*** This Week in Texas Music History is brought to you by Brane Audio ***
By Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.
This Week in Texas Music History, an all-star lineup of Fifties rockers flies into Austin.
On October 7, 1957, Austin’s City Coliseum hosted the Irving Field package tour featuring Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Lavern Baker, Clyde McPhatter, and more. This rock ‘n’ roll fever dream of a tour started in Pittsburgh and had already barnstormed one-night stands in Richmond, Annapolis, Norfolk, Akron, Cincinnati, Toronto, Montreal, and Rochester.
In DC, police cancelled the concert for fear of a riot. When the tour hit Tennessee and Alabama, white artists dropped out due to the venues’ segregation policies. Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers returned to the tour in Tulsa on September 28th, and the show would still hit Oklahoma City, Wichita Falls, Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, San Antonio, Corpus, and Houston before arriving in Austin on October 7th, a span of ten days.
If that sounds grueling, it was. It was also typical for stars in the new genre of rock ‘n’ roll. There’s fun stuff here. The artists shared a single bus where Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly gambled in the back. The Everly Brothers convinced Holly to ditch his wire-framed glasses for his trademark black horn-rimmed. But there’s historical significance to these conditions, too.
Tour managers squeezed all they could out of what they thought of as a flash-in-the-pan teen fad. It was this exploitive tour management that created the conditions for another package tour in 1959, the Winter Dance Party, where Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper rented a plane rather than spend another day on a freezing tour bus, with tragic results. That the rock ‘n’ roll fad survived them and rendered them legends is small solace. Buddy Holly, “Early in the Morning”
Sources:
Michael Corcoran. Austin Music is a Scene Not a Sound: An Illustrated History of the First 100 Years. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2024.
Kevin Romig. “‘Not Fade Away’: The Geographic Dimensions of Buddy Holly’s Meteoric Career,” The Journal of Texas Music History. 2011.
