Music and film have a way of closing even the greatest geographical distances, shrinking entire oceans and countries until Liverpool doesn’t feel so far away from Los Angeles. And in some rare pop culture cases, these proximities distill themselves down to a two-minute-fifteen-second single that remains a beloved favorite of the early rock canon today. Take, for example, The Crickets’ 1957 track, “That’ll Be The Day”.
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Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes first recorded “That’ll Be The Day”, which Holly co-wrote with Jerry Allison, in 1956. However, it was The Crickets, Holly’s other musical act, that would put their version of the song out first in July 1957. The Three Tunes’ rendition came months later. But before the Lubbock-born, glasses-clad musician could come up with “That’ll Be The Day”, John Wayne first had to star in The Searchers.
The 1954 Western film features Wayne starring as Ethan Edwards, a middle-aged Civil War veteran. Edwards had a recurring line, “That’ll be the day,” throughout the film, which stuck in Holly and Allison’s minds. After they got out of the movie theater, it took Holly and Allison about half an hour to flesh out the rest of their idea.
How “That’ll Be The Day” Went From Crickets to Beatles
While both Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes and The Crickets released versions of “That’ll Be The Day”, the latter rendition is the version that had the most chart success. The success was the same for Holly either way. The only reason he recorded it twice is that the Three Tunes version was recorded by Decca, which refused to release any singles from his sessions with the label. When Holly signed on to Brunswick Records, crediting “That’ll Be The Day” was a way for Holly to work around a contractual obligation not to release any songs he recorded with Decca under his name.
So, it was The Crickets’ version of “That’ll Be The Day” that eventually floated over the Atlantic Ocean to the port town of Liverpool, England. During the summer of 1958, three young friends were embarking on their first studio experience. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison visited Phillips Sound Recording Services to record their first songs to acetate as The Quarrymen. The group paid 17 shillings and three pence to track two songs in the living room studio, “In Spite of All the Danger”, an original composition credited to McCartney-Harrison, and “That’ll Be The Day”.
Given how big an inspiration Holly was to the future Beatles, it’s unsurprising they selected one of the American rock ‘n’ roller’s songs to record. Holly even helped name the Fab Four. “The Beatles” was an homage to “The Crickets.” Speaking to Guitar Player in 1990, Paul McCartney said that early American rock songs like “That’ll Be The Day” had “burned themselves into my being. I wouldn’t want to get them out, ever. That’s something I’m really proud to have burned into my soul, branded in me.”
Photo by Steve Oroz/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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