Buddy Holly Birthplace (Destroyed) — 1911 6th Street, Lubbock

Buddy Holly — Charles Hardin Holley — was born on September 7, 1936, at 1911 6th Street in Lubbock, Texas. The house where he was born no longer stands — it was destroyed by fire some years after the family moved away, and the site is now an empty lot behind the Avenue Q Walmart. It is one of the more poignant stops on any Buddy Holly pilgrimage through Lubbock: the place where one of rock and roll's founding figures entered the world, now a patch of bare ground in a commercial district.

The Holley family was working-class and musical. Buddy's mother played piano and sang in the church choir; his older brothers Larry and Travis played instruments. Buddy picked up the guitar as a child — his parents bought him one after he won a talent contest at age five playing a toy violin — and by his early teens he was performing country and western music with school friend Bob Montgomery on local radio. The family moved between several homes around Lubbock over the years, including addresses on 37th Street and 39th Street in the south of the city.

Holly left Lubbock to pursue a recording career and was dead by twenty-two, killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 3, 1959. In his brief career he recorded songs — "That'll Be the Day", "Peggy Sue", "Not Fade Away", "Everyday", "Rave On" — that became direct blueprints for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and virtually everyone who followed. The empty lot at 1911 6th Street has no marker, but the Buddy Holly Center museum and Walk of Fame statue a few blocks away serve as the city's formal acknowledgment of what began here.