Laing/Buddy Holly, 1. The West Texas Musicscape and Buddy Holly’s Musical Idiolect, 1950–1955

The author introduces his approach to the volume whereby he will study “Buddy Holly” as 'the precipitate of a network of practices involving numerous other individuals (e.g. musicians, disc jockeys, promoters, producers), technologies (e.g. radio, jukebox, phonography, electric guitar), and artefacts, most notably sound recordings. He proceeds then to describe the 'musicscape' of Lubbock, West Texas. After a brief section on the city of Lubbock, the remainder of this chapter describes five sites or musicscapes in which Buddy Holly and his informal network of friends and collaborators were immersed in the mid-1950s. The term “musicscape” is derived from the concept of soundscape elaborated by Canadian musicologist Murray Schafer, who defined (Schafer 1977).