Buddy's influential music career lasted just two years
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Forty seven years ago today, the singer Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash. For many, it was the day the music died - as the singer Don Mclean put it in American Pie.
If he'd survived, Buddy would now have been 69 years old - and would no doubt have had a long career in rock and roll.
Even his brief two year stint in the limelight was hugely influential on other performers, including The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
This morning on Breakfast, we talked to Buddy's widow, Maria Elena.
She'd only been married for a few months when the star died.
"Buddy always said his music made people happy - it was uplifting. And that's why it's still around," she told Bill and Mishal.
Buddy and Maria Elena met when she was working as a receptionist at his record company.
"It was love at first sight," she told us.
The two went out that same evening, she recalled. Within a few hours of meeting, he'd asked her to marry him:
"He got up and said - I'll be back.
"He came back with red roses...he was a very determined young man."
After a brief honeymoon in Acapulco, Maria found herself on tour with Buddy and the band:
"It wasn't very glamorous," she told us. "You had to do your own setting up and taking down: there were no roadies in those days."
Buddy was killed just six months after they'd married - but Maria is convinced that if he'd lived, he'd still be composing today.
Despite re-marrying and raising a family, she has devoted much of her life to his memory:
"There's not a day in all these years when I don't think of him," she told Bill and Mishal.
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