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Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede

Bradley Denton

1991

 

For Barbara Jean... ...these words of love

 

"The Midwest has a lot to answer for."

--HOWARD WALDROP, following the August 1990 Wisconsin helicopter crash that took the life of guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan

 

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prologue

In life, their names were linked for only a few cold, miserable weeks.

In death, their names became a Trinity, as if carved into the same tablet of sacred stone.

Ritchie Valens. The Big Bopper.

Buddy Holly.

Years later, we would look back with longing and say that the music had died.

We should have known better.

 

part 1 - the annunciation

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OLIVER

I was conceived in cold circumstances in the front seat of a 1955 four-door Chevrolet in the early morning hours of Tuesday, February 3, 1959, near Des Moines, Iowa. I read about this in Volume I of Mother's diary when I was nine years old. I was terrified that she would catch me, but I needn't have worried. She was writing Volume IV at the time, and she never looked back at finished work.

The same passage in Volume I notes that the song playing on the car radio during the crucial moment was Buddy Holly's "Heartbeat." Mother wrote: I know, now and forever, that it is "our" song. I am home in bed now, and had an argument with Mama because C. brought me back so late on a snowy night, "and a school night at that!" I cannot sleep because I hear that song over and over in

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