Crickets Member and Country Songwriter Sonny Curtis Has Died

Few musicians can say they were there at the very formation of rock and roll, wrote some of the genre’s most foundational songs, toured with legends like Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, along with influencing the world of country songwriting decades later to an award-winning capacity. This was the remarkable life of Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Sonny Curtis who’s being remembered in the wake of his passing at the age of 88.

The first association most people draw from the name Sonny Curtis is his important time playing in the backing band for Buddy Holly known as The Crickets. Curtis had played on some of the earlier hits for Holly before the official formation of The Crickets in 1957, but he wasn’t officially a Cricket until 1958. Right before Holly’s death on February 3rd, 1959 when the bespectacled rocker moved away from The Crickets as his backing band (and hired a young bass player named Waylon Jennings), Sonny Curtis assumed lead guitar and vocal duties for the legendary band.

The association of Sonny Curtis with The Crickets is what kept the world paying attention to him after the passing of Buddy Holly, but it was really Sonny’s songwriting where he contributed some of the most important moments to popular culture in the United States and beyond. Sonny’s original song “I Fought The Law” helped make The Crickets and important early rock band all on their own. The song later became a hit for the Bobby Fuller Four, and later bands like The Clash, Dead Kennedys, and Green Day would help make it an iconic song in American music history.

Sonny Curtis also wrote “Walk Right Back” for the Everly Brothers in 1961, and it would also go on to be a hit for Anne Murray in 1978. But it was another song called “A Beatle I Want To Be” that helped take Sonny Curtis in a slightly different direction in his career. It was a protest song of sorts about Beatlemania and the British invasion that was happening in popular music in 1964. The Beatles had actually drawn inspiration for their name from The Crickets since they were one of the very first true rock and roll bands.

Sonny’s semi-success with “A Beatle I Want To Be” is what in part inspired him to not just try to write hits, but songs that were either commentaries on popular culture, or contributed to it. He wrote the song “The Ballad of Batman” that The Camps turned into a single. This would eventually lead Sonny to writing jingles for companies such as Buick and Bell Telephone, and eventually one of his most lasting contributions to American culture, the song “Love Is All Around,” also known as the theme song to the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

But before you go concluding that the career of Sonny Curtis was colored with novelty hits and one-hit writing contributions for others, by the ’80s he was working with Nashville, writing songs that would be some of the best the genre ever heard. The best known, and probably the one that would eventually make him an inductee to the Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame was “I’m No Stranger to the Rain.” Along with being the final living #1 for Keith Whitley in 1989, it would win the CMA’s Single of the Year, and arguably become Whitley’s signature song.

It was two years later that Sonny Curtis was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2007, he would also be inducted into Nashville’s Musicians Hall of Fame. And then in 2012 after a special committee recommendation, Sonny Curtis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of The Crickets.

Meadow, TX is a tiny town in the southern portion of the Texas Panhandle, and this is where Sonny Curtis was born on May 9th, 1937 in a dugout house during the depths of The Great Depression. Sonny’s extended family was musical. His uncles performed in a bluegrass group called the Mayfield Brothers. Sonny was teenage friends with Buddy Holly, and before the Crickets, they had a band together named The Three Tunes. Right in the mix of the formation of rock and roll and shortly after Buddy Holly’s death, Curtis was drafted and served in the US Army from 1960 to 1962.

The death of Sonny Curtis on September 19th after a brief illness was felt across popular American music. With the death of bass player Joe B. Maudlin in 2015, and drummer Jerry Allison in 2022, this colcludes the living legacy of The Crickets. Sonny Curtis was a skilled guitar player, a clever songwriter, and someone who left his fingerprints all across American culture in indelible ways.

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