Hillbilly Holly

Obit of the Day (Historical): Ritchie Valens (1959)

Ritchie Valens had three top 50 hits when he died in a plane crash on February 3, 1959. He was only 17 years old. Valens ended up on the plane after winning a coin toss.

Valens, whose full name was Valenzuela, hit #42 with his 1958 single “Come on Let’s Go.” Later that same he reached #6 with the ballad, “Donna” which was written about his girlfriend Donna Ludwig. The “B” side of that single was “La Bamba’ a traditional Mexican folk song that he arranged into a rock hit - it would hit #22 in the U.S.

“La Bamba” inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

Along with Valens, rock stars Buddy Holly and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson also died. The incident is now called “The Day the Music Died.” (You can read Obit of the Day’s full post on the tragedy here.) 

(“La Bamba” is copyright Ling Music Group, 2009)

Also today:

Buddy Holly

September 9, 1954:

Elvis made an appearance at Katz Drug Store Lamar-Airways Shopping Center in Memphis, Tennessee, performing “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky”.

There was the opening of a new shopping center, and Elvis caused a huge crowd of teenagers. The performance was emceed by Elvis’ former Humes High classmate George Klein.

Elvis performed on a makeshift stage built on a flatbed truck in the center’s expansive, unprecedentedly large parking lot. Still relatively unknown outside of Memphis, the Memphis Press-Scimitar again misspelled Elvis’ name, this time with two S’s in ‘Presley’.

Johnny Cash was in the audience and after the show, he met Elvis for the first time. In an autobiography he wrote, “the first time I saw Elvis, singing from a flatbed truck at a Katz drugstore opening on Lamar Avenue, two or three hundred people, mostly teenage girls, had come out to see him. With just one single to his credit, he sang those two songs over and over.

That’s the first time I met him. Vivian and I went up to him after the show, and he invited us to his next date at the Eagle’s Nest.”

Opal Walker was a young girl from Memphis at the time who was at the show that night. She took three photos that have since been reprinted in countless books and articles. They are the only known photos of the appearance there, though none show the actual performance, and are considered the official first Elvis fan photos.

Marilyn Monroe by Sam Shaw, 1957

"Soon we could drive to isolated beaches and swim together. Strangely, she had never properly learned to swim; it was the only awkward thing she ever did, and her clumsy attempts ended in laughter. Emerging from the water, her powerful body threw back the sun like Botticelli’s Venus, and sometimes she even had the same saltwater-washed, sea-emergent stare."