She first met Holly when he accidentally knocked her over while rushing to a music assembly. ‘I’m too late to pick you up,’ he told her, ‘but you sure are pretty’
PEGGY SUE GERRON, who has died aged 78, was the inspiration for one of Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ best-loved songs, Peggy Sue. When Holly was awarded a posthumous lifetime achievement Grammy award, the song was hailed as “the first international rock anthem”, though several other compositions might reasonably lay claim to that accolade.
The song, credited to Holly, the Crickets drummer Jerry Allison and the band’s producer Norman Petty, was originally called Cindy Lou, after Holly’s niece, Cindy Lou Kaiter. Then Allison, who was going out with Peggy Sue Gerron, asked Holly to change it in his girlfriend’s honour. Peggy Sue always denied the story that the song’s renaming was a ploy to get her back after the couple had split up.
Peggy Sue Gerron was born on June 15 1940 at Olton, Texas, but grew up 50 miles away in Lubbock, where she attended high school. There, she said, she had her first encounter with Holly when he accidentally knocked her over in a corridor while rushing with his guitar and amplifier to a music assembly in the school hall. “I’m too late to pick you up,” he told her, “but you sure are pretty.”
A few weeks later, she was on a night out with Allison when they met Holly, who laughed and said: “I’ve already overwhelmed your Peggy Sue.”
She was still at school when the record, a follow-up to That’ll Be the Day, was released in July 1957, and when Holly and the Crickets gave the song its live debut, at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, she was in the audience to witness its ecstatic reception. In short order it was in the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 1958, Peggy Sue Gerron and Allison married. That December, Holly split from the Crickets, and on February 3 1959 he was killed in a plane crash in Iowa along with his fellow pop stars, Ritchie Valens and JP Richardson, “the Big Bopper”.
I’m too late to pick you up… but you sure are pretty
Shortly before his death Holly had recorded a follow-up to Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue Got Married, which was released posthumously in 1959, and was played over the opening credits of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1986 time-travel comedy of that name starring Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage.
Peggy Sue Gerron’s marriage to Allison was, by her account, an unhappy one, and after an on-off relationship they finally divorced in 1964. She moved to Pasadena, California, where she attended college and went on to become a dental assistant.
She married again, and with her second husband built up a successful plumbing and sewage business, becoming, she claimed, the state’s first licensed woman plumber. After the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, their firm aided the relief effort, lending their specialised cameras to search for people trapped in wrecked buildings.
Her role as Holly’s titular muse was unheralded until the 1978 biopic The Buddy Holly Story. In the mid-1990s, Peggy Sue Gerron moved back to Lubbock to care for her ailing mother, remaining there for the rest of her life. She was part of the successful campaign to establish the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, as well as helping set up a music festival, and she developed a career as a speaker and broadcaster.
In 2008 she published a memoir, What Ever Happened to Peggy Sue?, for the song’s 50th anniversary, but it was badly received in some quarters: Holly’s widow, Maria Elena Holly, threatened legal action over alleged inaccuracies.
Peggy Sue Gerron had a daughter and a son with her second husband.
Peggy Sue Gerron, born June 15 1940, died October 1 2018.
