwich Village if I had lived to see the ’60’s. And who’s to say I wouldn’t have been? You think I wasn’t walking beside ol’ Bob Dylan when he went there? You think I wasn’t always the best part of every future anybody could imagine that made a way forward instead of back? What part of my love’s bigger than a Cadillac did you miss? Or did you think I was only singing to a girl?

The new me departs, leaving the old me where I found me.

Never look back when you are leaving yourself behind.

Where the old me still walks. Never quite alone, as long as there are so many new mes.

Then there’s me.

The old me.

IT WAS A LONELY WAY TO DIE. No lonelier for me than for Ritchie, lying so close by I could have reached out and touched him if I’d still been able to move, or J.P., thrown forty feet, or that poor kid who died where a good captain should if he has to die, in the cockpit.

I always felt sorry for that kid, having to take all the blame. Like it was his fault we wanted to get someplace warm in the dead of winter, like a North Dakota motel, and wanted to get there faster than a bus could take us. That’s been the hardest part of being out here all this time, knowing we pushed him just a little bit. Not too hard. Just enough.

I always felt sorry for that kid, having to take all the blame. Like it was his fault we wanted to get some place warm in the dead of winter . . .

Knowing I would have done the same in his place doesn’t make it any easier. I wish he walked here some times. I’d like to see Ritchie or the Bopper, too. But he’s the one I need to have a talk with, to let him know that, no matter how it may have seemed, I really wasn’t the one thing I never wanted to be, could never accept being, which was small.

The only real difference between him and me is I got out for a minute there. Not out of the plane maybe, but out of my life, out of my hardware store destiny.

I got out because I had a gift born in me which I developed well enough to teach the Beatles and the Stones and a few thousand others how to write songs. Then I was able to sing them well enough that not one single person out of the thousands who have tried has ever been able to beat me.

Not even once.

I’m not bragging. Who needs that where I am now, walking this damn cornfield with another one of those boys who thinks, because I used to write songs you could memorize in a heartbeat, he’s really me?

And who knows? There’s been a lot of them thought they were me. One of ’em probably is. Could just as well be him as any of the others.

That’s the funny thing. How many of them have almost been me. There’s been so many got so close you’d think one of ’em woulda’ nailed it by now.

Heck, I heard this one English girl, Sandy Denny was her name though I don’t know if the name was real or made up or, like mine, slightly altered, almost real. Anyway, she sang one of my songs and just killed it. Yeah, she’s out here now, wandering somewhere or other. Not this cornfield. A lot of people do stop by if they get the chance. But I haven’t seen her.

But I get to hear all my songs. That’s one good thing about this place. I hear what I hear and if something’s missing I hear that too — I mean I hear an absence that can’t quite be explained to people who are still walking around in their earthly bodies. But I heard about Sandy Denny and then I heard Sandy Denny herself and boy she killed it. “Learning the Game,” it was. Just killed it.

She came about the closest I guess.

But she didn’t beat me. Nobody ever has.

When Jerry Lee gets out here — and I bet he will, I don’t think he’s going to Hell like Mick Jagger and some of them, or at least I don’t think he’s going there for the way he tried to sing one of my songs and proved to ol’ Satan that the boy could not only use some help but needed it real, real bad, like a junkie needs a fix — he’ll claim he could have taken me down at any time and maybe that he did take me down.

But we’ll both know he’s lying, or, as Jerry Lee likes to say, just putting me on.

Oh, boy . . . I seen a lot of those come and go.

And Mick? Whoo boy. He won’t be around here. He tried on one of my songs and gave straight up and went and made him a deal so he could start singing all those songs I taught him to write the way they were meant to be sung. I hear there’s some who were so impressed by what he did later they fooled themselves into thinking he had something on me.

Well, that is one way to separate the fools.

One thing I have figured out.

I mean I either just realized it, or I just remembered it for the first time since the last time I forgot.

I’ll be free when the last person forgets.

Son of a bitch.

Won’t that be the day?

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Thanks for reading! Below are links to a pair of articles that are essential to knowing what the Tell It Like It Was publication here on Medium is all about — mostly rock & roll music of the ’50s and ’60s.

Introduction to “Tell It Like It Was”

Introduction to “The Toppermost of the Poppermost”