A long, long time ago, before "the day the music died," I returned to Texas Tech, my alma mater, to see a performance of The Marvelous Multicolored Rainbow, a musical I had written for an arts festival at Tech. At the time, I was a doctoral student at Columbia University, and so, coming back to Lubbock where I had graduated with degrees in Music and English (English Poetry and Drama) was a bit of a homecoming. Little did I realize I would somehow tumble back in time to my undergraduate days at Tech.
As a freshman, I had been a bit confused, although I had written a number of musicals throughout my days at Amarillo High School and had served as editor of the school newspaper and yearbook. My father urged me to become an English major, since I had won the Columbia University Award for best editorial writing. But upon seeing An American In Paris in Topeka, Kansas, where I was attending a conference on school newspapers, I was captured by my lifelong connection to music improvising and was determined to study composition at Texas Tech. In the end I pursued two degrees, one in literature and writing, and the other, music composition.
I found life in the dorm devastating, and on a rainy night in Lubbock, I was found collapsed on the top of a downtown parking lot. I awoke in the hospital on Thanksgiving weekend with my appendix removed. My parents visited me in the hospital, but I was in no condition to travel home, so I was doomed to spend Thanksgiving in the hospital.
A few days earlier, I had attended auditions for choir, and heard a most incredible contralto who was Norwegian. She was in her thirties, married, with three adopted children. Her husband was a salesman and was home only on weekends. When she learned I was recovering in the hospital unable to travel home, she insisted that I join her family for Thanksgiving. That was when I met the youngest child, Shelly, who was just three years old. I wrote a song for Dorothy, "Always Be My Sweet Little Girl," which became a hit with the local Lubbock audiences and eventually throughout Texas. Dorothy would sing this song to Shelly while I accompanied on the piano.
Things came easily for me at Tech. I had a vocal quartet that I wrote music for and took arrangements off the recordings of the Four Freshmen, so we entertained throughout the Lubbock area. I composed a musical, Something for Nothing, performed in a Coliseum that sat 5000 people in the audience.
My relationship with Dorothy deepened into an affair which lasted until I graduated from Texas Tech and left for New York to study musicology at Columbia University. My return to Texas Tech was the first time I saw Dorothy for several years. At the time of my return, Buddy Holly was wowing audiences at Texas Tech and throughout Texas and the Southwest. Dorothy had become the Entertainment Director at Texas Tech's Student Union and somehow was deeply involved with this rising star. Buddy's career in Lubbock paralleled my development in Amarillo. We were the same age, but his roots in country music and the emerging Rock scene attracted national attention.
Dorothy told me that he had an apartment in New York and was recording for Decca Records. Decca dropped him when his singles sold poorly. He moved back to Lubbock and his recording "Peggy Sue" produced by Coral Records in New Mexico, sold one million copies. This led to a hastily arranged tour to cover twenty-four midwestern cities in twenty-four days by bus, but special arrangements had been made for Holly to fly in a Beechcraft Bonanza. No one really understood that the pilot was inexperienced and the weather conditions were too severe to make the flight. The plane crashed two minutes after take-off.
The songwriter Don McLean immortalized that moment in his epic, American Pie, as "the day the music died."
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