Down the Line: Rarities

This remarkable collection features 59 rare tracks, studio outtakes, home recordings and demos drawn from every stage of Buddy Holly’s brief but remarkable career, running the gamut from Holly’s tentative but nonetheless fascinating teenage stabs at songs by Hank Snow and Elvis Presley to the entirety of the fabled Apartment Tapes, hushed acoustic numbers recorded by Holly a short time before his death in February of 1959. Though much of this material has been collected before, by presenting all of it as a single coherent document Geffen Records has handed listeners the equivalent of an artist’s sketchbook, a collection of rugged but revelatory work that offers a tantalizing glimpse into Holly’s creative process. Even the covers, of which there are many, are remarkable, not only for Holly’s reliably incendiary performances but for their stylistic breadth. Holly’s canny choice of covers explicitly illustrates the manner in which he was able to synthesize the raw materials of American popular music, honky-tonk, Blues, Creole music, and rock ‘n’ roll into a fascinatingly polyglot, but distinctively new style of music that was entirely his own.