Very sad to wake up this morning to the news of Sonny Curtis’s passing. Sonny was the last surviving member of Buddy Holly’s Crickets, and man, what a résumé he had!
Sonny started out as a hot young picker in Lubbock. When Buddy Holly first went to Nashville in 1956, Sonny was allowed to play on some of the sessions, where he contributed amazing thumbpicking-on-a-Stratocaster licks to songs like “Blue Days, Black Nights,” “Love Me,” “Changing All Those Changes,” and the first version of “Rock Around with Ollie Vee,” which Sonny also wrote. Most of us rockabilly guitarists have spent countless hours trying to learn these licks. If that was the only thing Sonny ever did, these sessions would have been enough to cement a serious legacy.
Sonny didn’t join the first version of Buddy Holly and the Crickets when they hit the big time in 1957. Instead, he toured with the Philip Morris Roadshow, backing up rockabilly Ronnie Self and other big-name country acts on the tour. Sonny would record a few sides with Ronnie Self, and one of the things I never knew until this morning is that Ronnie was (very briefly) a member of the Crickets, following Buddy Holly’s death.
Sonny would be an on-again, off-again member of the Crickets from 1958 until they quit playing just a few years ago (when Joe B. Mauldin and Jerry Allison passed away). The Crickets without Buddy Holly never achieved great stardom, but they continued to make records that influenced the Beatles and many of the up-and-coming British Invasion acts.
Sonny also started writing songs on a very serious level, first scoring a huge hit with “Walk Right Back” for the Everly Brothers in 1961 (a song that had a long life and many cover versions, including a hit remake by Anne Murray in the 1970s). Sonny also wrote “I Fought the Law,” a minor hit for the Crickets, but a song with an amazing history of remakes and covers, most notably the huge hit version created by the Bobby Fuller Four in 1965, and later recorded by The Clash in 1978 and performed by Green Day in a Super Bowl Pepsi commercial in 2004. Sonny also wrote “More Than I Can Say,” “Baby My Heart,” “A Fool Never Learns,” “The Last Song I’m Ever Gonna Sing,” “The Collector,” “Destiny’s Child,” “Bo Diddley Bach,” and a hundred more great songs recorded by an impressive roster of acts in the 1960s—Bobby Vee, Andy Williams, the Everly Brothers, The Kingsmen, and Sonny himself.
His big paycheck in the 1970s was writing “Love Is All Around,” the theme song for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which was a huge hit show and ran for many years. In later years, the Crickets would always play the Mary Tyler Moore theme song and make jokes about all the meals and bills the song had paid for over the years.
In later years, Sonny continued as a solo artist and wrote hit country songs for artists like Keith Whitley and Ricky Skaggs, and continued to tour with the Crickets.
I got to play with Sonny and the Crickets one time, when I had them come out as the headliners for my Guitar Geek Festival in 2009. I got to perform “Peggy Sue” with my heroes, and I still count that moment as one of the highlights of my career. I was a little bit overwhelmed when I met Sonny, I stuck out my hand and the only words I could muster were “Holy crap, you’re the man who wrote ‘I Fought the Law.’” He smiled, leaned in, and said: “Did you hear the Green Day version they did for the Super Bowl commercial?” We both chuckled, knowing exactly what that meant: mailbox money.
Whatever mailbox money Sonny earned over the years was more than well deserved. He was one of those West Texas geniuses that grew up in a place where great music grew like the cotton crops that surrounded Lubbock, and he traveled from New York to Los Angeles to Nashville selling his brand of West Texas musical magic for many decades, bringing it to the rest of the world through all these incredible songs and recordings. Thank you for your gift to the world, Sonny. Have a safe journey to the great pickin’ party in the sky.
Read a long interview with Sonny Curtis at the International Songwriters Association website.
