On its face,
Holly in the Hills was seemingly one of the more artistically dubious
Buddy Holly albums to appear posthumously. Built around
Holly's pre-
Crickets recordings circa 1955, as part of the duo of Buddy & Bob, the familiar
Holly voice is present and easy to appreciate, though he's sharing the spotlight with Bob Montgomery and doing a repertory that's steeped thoroughly in country music, complete with fiddle accompaniment ("Baby It's Love," "I Gambled My Heart").
Holly was beginning to discover rock & roll and work out a sound of his own, as demonstrated by some of the cuts here, but he was still a country artist and doing a lot of ballads in that idiom as well. Apart from "I Wanna Play House With You," "Wishing," and "Down the Line" -- and as it happens, those three are killer tracks, worth the price of the album -- little here resembles the sound that
Holly subsequently became known for. All of it, however, is fine music, occupying a place in
Holly's career to what
the Everly Brothers' early Columbia sides represent in their history (though it is far more sophisticated than
the Everlys' sides). The presence of
the Fireballs, a band managed and produced by producer
Norman Petty, on several of the tracks, does bring the material up to a modern standard (circa 1965), and it's easy to see why this record sold well, especially in England, where it rode the charts for six weeks and just missed the Top Ten.
Holly in the Hills does represent a formative and legitimate component of
Holly's music, which is perfectly valid, and he does amazingly well in tandem with Montgomery on numbers like "Queen of the Ballroom" and "Soft Place in My Heart" -- had rock & roll not come along, it would be easy to see these Buddy & Bob sides having opened a career in country music for the two of them that could easily have carried them into the 1960s before a very different audience from the one
Holly actually ended up finding. ~ Bruce Eder