Great Buddy Holly CD

Personnel: Buddy Holly (vocals, guitar).
In 1967, Decca Records reissued Buddy Holly's That'll Be the Day album with new cover art and this new title, minus one song ("Ting-a-Ling"). That album has remained in print to the present day, due in part to the fact that it's always been popular as a low-priced LP or CD -- the latter is a result of the ironing out of the contractual and potential legal difficulties that Buddy Holly had engendered by re-recording "That'll Be the Day" (which appears here in its early version); he surrendered any artist royalties to which he would have been entitled from these sides, so MCA owns them completely. Reference books and experienced listeners have always felt compelled to warn neophyte fans away from The Great Buddy Holly, not because it's bad (it's not), but because its ten songs were cut at Holly's 1956 Nashville sessions, before he had evolved and created (in the studio, at least) the sound that made him famous. In fact, this is a fun record, if not really representative of Holly's fully developed style, and ought to interest not only his fans, but also anyone who wants to learn a little more about the early days of the rock & roll boom, when even soon-to-be top artists and their producers were still trying to figure out how big a proportion of country to R&B, blues, and pop there ought to be in a rock & roll record. But better still, one should track down the imported reissue (part of a two-on-one CD) of That'll Be the Day from Beat Goes on Records, or the mid-'70s British LP The Nashville Sessions, both of which offer the same songs in better sound and with full annotation. ~ Bruce Eder
Collectables' The Great Buddy Holly is a good budget-priced, ten-track collection containing some of the rock & roll legend's most overt rockabilly tracks, including "Rock Around With Ollie Vee," "Love Me," "Don't Come Back Knockin'," and his first number one hit from 1957, "That'll Be the Day." Please note that this edition includes the exact same track listing and cover art as the 1982 MCA release of the same name. ~ Al Campbell
An entertaining, albeit brief, collection of recordings Holly made before the success of "That'll Be the Day" turned him into an overnight star. The emphasis here is mostly on straight-ahead, guitar-driven rockabilly, like "Don't Come Back Knocking," "Midnight Shift," or "Rock Around With Ollie Vee." There's also an early take of "That'll Be the Day" that lacks the focus of the more familiar version but is interesting nonetheless. Granted, all of this material is available on other, more comprehensive Holly packages, but there's a certain internal logic to the sequencing here that is undeniably effective.