Teaching the Players

Song 379: This week the playlist comes around to Learning the Game by Buddy Holly, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it here. From the moment the Beatles rocked my world in February of 1964, I believed the Fab Four had invented RnR, and I knew almost nothing about the 1950s pioneers until I began my college era in the fall of 1969. Not long after, a 1950s revival began on the radio, and that, along with a subscription to Rolling Stone, quickly acquainted me with some very significant talents, including this guy in the glasses. By the time The Buddy Holly Story hit the screen in 1978, I had come to understand what the music world had lost to a plane crash on The Day the Music Died in February of 1959, though at the time it happened, I had no idea what had occurred. I added a BH compilation LP to my collection in the mid-1970s, and it truly impressed me to recognize how much good music Buddy had laid down in such a short career. If the comment on the linked YT video is correct, this track (which did not appear on my BH album) was actually the last one Holly did. I wouldn't even know about the tune until later, in the 1980s, when one of my Berkeley musician friends taught it to me, and we then regularly played and sang it together. During that stretch, learning the song, I felt like I was also learning the game, but when I found that I was not the one she's thinking of, I couldn't really blame her, because she had never said I was the only one she'll ever love.