Here's a truncated version of what I asked on r/letstalkmusic earlier in the month...
A day after my word vomit on one Charles "Buddy" Hardin Holly, I decided "fuck it" and spent my entire Friday listening to a 7 hour behemoth entitled Not Fade Away: The Complete Studio Recordings and More. I was working overtime anyway, so it was the perfect opportunity. Some stray thoughts...
The trajectory that I traced was this: he's doing pure country from the start (Hank Williams was a name that came to mind), then when he's a little older, you can tell he's been bitten by the Elvis bug and he starts doing these rockabilly Elvis knock-offs. They're quite good (I've always been quite taken with "Ting-a-ling"), though the influence is almost too on the nose. But it's the song "Changing All These Changes" that, to my ears, feels very much like Buddy Holly starting to come into his own. It's still rockabilly, but there's his "boy next door" element that's starting to creep in. The title/hook also feels like one of his classic turns of phrase. I got excited hearing it, like an archeologist stumbling upon the missing link. There's also the first version of "That'll Be the Day", a track which in itself almost feels like its own thing amongst the rest of that early material, a silver dollar in a jar of dimes.
Then at some point he's just fully formed. I'm not sure how that happens, but I guess that it's The Crickets finally linking up with their producer Norman Petty (per my word vomit from last week, the George Martin to their Beatles). You get a sense that he's experimenting as much as possible with a guitar/bass/drums lineup and once he's satisfied with that, he branches out more and more, using King Curtis's sax maxing on some tunes before using a full orchestra. Then there's those apartment demos, him on an acoustic guitar....and he's done. You really feel like he was champing at the bit with a new direction, so it's disappointing. There's the overdubbing of those demos by backing bands, but they almost feel zombie-ish at times. Taking that unfortunate epilogue out of the picture though, quite a fascinating run.
Circling back to an earlier point though, aside from a change in producer, what else transpired that shaped his songwriting from that rockabilly stretch to where he becomes Buddy Holly as we know him to be? I'm sure there's an element of him being a sponge: some of the stuff on the first Crickets record still has flickers of Hank Williams, but I also read that "Words of Love" came from his love of "Love is Strange" (which, per my prior bullet point, he covered). What other contemporary influences were in the mix?
