Buddy Holly statue and West Texas Walk of Fame

The bronze statue of Buddy Holly stands on 8th Street in downtown Lubbock, a few blocks from the Buddy Holly Center, in the middle of a pedestrian plaza that runs through what the city has designated as its arts district. The statue — a life-size figure of Holly in performance, guitar raised, glasses on, the pose immediately recognisable — is the most visible public marker in the city that produced him. Around it runs the West Texas Walk of Fame, a series of plaques set into the ground honouring other musicians who came from the same flat stretch of country: Waylon Jennings, Mac Davis, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Roy Orbison — though Orbison was from Wink, an hour and a half southwest.

The concentration of major American musical figures who came from Lubbock and the surrounding region is statistically improbable and never fully explained. The city is flat, isolated, and conservative; its music scene in the 1950s consisted largely of church, country radio, and the occasional touring show. Whatever produced Buddy Holly — and then Waylon Jennings, and then a generation of outlaw country and Texas singer-songwriters — was evidently something in the ground rather than something in the infrastructure.

The statue and Walk of Fame are a short walk from the Buddy Holly Center, which houses the primary archive of Holly memorabilia and recording history, and from the area of downtown where Holly grew up and first performed. Lubbock has committed seriously to its Holly heritage; the airport is named Lubbock Preston Smith International, but the road approaching it is called Buddy Holly Avenue. The statue is the physical centre of that civic investment.