taken almost note for note from Roy Orbison’s guitar solos on the B-side of his first single for the Sun label, “Go! Go! Go!”—but there’s a difference. In “I’m Looking for Someone to Love” there’s room in the song not only in terms of space and feeling, but in terms of time—there’s time to do something other than what the song says you’re supposed to be doing, that is, looking for someone to love. There’s time to fool around, to get that sound that up until now you’ve only heard inside your head.
“Go! Go! Go!”—especially Orbison’s solos and the rhythm behind him—is absolutely frantic. It’s so fast that as Orbison sings the song he’s also playing, he cannot keep up with himself. By the last verse he’s actually gasping for breath—no metaphor, you can hear it. But Holly’s solos, the same solos, have an elegance Orbison never thought of. As withBob Dylan’s runaway-train harmonica solo in “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” Orbison’s signature is the bluegrass pause, a silence at just that instant when the music is at its highest—Wile E. Coyote as he realizes there’s nothing beneath him but air, then the plunge down into what feels like an unthinkable increase in speed, in excitement, leaving the silence even more of a beckoning void that it was when the silence suspended the sound. That’s Holly’s signature too, here—but with a playfulness, a lack of fear, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid losing ground to the Pinkertons behind them and knowing they’ll get away somehow, one way or the other: “The fall’ll probably kill you.” A relaxing into speed, so that there’s no way in the world, in this song, that Buddy Holly could fall behind himself.
There is “Peggy Sue,” the number 3 hit from 1957, and the home recording, from 5 December 1958, of “Peggy Sue Got Married.” Here is where the ordinariness the singer projects creates an intimacy with the listener—even though the quiet, troubled, happy man in “Peggy Sue Got Married” is hardly the hard, even avenging man in “Peggy Sue,” a man who refuses to explain himself and demands that you believe him anyway.
This man rides the coldness of the music, as cold in “Peggy Sue” as the music in “Peggy Sue Got Married” is warm. There is the battering, monochromatic tom-tom rumble from Jerry Allison that opens “Peggy Sue,” named for Allison’s girlfriend,when the song was written: the next year Peggy Sue was Allison’s wife, and eleven years after that his ex-wife. There is Joe Mauldin’s bass strum behind that; there is the instrument beneath both that you barely register, Niki Sullivan’s rhythm guitar. No leaps, no grand gestures, no gestures at all, just a head down into the wind the song itself is making, and then a harsh, cruel guitar solo, emerging as inevitably as any in the music, and also a shock. “If you knew, Peggy Sue”—the song is unexplainable, at least by me, but not by Jonathan Cott, writing in 1976.
“The women of Fifties rock ’n’ roll, about whom songs were written and to whom they were addressed,” Cott says, “were as interchangeable as hurricanes or spring showers, Party Doll ornaments of the song.” But
with Peggy Sue, Buddy Holly created the first rock and roll folk heroine (Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode is her male counterpart). And yet it is difficult to say how he did it. Unlike the Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands—who Bob Dylan fills in as he invents and discovers her—Peggy Sue is hardly there at all. Most Fifties singers let it be known that they liked the way their women walked and talked; sometimes they even let on as to the color of their sweethearts’ eyes and hair.
But Buddy Holly didn’t even give you this much information. Instead, he colluded with his listeners, suggesting that they imagine and create Peggy Sue for him. Singing in his characteristically shy, coy, ingenuous tone of voice, Holly seems to let us in on a secret—just as later, in
“Go! Go! Go!”—especially Orbison’s solos and the rhythm behind him—is absolutely frantic. It’s so fast that as Orbison sings the song he’s also playing, he cannot keep up with himself. By the last verse he’s actually gasping for breath—no metaphor, you can hear it. But Holly’s solos, the same solos, have an elegance Orbison never thought of. As withBob Dylan’s runaway-train harmonica solo in “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” Orbison’s signature is the bluegrass pause, a silence at just that instant when the music is at its highest—Wile E. Coyote as he realizes there’s nothing beneath him but air, then the plunge down into what feels like an unthinkable increase in speed, in excitement, leaving the silence even more of a beckoning void that it was when the silence suspended the sound. That’s Holly’s signature too, here—but with a playfulness, a lack of fear, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid losing ground to the Pinkertons behind them and knowing they’ll get away somehow, one way or the other: “The fall’ll probably kill you.” A relaxing into speed, so that there’s no way in the world, in this song, that Buddy Holly could fall behind himself.
There is “Peggy Sue,” the number 3 hit from 1957, and the home recording, from 5 December 1958, of “Peggy Sue Got Married.” Here is where the ordinariness the singer projects creates an intimacy with the listener—even though the quiet, troubled, happy man in “Peggy Sue Got Married” is hardly the hard, even avenging man in “Peggy Sue,” a man who refuses to explain himself and demands that you believe him anyway.
This man rides the coldness of the music, as cold in “Peggy Sue” as the music in “Peggy Sue Got Married” is warm. There is the battering, monochromatic tom-tom rumble from Jerry Allison that opens “Peggy Sue,” named for Allison’s girlfriend,when the song was written: the next year Peggy Sue was Allison’s wife, and eleven years after that his ex-wife. There is Joe Mauldin’s bass strum behind that; there is the instrument beneath both that you barely register, Niki Sullivan’s rhythm guitar. No leaps, no grand gestures, no gestures at all, just a head down into the wind the song itself is making, and then a harsh, cruel guitar solo, emerging as inevitably as any in the music, and also a shock. “If you knew, Peggy Sue”—the song is unexplainable, at least by me, but not by Jonathan Cott, writing in 1976.
“The women of Fifties rock ’n’ roll, about whom songs were written and to whom they were addressed,” Cott says, “were as interchangeable as hurricanes or spring showers, Party Doll ornaments of the song.” But
with Peggy Sue, Buddy Holly created the first rock and roll folk heroine (Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode is her male counterpart). And yet it is difficult to say how he did it. Unlike the Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands—who Bob Dylan fills in as he invents and discovers her—Peggy Sue is hardly there at all. Most Fifties singers let it be known that they liked the way their women walked and talked; sometimes they even let on as to the color of their sweethearts’ eyes and hair.
But Buddy Holly didn’t even give you this much information. Instead, he colluded with his listeners, suggesting that they imagine and create Peggy Sue for him. Singing in his characteristically shy, coy, ingenuous tone of voice, Holly seems to let us in on a secret—just as later, in
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