That's My Song!

Or is it?

I thought I had a great idea. Years ago one of my pitches to Nightline was to produce a broadcast for Valentine's Day about women who had popular songs written about them when they were young. I wondered how their lives had turned out after they had been immortalized in the annals of rock and roll and thought others would be interested in finding out.

Nightline passed on my idea but I got to accomplish part of what I envisioned anyway and to meet two of those women— Peggy Sue Gerron and Donna Ludwig.

The songs Peggy Sue and Donna were big hits in the late 1950s and their singer- songwriters, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens along with J.P. Richardson— The Big Bopper —died in a plane crash in 1959. Holly was 22. Valens was 17. I was 12 and in the 6th grade. Only JFK’s assassination four years later would surpass the shock I felt at the time.

Both Peggy Sue and Donna agreed to be interviewed for my story and both were delightful to meet but all these years later I have come to realize that their own stories of how they had dealt with loss, remembrance and notoriety were quite different and I did not really grasp how different when I met them in 1996.

Peggy Sue

My first stop in putting the piece for Good Morning America together— GMA green lighted my doing it —was Lubbock, Texas where both Peggy Sue Gerron and Buddy Holly grew up and where she had returned later in life. Peggy Sue was not Holly’s girlfriend in high school. Her boyfriend was Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ drummer who she eventually married and divorced— Yes, Peggy Sue got married and not just in another song but twice actually.

How her name became a song title to begin with was part romance and part happenstance. Buddy Holly wanted the song to be called Cindy Lou for a niece of his Cindy, who had recently been born, and Lou, for his sister Lou. The drummer Jerry Allison and Peggy Sue, who had begun dating in high school, had just broken up and Allison, who is credited with co- writing the song, asked Holly to change its title to Peggy Sue in the hope he could patch things up.

Peggy Sue just happened to rhyme with Cindy Lou so the change was easy and didn’t change the lives of Buddy’s niece and his sister but it was Gerron’s that it altered forever. The song wasn’t Buddy’s and the Crickets’ first hit— That’ll Be the Day was in 1957 —but in any listing of rock and roll songs with a girl’s name as its title Peggy Sue is near, if not at the top.

Once on the ground in Texas Gerron took us to Lubbock High School to see a trophy case which you'd expect to be full of athletic awards but this one wasn’t. It was devoted entirely to Buddy Holly memorabilia.

We went to his gravesite and a friend of Peggy Sue's, a Holly enthusiast, bent down and began scratching the ground around the flat stone that revealed that the family name was actually spelled Holley. The fan unearthed a half dozen guitar picks buried around the marker by others who had made pilgrimages to the cemetery before he stopped.

Peggy Sue had us drive a 100 miles to Clovis, New Mexico to the music studio where Buddy Holly and the Crickets recorded most of their hits. It appeared to be a candidate-in-waiting to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places and still looked like it must have nearly a half century before. A 45 record of Peggy Sue sat on a turntable ready to spin and reproduce the pounding rhythm of Allison’s drums and Holly’s guitar that had rocked that same space long before.

Peggy Sue Gerron was an ebullient tour guide and and a great interview. In the throes of visiting her Buddy Holly shrines I never questioned how much her own life was wrapped up in being the Peggy Sue of the song.

Gerron hadn’t had a romantic relationship with Holly but the importance of her sustaining a connection to the song was obvious. She had had a career owning a successful business with her second husband and raised a family but her identity as the Peggy Sue of Peggy Sue later led her to be part of numerous events that paid tribute to Holly’s career and to write a memoir titled Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue? Holly’s widow claimed the book so exaggerated her relationship with her late husband that she filed a lawsuit.

A number of Peggy Sue’s obituaries called her the inspiration for the song that bears her name. She was never the muse but she became a charming cheerleader. Peggy Sue Gerron died in 2018.

Donna

Donna Ludwig was Ritchie Valens' high school crush. I met her at her office in Sacramento where she lived and was working as a mortgage broker. She had also married and raised a family. I wanted to interview her in front of a jukebox and had arranged with a bar downtown to let me make use of theirs.

Unlike Peggy Sue, Donna was composed for Donna Ludwig and she told me how Valens had sung it to her over the phone right after he had completed the song. They only knew each other for a little over two years and for part of that time Valens had dropped out of high school when his two sided hit record of Donna and La Bamba became a million seller by the fall of 1958 and he had begun touring.

Donna and Ritchie grew up in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Today, the Valley has a population almost evenly split between whites and Latinos but in the 1950s it was predominately white. Donna’s father never accepted his daughter’s relationship with a Latino boy while Valens was alive but I regret not asking her if he had reconsidered how he felt about him later in life.

Donna had parked her car on the street and fed the meter outside the bar but the interview went longer than we thought and she got a ticket. She was a bit distraught because she told me it was the first ticket she had ever gotten in her life. I took it from her and added it to my expense report.

Back at her house she showed me the debut and only album Valens had recorded before his death that he had given her. As she carefully took the record out from the album's sleeve she teared up and said, "It's very sacred to me." Donna Ludwig was 16 when Ritchie Valens was killed in the plane crash. She remained close to his family but only rarely let it be known to others that he had written a love song for her.

In fact when the the Valens’ biopic La Bamba came out in 1987 most of the people in the office where she worked only found out about her relationship with him when she took the day off to attend the movie’s opening and she reportedly joked, “If I knew I was going to get all this attention, I’d have lost 20 pounds.”

When I met her, Donna's only hint that revealed she was the Donna turned out to be the vanity license plate O DONNA O on her car. In any other setting I would not have made any connection about who it belonged to. There are a lot of Donnas. For every 100,000 people in America there are roughly 400 Donnas and who knows how many other license plates are imprinted with their names. But Donna Ludwig made it clear as we wrapped up our shoot with her that there’s only one Donna Donna. “Yes, it’s my song,” she said.

Here’s the link to the story that aired in 1996. It’s on YouTube and has amassed 224,000 hits to date. Click on That’s My Song below…

That's My Song!