A friend sent along this email tonight that seemed worth sharing:

February 3, 2008 will mark the 49th anniversary of Buddy Holly’s untimely death near the Mason City ,Iowa airport….I mark the day every year and often e mail my friends to remind them to mark it as well…for some reason the 49th anniversary has caused me to think about it more than usual…Buddy would be 71 years old now had he lived…he never saw miocrowave ovens…cell phones…8 tracks…home computers..the internet…DVDs or CDs….color TV or flat screens I pods…carbon fiber..and many more things…so the world has changed a great deal…BUT Buddy’s music still lives on…I do not use the word timeless because nothing is timeless in the sense that as time moves on everything will be seen with a different perspective..we will never know what direction his work mayt have taken but his own words and his last recorded music such as Leaning the Game and Crying Waiting Hoping along with the orchestra back up in the Pytrhian Temple recordings indicate that he had alot to add to Rock and Roll and that he probably would have added many more hit records to his alrerady impressive body of work that he had compiled the 3 or 4 short years…His work has been played by many of the great Rock and Rollers and although it is not timeless to me it seems as ttimely and fresh today as the day it was recorded…and as Sonny Curtis said in his song about Buddy…the music did not die on February 3,1959 rather it lives every time someone plays roc and roll…so give this very talented musoical genius wgho left us too soon a moment of respect on February 3….I certainly will

A dozen years ago I was living in Nashville and spent some time with Waylon Jennings for my book about country music. He told me the story about the night the plane went down. He was supposed to be on the plane with Holly. It was a lottery system, as some people were driving and others were flying. The Big Bopper was sick that night. He pulled rank and basically bullied Jennings into giving up his seat on the plane. Jennings had no choice, but his dark, joking response was, “I hope the plane crashes.”