Laing/Buddy Holly, Introduction

This book appears more than 50 years after the accidental death of its subject at the age of 22. Despite (and in part because of) that foreshortened life and career. Buddy Holly’s music has continued to fascinate successive generations of musicians and listeners since 1959. To document and try to explain the reasons for that fascination is one of the aims of this book. The others are to re-create Holly’s musical world and career in the emergence of rock ’n roll as a genre and an industry in late 1950s America, and to examine Holly’s corpus of recordings.