Buddy Holly Birthplace — Lubbock, Texas

Buddy Holly — Charles Hardin Holley — was born on September 7, 1936, at 1911 Sixth Street in Lubbock, Texas, and in his brief career before dying at 22 in a plane crash, invented much of what rock and roll would become. His innovations were structural and sonic: the Stratocaster as a rock guitar, the self-contained guitar-bass-drums lineup that became standard, the singer-songwriter who controlled his own recordings, the use of studio overdubbing as a creative tool. Songs like 'That'll Be the Day,' 'Peggy Sue,' 'Not Fade Away,' 'Everyday,' and 'Rave On' were direct blueprints for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and virtually everyone who followed.

Holly recorded at Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico, where he was given unusual creative latitude for a 1950s artist. His Crickets lineup — guitar, bass, drums, no saxophone or piano — was a radical simplification that pointed toward the self-sufficiency of the rock band as creative unit. His death on February 3, 1959 — 'the day the music died' in Don McLean's 'American Pie' — in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, also killed Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper and marked the end of the first rock and roll era.

Lubbock has embraced its Buddy Holly heritage with a Walk of Fame, a statue on Avenue Q, the Buddy Holly Center museum, and the preservation of his birthplace marker. The city is in the Texas Panhandle, a flat, wind-blown landscape that bred a particular kind of American loneliness and ambition. Holly is buried at the City of Lubbock Cemetery.