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.
(Page 3 of 3)
Langston contacted María Elena to work out a licensing agreement and kept negotiations going until they agreed upon the Buddy Holly Music Festival. It would be promoted by Broadway Festivals, a civic-oriented nonprofit organization that Langston headed. After he left office, in 1996, the festival became the responsibility of the Lubbock Convention and Visitors Bureau, which is overseen by Market Lubbock.
Negotiations to renew the licensing agreement for the Buddy Holly Music Festival broke down shortly before the 1999 event. The relationship between María Elena and C. David Sharp, the CEO of Market Lubbock, was rancorous from the start. "He was a good ol’ boy trying to bully me," she says. "He said it was a take-it-or-leave-it deal." The offer on the table was a generous one: $50,000 and 15 percent of the gate receipts. She left it.
The sticking point was her refusal to allow the festival promoters to use her late husband’s image however they saw fit. Sharp told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that María Elena "was not willing to grant us the latitude that we needed without us having to constantly go back with what I call ’Mother, may I?’ questions." María Elena says she didn’t want to see Buddy’s likeness attached to beer or tobacco company logos, which could have happened, given the language of the agreement and the likelihood that organizers would seek sponsors to offset the costs of the festival.
In addition, the company that merchandises Buddy, CMG Worldwide, had allowed María Elena to assign rights to the festival only to help get it off the ground. Now CMG wanted to be compensated, but no amount of money would persuade it to give the festival blanket rights. "The way the deal was structured, the producers [Lubbock] would effectively acquire unilateral merchandising rights," says Jonathan Faber, an assistant vice president of business and legal affairs at CMG. "It would cause a host of problems if another entity is capable of granting licenses to use the name, image, or likeness of one of our clients." That catch-22 ended the negotiations. "I declined," María Elena says, "and I was accused again of being greedy. The truth of the matter is, I’ve been very protective of Buddy’s name and image. I guard that name and that image like a mother hen."
Langston vouches for that. "She wanted to have a say in what kind of lettering we’d use, whether T-shirts would be all cotton or a fifty-fifty blend. She wanted to be involved in every detail, and she has the legal right to do so. As it was, everything worked out pretty doggoned well the first two years, except we didn’t make any money."
So when the Buddy Holly Center was dedicated, there was no Buddy Holly Music Festival. A street concert did feature a rockin’ oldies show featuring Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon, Chris Montez, the Drifters, and the Coasters, along with a special appearance by the son of the Big Bopper, J. P. Richardson, Jr., who reprised his father’s hit, "Chantilly Lace," with a cell phone. The Crickets even performed with the Lubbock Symphony and folk singer Nanci Griffith at the Civic Center, an event sponsored by the Civic Center. María Elena was conspicuous in her absence.
"I’ve had my emotions tied up in Lubbock for forty years," she sighs. "All this time, I have seen the city of Memphis get behind Elvis Presley one hundred percent. This is an everyday situation with the city of Memphis to honor Elvis, not just a day or a week. The city embraced that in a way the city of Lubbock has not with the Buddy Holly Music Festival. They’ve never done it openly and directly. It’s always a new organization or a new person. I’m not saying everyone’s afraid, but city officials don’t want to ruffle feathers. I’m a hot potato in their hands. I’m the witch. It’s always this or that doesn’t happen because María Elena won’t agree. She wants too much money. Bull."So is the fact that the celebration that will be held this year—marking Buddy’s sixty-fifth birthday—will be called the 2001 Crossroads festival. Surely a compromise can be found to unite the widow with the town and keep the legend alive. Several high-profile folks in Lubbock enjoy good relations with María Elena, including Connie Gibbons, the soft-spoken director of the Buddy Holly Center who worked with her to prepare the permanent exhibit. Gibbons is responsible for paying 15 percent of the sales of Buddy Holly T-shirts, souvenir horn-rimmed glasses, coffee mugs, Christmas ornaments, and all other Buddy Holly merchandise to María Elena. "I brought her here before we opened, and she spent a couple of days," she says. "She could tell what it was. I think she was impressed. She was supportive and complimentary."
María Elena should linger long enough to hear what Gibbons hears. "I guess we’ll always have the element that doesn’t appreciate his contributions to music," Gibbons says. "But you know, when locals visit the exhibit for the first time and see him placed in a sociohistorical context instead of the kid next door, I’m always hearing the reaction, ’I had no idea!’ They begin to appreciate his significance. It’s a slow process, one that’s been going on for forty years."
"It’s not easy trying to deal with the city that never gave her husband his due until recently," concurs Victor Hernandez, a Lubbock city council member who helps promote an annual Diez y Seis celebration. "Lubbock hasn’t learned to do that yet. A lack of respect is what it boils down to. I don’t know if it’s the fact she’s Latina or was married for such a short time to him. What she and Buddy did was not socially accepted and with some people, it still isn’t. But she hasn’t gotten that respect."
Yet Lubbock isn’t the upright, uptight city that she first encountered decades ago. It has finally come around to recognizing the value of Buddy, if for nothing else than an effective means of selling Lubbock to the world. Otherwise, the Buddy Holly Center would not exist. It’s a pity there isn’t a music festival to go along with it. María Elena talks of staging a Buddy Holly Festival in Dallas next year. But she also says she’s open to negotiating once again. "I’ve been involved in ongoing talks for the past forty years with different people," she sighs wearily. "I always go back, for more punishment probably. Hopefully, if the right person is there to be honest enough to come forward and say, ’Maybe we misunderstood,’ then I’m open to more punishment."
I am not. The bottle of champagne has been drained. I want to throw my hands up and tell María Elena that it’s time to get together with Lubbock for the good of Buddy, but I defer. Instead she starts to walk me out. For all the time we’ve spent getting lost in Buddy, I realize I’ve neither seen nor heard him. That’s when she opens a door to her office. Buddy is everywhere: his pictures on the wall, CDs of his music scattered around the desk alongside papers pertaining to the particulars of his career. Across the hall is the audio room, where she listens to music—Buddy’s music. Gold records and platinum records line the wall. When María Elena opens those doors, Buddy Holly lives.
Back in Lubbock, the clearest sign of hope is the Body Holli Custom Painting and Body Shop, just off Buddy Holly Avenue, the wide thoroughfare formerly known as Avenue H on the edge of the Depot district. It is the first local business to pay indirect tribute to the West Texas teen who rocked the world. Regardless of the infighting, his legacy will not fade away.
My Library
