The Widow’s Pique
For more than forty years, María Elena Holly has fiercely guarded the legacy of her late husband, rock and roll icon Buddy Holly.
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Nothing could have prepared the Nuyorican big-city girl for the Hub City of the South Plains when she first saw it in 1958. "Even from the air, you could see it was so flat. But all I cared about was Buddy," she says. Lubbock was like another planet. Segregation was still the social practice, if not exactly the law, and Mexican Americans were the most ostracized minority. Like it or not, María Elena passed for Mexican. She learned the hard way at one restaurant. She placed an order that wasn’t acknowledged by the waitress, and her husband had to do it for her. "When Buddy told me to come to Lubbock, he said, ’María Elena, I must warn you, we’re a little different here. We’re a little backward.’ Where I came from, we weren’t aware of color or our differences. It was a mixed culture."Bill Griggs, the Lubbock resident who is the world’s leading authority on Buddy and his music, insists that Buddy was coming back to his hometown to open a studio and production facility after he learned the business in New York. Griggs still has the business cards that Buddy had printed for Prism Records to prove it. María Elena suggests that if he ever had gone back home for good, she wouldn’t have gone with him.
The City of Churches (250 houses of worship, more per capita than any city its size in the United States) was uncomfortable about paying tribute to a local kid who happened to become famous by playing rock and roll— "the devil’s music," as one resident called it. David Langston, the mayor of Lubbock from 1992 to 1996, says you have to understand the forces at work. "You have this residual resistance to Buddy Holly and what he stood for here in Lubbock. This is a very conservative region," he says.
Two decades would pass before the city officially acknowledged his contributions by erecting a life-size bronze statue by sculptor Grant Speed. It was dedicated in 1980 in front of the civic center as the centerpiece of the West Texas Walk of Fame, which honors local and regional celebrities, including Mac Davis; Sonny Curtis, a member of Buddy’s band, the Crickets, and composer of the theme for television’s Mary Tyler Moore Show; and Ralna English, a staple of The Lawrence Welk Show. Yet even though the city was just beginning to come around, the widow and the hometown could not see eye to eye. María Elena let it be known that she would have preferred a scholarship at Texas Tech to a statue of her late husband. "I felt like it would have been more beneficial," she says. Jump ahead twenty years, during Labor Day weekend in 2000 and the week of Buddy’s birthday, and the Buddy Holly permanent exhibition in the Buddy Holly Center is packed. Bill Griggs is talking with groups of fans who have flown in from overseas and introducing visitors to people like the Tolletts, the now-elderly couple who sang backup vocals on "That’ll Be the Day." When the song starts playing over the center’s sound system, Griggs stops in his tracks, turns, and salutes. "The National Anthem of West Texas Music," he bellows proudly.
The setting is impressive. Time lines of Buddy’s career highlight exhibit cases containing his trademark black horn-rimmed glasses and 1958 Fender Stratocaster electric guitar (the whammy bar was removed because Buddy didn’t use one, Griggs points out). Other displays feature more guitars, Buddy’s Lubbock High School yearbook, his report cards (A’s, B’s, C’s, and a few D’s in biology during the 1952-1953 school year, as well as teachers’ comments such as "Does nice work"), his first-baseman’s mitt, and his Cub Scout uniform.
Echo McGuire Griffith shows me the new Echo McGuire showcase, paying tribute to Buddy’s high school sweetheart, the girl before María Elena. Her frilly prom dress, the necklace Buddy gave her, and the stuffed hound dog he and his first performing partner, Bob Montgomery, signed are all on display. She introduces me to her husband, Ron, who has a habit of telling people that he is the man who stole Buddy’s girlfriend. She tells me with a sweet smile that they broke up because of what Buddy was doing, playing rock and roll. "I have felt like I’ve had the call of God all my life," she says. "We were headed in different directions."
Being the keeper of all things Buddy means an endless stream of legal battles, negotiations on licensing agreements that go on forever, and calls during all hours from fans around the world wanting to connect with Buddy. "I didn’t ask for it. I was assigned to it," María Elena says. "I don’t complain about that. It has been good to me. The Man has been taking care of me, but He said, ’You don’t get something for nothing. You have to work your ass off for it.’" Her own personal crusade was to secure the rights of her late husband’s works. She points toward a circled item from a recent Rolling Stone. It reads that President Clinton backs the Copyright Corrections Act, which reverts the ownership of master recordings back to the artists, rather than to their recording company or manager. María Elena smiles. If protecting Buddy’s image is a job that never ends, at least she is compensated well for her efforts. The stylish furnishings, the art hanging on the wall, the neighborhood she lives in, the Veuve Clicquot ("One of my little pleasures," she says) all attest to that.Whether it’s the champagne talking or plain old common sense, I know that as charming as María Elena is, I wouldn’t want to be sitting across the table from her trying to negotiate the use of Buddy’s likeness or music. She’s a hard-nosed businesswoman, a reputation burnished by her role in the enactment of Chapter 26 of the Texas Property Code, better known as the Buddy Holly bill, a landmark piece of legislation passed in 1987 that protects the heirs of deceased celebrities from exploitation. María Elena hired lawyer Shannon Jones, Jr., of the Dallas firm Passman and Jones, to help her push the bill through, and they personally lobbied legislators to ratify it.
She’s still at it too. A suit she filed with some of Buddy’s relatives against MCA Records, the company whose labels Buddy recorded for, is in a California court. It involves a dispute over royalties and the ownership of Buddy’s master recordings.
The sad part is that while María Elena has won so many important legal victories, her relationship with Lubbock has only gotten worse. Though she cooperated with the Buddy Holly Center and the permanent exhibit, which opened in 1999, her relations with another civic organization have grown so strained that the annual Buddy Holly Music Festival is now called the Crossroads Music Festival, even though it takes place within shouting distance of the center. David Langston spearheaded the effort to spend $175,000 of the city’s hotel-motel tax to purchase the collection that ultimately led to the creation of the Buddy Holly Center. He’d seen the light after attending a musical production in London that was based on Buddy’s life. "People were rocking in the aisles over this music from Lubbock, Texas," he says. He thought to himself, "Why aren’t we taking advantage of this?" Buddy was a means to market Lubbock to the world.
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