Singles + - Buddy Holly

Personnel includes: Buddy Holly (vocals, guitar); Niki Sullivan (guitar); Joe B. Mauldin (bass); Jerry Allison (drums).
This collection starts deeper and more interesting than its title would lead one to expect, and for 29 of its 45 songs, it's also wonderfully enjoyable. Assembling all of the Buddy Holly singles and B-sides issued in America and Europe between April of 1956 and September of 1964, it covers Holly's music and career the way the ordinary listener heard it, and pretty much the way that Holly concentrated on it; he only completed two LPs in his lifetime, but he released some 16 singles during the last three years of his life, from early 1956 until early 1959, of which a dozen charted. Those 30 songs provide a step-by-step map of his development as an artist; the dozen or so posthumous releases that followed tell how his name was kept alive (principally in England), in interesting but often awkwardly overdubbed versions of the original recordings. This set treats the first ten singles well enough, but then it goes astonishingly wrong by utilizing the stereo masters on the subsequent singles -- true, "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" and "Raining in My Heart" were recorded with orchestral accompaniment, but they were intended to be heard on 45s (exclusively mono in those days) and on AM radio (also mono). The stereo mastering adds nothing to the recordings except an overbearing artificiality; it's nice to hear the details of the scoring and the accompaniment, but not in so obtrusive a manner. Worse still, most of the posthumous singles (apart from the hard, stripped-down rock & roll numbers "Midnight Shift" and "Rock Around With Ollie Vee") are given this same treatment, and suffer from the same problems. The pity is that the producers really had something enjoyable in their grasp -- listening to "Blue Days, Black Nights" b/w "Love Me," it's eerie to think that Holly was cutting those sides practically at the same time that Elvis Presley was starting to lay down the tracks for his first RCA single and album, and it is hard to say that Holly's results weren't more accessible than Presley's. As the songs advance, one hears the innovations come in, layer after layer, the way that fans picked them up -- and then you run into the stereo masters for those later sides, which make you wince. In fairness, the sound is clean and a decent match for the best work that MCA has issued domestically on Holly. Ideally, these two CDs and their 100-plus minutes of music would be part of a four- (or five-) disc Buddy Holly box, but MCA/Universal doesn't seem capable of getting anything like that out in this lifetime, so this double-disc set will have to suffice, flaws and all. ~ Bruce Eder

• Released: 1/22/2002
• Genre: Oldies
• Genre: Oldies
• Genre: Pop
• Released: 01/22/2002
• Format: CD
• Released: 01/22/2002
• Format: CD