If You Knew

Last Monday, Peggy Sue Gerron died at University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas at age 78.

If her name sounds familiar, it must be because you've heard it sung a couple of thousand times since 1957, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets cut a hit called "Peggy Sue." You know her as "pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty Peggy Sue."

Buddy sang, "Oh how my heart yearns for you" but his heart was actually yearning for his girl, Echo McGuire.  Peggy Sue was the girlfriend of the drummer in the Crickets, Jerry Allison.

But, as so often happens to high school love affairs, they were rent asunder as she began her senior year because her parents moved the entire family to Sacramento. That was all happening as the Buddy and the band started becoming nationally prominent.

Buddy wrote the song originally as "Cindy Lou," for Holly’s niece. But the producer didn't like the way that name made the tune sound like a cha-cha. Allison came up with an idea to give the song a straight-ahead rock beat...and change the name from Cindy Lou to you-know-who.

And it just so happened that they debuted the song in a concert at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium. Allison called Peggy Sue when the band got to town and invited her to the show, and you can bet she was plenty surprised when she heard her name in a song!


“I think Buddy was playing a little bit of Cupid there,” Gerron told the Austin American-Statesman in 1999, referring to the Sacramento performance.

The song lasted far longer than Peggy Sue and Jerry's marriage, which ended after nine years. But while the times were still good, Buddy wrote a song called "Peggy Sue Got Married" for them. It was one of the songs he wrote and recorded on a home tape recorder in his apartment in Greenwich Village before leaving on tour with the Winter Dance Party, where he met his fate on February 3, 1959. Posthumously, the band filled out the guitar-and-voice track Buddy recorded and made the record.

After her marriage to Jerry Allison, she moved to California and became a dental assistant, and married a man who set up a plumbing business called Rapid Rooter before divorcing him and moving back to Lubbock to care for her mother.

You know what's great about American lives? You take away the rock and roll notoriety in this story, and this could be any other group of American high school friends as they wended their way through life.