You gave me all your loving and your turtle doving

Continuing my trip back through the 1958 album charts.

13/04/58 : The "Chirping" Crickets - The Crickets


No weeks skipped over this time and this is one I'm actually, for a change, quite looking forward to - I believe this is the only Crickets album with Buddy Holly. So it's got to be good, right?

Well, it starts with "Oh Boy", which is certainly a good start for any album - and it actually continues in a pretty high quality vein. It's interesting because it's closest to Elvis around this time, but the harmonies are just in a different league and so it's much more obviously a path into a lot of what came later in the 60s. "That'll Be The Day" is the other stand-out track (but quite possibly only because of familiarity) but I also liked "Last Night" - I can imagine Elvis doing a good version of this. All in all, this is a fine album which was an absolute pleasure to visit, particularly within the context of the other stuff we've seen this year. I can imagine teenagers playing this on repeat back in the day and driving their strait-laced parents ker-a-zee - they had absolutely no idea what was coming over the next decade though!

We're are at nominal #5 in the charts this week on its only week in the charts ever, which is a shocking state of affairs. I say it's a nominal #5 because, somewhat peculiarly, we have joint #1 albums this week for The Duke Wore Jeans and Pal Joey (not the charts finest week ever) with the rest of the top five being The King And I, Frank and The Pajama Game.

Wikipedia has very little on the album - yes, it's their only album with Buddy on but it's worth noting that The Crickets also played on Buddy's solo effort because their manager decided to market them under two different names, basically just to achieve more sales. The entry for "Not Fade Away" is quite interesting because of the artists who've covered it - it's closely associated with both The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead who've both played it live a load (over 600 times for The Grateful Dead, apparently!) but there are also versions out there by Rush, Deep Purple, Status Quo, Lemmy, Sheryl Crow and Florence + The Machine, which is quite the mix.

"Customers also listened to" approximately a million other Buddy albums - it's amazing how many of them there are other there considering how little time he was with us. For me, this is easily the best of Buddy's output and up there with the best of the albums from the year - it's was both enjoyable and interesting historically. And that's not something I've been able to type very often this year.

23/03/58 - A very enjoyable album
20/04/58 - Better than I was expecting

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