Buddy Holly Albums (9)
'Buddy Holly with the Picks: Only the Love Songs'
Release Date 1/1/2001
Tracks 20
Label K-Label
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'For the First Time Anywhere'
Release Date 1/1/1983
Tracks 10
Label MCA
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What The Critics Say
When this album was originally released in 1983, it was a major revelation in collector's circles. Here were the original, undubbed versions of eight songs that had appeared on posthumous Holly albums like Reminiscing, Showcase, and others with overdubbed backing provided by the Fireballs and producer Norman Petty, along with two rarities to pad things out. And hearing the stripped-down Holly minus the audio cover-ups and beef-ups revealed strong (and sometimes superior) efforts all by themselves without the assistance. With future Cricket Jerry Allison on drums, a set of revolving bass players, and Sonny Curtis handling lead guitar chores on three tracks, Holly blasts through some bona fide Texas rockabilly here. Four of the eight tracks come from Buddy's pen, and these early efforts ("Rock-a-Bye Rock," "Because I Love You," "Changing All Those Changes," and "I'm Gonna Set My Foot Down") are sign pointers toward his later, more commercial style; in this case listeners get stripped-down, elemental pop tunes disguised as rockabilly ravers and country ballads. The collection is bookended with two more tracks, the original studio swipe of "Maybe Baby" and "That's My Desire," a ballad from the 1958 New York session that produced "Rave On." Although the overdubbing done to Holly's music made sense from a commercial standpoint at the time, this collection only whets your appetite to hear more of the real thing. ~ Cub Koda, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
This is an album made up of the "Buddy & Bob" demos of 1954-1955, country music recorded by Buddy Holly and Bob Montgomery before Holly turned to rock & roll and became a star. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
On its face, Holly in the Hills was seemingly one of the more artistically dubious Buddy Holly albums to appear posthumously. Built around Holly's pre-Crickets recordings circa 1955, as part of the duo of Buddy & Bob, the familiar Holly voice is present and easy to appreciate, though he's sharing the spotlight with Bob Montgomery and doing a repertory that's steeped thoroughly in country music, complete with fiddle accompaniment ("Baby It's Love," "I Gambled My Heart"). Holly was beginning to discover rock & roll and work out a sound of his own, as demonstrated by some of the cuts here, but he was still a country artist and doing a lot of ballads in that idiom as well. Apart from "I Wanna Play House With You," "Wishing," and "Down the Line" -- and as it happens, those three are killer tracks, worth the price of the album -- little here resembles the sound that Holly subsequently became known for. All of it, however, is fine music, occupying a place in Holly's career to what the Everly Brothers' early Columbia sides represent in their history (though it is far more sophisticated than the Everlys' sides). The presence of the Fireballs, a band managed and produced by producer Norman Petty, on several of the tracks, does bring the material up to a modern standard (circa 1965), and it's easy to see why this record sold well, especially in England, where it rode the charts for six weeks and just missed the Top Ten. Holly in the Hills does represent a formative and legitimate component of Holly's music, which is perfectly valid, and he does amazingly well in tandem with Montgomery on numbers like "Queen of the Ballroom" and "Soft Place in My Heart" -- had rock & roll not come along, it would be easy to see these Buddy & Bob sides having opened a career in country music for the two of them that could easily have carried them into the 1960s before a very different audience from the one Holly actually ended up finding. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
The second of the posthumously overdubbed albums, Showcase presented a number of rock & roll cover songs performed by Buddy Holly, most of them recorded during his sessions in Nashville in 1956. It was not Holly at his best, though the performances were often spirited. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Even with Buddy Holly four years in the grave, there were "new" albums of his stuff coming out that were running circles around most of the competition, and Reminiscing was a prime example, a bluesy, hard-rocking, moody assembly of material gathered from across more than two years of Holly's history, from among some of his last finished tracks and demos going all the way back to 1956 and extending up as late as his home-recorded demos of January 1959. Apart from "Wait 'Til the Sun Shines, Nellie" -- which he may well have done as a sentimental favorite -- the main focus of the sound (overdubbed by the Fireballs under the guidance of producer Norman Petty) was rockabilly, sometimes of a very advanced kind. This expanded reissue, courtesy of MCA's British division, features not only excellent sound but is augmented with the presence of seven bonus tracks, including some of the 1956/1957 demos ("Bo Diddley," "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," "Slippin' and Slidin'") that formed the basic tracks for parts of the finished album, coupled with a handful of demos and acetates that were found in the early '80s and turned up originally on the For the First Time Anywhere album. The annotation by Colin Escott is as good as the sound -- and that's very good -- and this release continues the pattern of Holly's catalog generally being treated better in England than America. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
When Buddy Holly & the Crickets broke through nationally in 1957, they were marketed by Decca Records as two different acts whose records were released on two different Decca subsidiaries -- Brunswick for Crickets records, Coral for Holly records. But there was no real musical distinction between the two, except perhaps that the "Crickets" sides had more prominent backup vocals. Nevertheless, coming three months after The "Chirping" Crickets, this was the debut album credited to Buddy Holly. It featured Holly's Top Ten single "Peggy Sue" plus several songs that have turned out to be standards: "I'm Gonna Love You Too," "Listen to Me," "Everyday," "Words of Love," and "Rave On." The rest of the 12 tracks weren't as distinctive, though Holly's takes on such rock & roll hits as "Ready Teddy" and "You're So Square (Baby I Don't Care)" provide an interesting contrast with the more familiar versions by Elvis Presley. This was the final new album featuring Holly to be released during his lifetime. Every subsequent album was an archival or posthumous collection. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
The tendency of most critics is to dismiss this album, comprised as it is of the songs from Holly's 1956 Nashville sessions, which yielded a somewhat too tentative, country-oriented sound that suited neither him nor the public. In actual fact, at least ten of the 11 songs on this LP (the one exception being the ballad "Girl on My Mind") have aged almost as well as anything that Holly ever recorded. "Rock Around With Ollie Vee," "Blue Days, Black Nights," "Ting-A-Ling," "I'm Changing All Those Changes," "Modern Don Juan," "Love Me," "Don't Come Back Knockin'," and "Midnight Shift" are all decent, solid early rock & roll; he sounds too countrified by about half on much of the record, especially on the early version of "That'll Be the Day," but these were not bad records, even if they weren't going to break his talent out to a mass audience. What's more, at least at the time of his first sessions in January of 1956, few white artists and even fewer producers at major labels had yet figured out what mix of country, R&B, and blues worked on a rock & roll record. Given all of this, this is a better than decent album with one real gem ("Rock Around With Ollie Vee"), and if not for the fact that they mostly feature a completely different lineup of musicians and were also contractually separate from the rest of his eventual output for Coral/Brunswick/Decca, roughly half of the songs here could have been filtered into either of Holly's later official LPs without doing any violence to the newer material. Even the ballad "You Are My One Desire" -- though it doesn't really resemble much else that Holly ever did -- is given a hauntingly passionate performance. That'll Be the Day isn't a revelatory piece of rock & roll history, but it's a more substantial and enjoyable prelude to the main body of Holly's career than it's usually given credit for being, extending his serious legacy backward a full album. [In 1967, Decca Records reissued That'll Be the Day as The Great Buddy Holly, with a new cover and stripping off the song "Ting-A-Ling." In 1975, British MCA gathered together the 11 songs off of this album and an alternate take of "Rock Around With Ollie Vee" from a different session and released it as The Nashville Sessions.] ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
'The "Chirping" Crickets'
Release Date 1/1/1957
Tracks 12
Label Brunswick
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What The Critics Say
The debut album by the Crickets and the only one featuring Buddy Holly released during his lifetime, The "Chirping" Crickets contains the group's number one single "That'll Be the Day" and its Top Ten hit "Oh, Boy!." Other Crickets classics include "Not Fade Away," "Maybe Baby," and "I'm Looking for Someone to Love." The rest of the 12 tracks are not up to the standard set by those five, but those five are among the best rock & roll songs of the 1950s or ever, making this one of the most significant album debuts in rock & roll history, ranking with Elvis Presley and Meet the Beatles. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
