Records and Roots: Waylon Jennings remembered friend Buddy Holly through gifted motorcycle

Inside the Nashville home of country legend Waylon Jennings was a wooden cigar store Indian. He often took it on tour, where it stood onstage for all to see.A closer look revealed a framed set of long pigtails, a gift from buddy Willie Nelson. When he attained sobriety, Jennings' wife Jessi Colter threw him a party in the home, which Nelson attended. Johnny Cash gifted his friend a desk; Willie Nelson chopped off his hair for his pal.Also inside Waylon's garage sat a 1969 Dodge Charger, color orange. It came from the television show "The Dukes of Hazzard," which Waylon narrated. A deeper look inside his home revealed a motorcycle.Born Wayland Arnold Jennings in Littlefield, Texas, the Country Music Hall of Fame member would have been 86 this month. An elongated battle with diabetes cut his life short in 2002 at the age of 64.But on his 42nd birthday in 1979, Joe Mauldin and Jerry Allison gave Waylon a 1958 Ariel Cyclone motorcycle. Mauldin and Allison had been in the late Buddy Holly's band, The Crickets.Holly and Jennings knew each other from their days in Lubbock, Texas. Holly hired Jennings to play bass guitar on his Winter Dance Party tour in 1959.Well, after a show in Clear Lake, Iowa, 22-year-old Buddy Holly, along with fellow pop stars Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson were killed in a plane crash just after midnight on Feb. 3, 1959. A generation later, Don McLean immortalized the tragedy with the line "the day the music died" from his epic song, "American Pie."Waylon Jennings was to have been on that fateful flight. However, the Big Bopper, who had the flu, swapped places with Jennings, who rode onward to the next town aboard a bus. Earlier that night, Jennings later said that Holly said to him, "Well, I hope your ole bus freezes up!" Jennings replied to Holly, "Well, I hope your ole plane crashes!"Jennings was haunted for years thereafter, and perhaps for the rest of his life, as a result.Nine months earlier, Buddy Holly and his Crickets band members Joe Mauldin and Jerry Allison were on tour. They were in Dallas on May 13, 1958. Each wanted a motorcycle, and so they ventured to a Harley-Davidson dealership in Dallas. Apparently rebuffed by a mistrusting salesman, the trio walked across the road to Miller's Triumph Shop.Holly bought an Ariel Cyclone, of which only 200 were made. Mauldin purchased a Triumph Thunderbird, and Allison decided on a Triumph Trophy.Alas, Holly and The Crickets split up five months later. That precipitated Holly's need for new band members, of which one was 22-year-old Waylon Jennings. After the plane crash killed Holly, his father kept the motorcycle for about 10 years, after which it switched several hands.Another decade passed. Mauldin and Allison, who had heard of Jennings' distress as a result of Holly's death, bought and then gifted the motorcycle to the "Good Hearted Woman" singer for his birthday in 1979. They located Jennings on tour in North Texas."I walked into my hotel room after the show and saw it sitting there. What else could I do?" Waylon Jennings wrote in his book, "Waylon: An Autobiography."Upon receiving his gift, Jennings did not hesitate."I swung my leg over it, stomped on the kick starter, and it burst into roaring life. First kick," Jennings wrote. "It was midnight, and it sounded twice as loud bouncing off the walls of that hotel room. I knew Buddy wouldn't mind."Decades later, Buddy Holly's motorcycle sat quietly inside Jennings' artifacts-laden home in a posh Nashville neighborhood. That is, until he and wife Jessi Colter moved to Arizona.Then Jennings died in 2002. An auction of Jennings' estate in 2014 included the motorcycle. Bids reached nearly half a million dollars, but the bike did not sell. Not then, anyway.Years earlier, the Buddy Holly Center opened in 1999 in Holly's hometown of Lubbock, Texas. Fans can see artifacts including Holly's signature black horn-rimmed eyeglasses he wore at the time of his death and the sunburst Fender Stratocaster he played during his final show.Well, among the Decca records framed, and Holly's personally owned photos and such, rests a motorcycle.The 1958 Ariel Cyclone bought and ridden by Holly and gifted to Waylon Jennings in 1979 resides in the Buddy Holly Center. They met in Lubbock, the city in which a rock 'n' roll star was buried young and the one that remembers a country legend today on the day of his birth.