EDGE: Before the Beatles, there was Buddy

Buddy Holly figures prominently in any potted history of rock music. He’s characteristically included among that handful of late-‘50s avatars who lit a spark that was all but extinguished until a bunch of shaggy-haired British boys crossed the Atlantic to remind Americans, and thence the world, of what they’d been missing.

As we remember the 50th anniversary of the untimely death of Mr. Holly - and Ritchie Valens and J.P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson Jr. - this week, it’s perhaps a good time to make an even greater claim for Mr. Holly’s legacy.

Think of it this way: There are two epochs of rock - Before Buddy and After Buddy.

In his book “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity,” University of Chicago art historian David W. Galenson sets this bar for an artist’s influence: Can anyone subsequently ignore his work?

In Mr. Holly’s case, the answer is an emphatic no.

If Elvis Presley changed the face (and hair and hips) of pop music, Buddy Holly - himself influenced by Mr. Presley, to be sure - went on to alter its molecular structure.

As Marshall Crenshaw - the eclectic singer-songwriter who played Mr. Holly in the 1987 Valens biopic “La Bamba” - notes, Mr. Holly, along with quintessential rocker Chuck Berry, “invented ‘60s rock. It was really those two guys.”

“His music was unique, original and distinctive,” Mr. Crenshaw adds. “He influenced all the important stuff that came afterward.”

More so than Mr. Berry, however, Mr. Holly became what Mick Jagger called the “archetypal singer-songwriter”: a vessel for original musical ideas that did not necessarily obey a particular form or genre.

Mr. Holly and his backing band, the Crickets, were rock music’s first self-sufficient writers and performers of their own material.

In this, he prefigured both the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

Of the nearly 100 songs he recorded in just three years, Mr. Holly wrote or co-wrote about 40. According to the Silver Spring-based musician and Holly fanatic J.P. McDermott, his creativity had been accelerating rapidly until the fatal plane crash.

Mr. Holly was the first rock artist who glimpsed a future that was open to exploration and experimentation. He toyed with the sonic possibilities of ancillary instruments such as the celesta. He recorded with a string section - rare for a rocker in those days. He seemed to grasp intuitively an insight that critic Terry Teachout credits to the Beatles and their producer, George Martin: that the recording studio itself could, in effect, become a kind of instrument.

What more would he have accomplished? One can only speculate - he died in 1959, at the age of 22. Rabid Holly fan John Lennon was certain his craft would have grown even more inventive and sophisticated.

Mr. McDermott, who earlier this week delivered a lecture on the singer at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, says that in the months before he died, Mr. Holly was keen on collaborating with R&B star Ray Charles.

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