Linda Ronstadt called it “an afterthought that we threw in.” The song took barely two and a half minutes, it had been a flop nineteen years earlier for the man who wrote it, and its singer treated it as little more than a lively moment for her concerts. Then it went to number five on the Billboard Hot 100, shared the top five with her own Blue Bayou, and helped make her the biggest female rock star in America. It’s So Easy is the story of a Buddy Holly failure that needed a second singer — and nearly two decades — to find its audience.
The Crickets’ Forgotten Farewell
Buddy Holly and his manager-producer Norman Petty wrote It’s So Easy! in 1958 — Petty’s name beside Holly’s on the credit was standard practice for the Clovis operation, whether or not he had contributed a note — and Holly recorded it with the Crickets between June and August of that year at Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico. It is pure Holly in miniature: bright, buoyant, a young man marveling at how simple it is to fall in love, carried on that hiccupping vocal delivery and a guitar figure as cheerful as anything he ever cut. Brunswick Records released it as a single in 1958 — and nothing happened. The record failed to chart at all.
It turned out to be the last single the Crickets released while Holly was still in the band. Within months the group had fractured, Holly had moved to New York and married, and in February 1959 he was dead in an Iowa plane crash at twenty-two. It’s So Easy! went into the catalogue as a footnote — a minor, uncharted side by a major artist, the kind of track that turns up on reissues and is skipped by all but completists. The song’s publishing eventually came under the control of Paul McCartney’s MPL Communications, one of many Holly copyrights McCartney acquired, but for years the song itself simply slept.
Holly’s reputation, at least, was being rebuilt around it. The 1973 film American Graffiti had put his music back in front of a young audience, McCartney — who idolized him — promoted an annual Buddy Holly Week in London, and a generation of musicians who had grown up on the Crickets, Ronstadt prominent among them, were beginning to treat the catalogue not as nostalgia but as a foundation. The songs were coming back. The question was which singer would get to one of the overlooked ones first.
That it slept so long is strange, because the raw materials were obviously first-rate: a melody that lodges in the mind on one hearing, a lyric of almost taunting simplicity, and a rhythm built for dancing. What it lacked in 1958 was timing — the Crickets’ commercial momentum had stalled, and the record business moved on. What it got, in 1977, was exactly the right interpreter at exactly the right moment.
The Holly Disciple
Ronstadt’s debt to Buddy Holly was deep and longstanding. The early rock and roll records — Elvis Presley, and Holly above all — were foundational to her musical education in Tucson, and as her career developed she returned to his catalogue with the regularity of a believer. On Heart Like a Wheel in 1974 she sang his valedictory ballad It Doesn’t Matter Anymore. In 1976, on the album Hasten Down the Wind, she took his signature hit That’ll Be the Day all the way to number eleven on the pop chart, with a full-throated rock arrangement that won respect for treating Holly not as an oldies act but as a living influence. That album also earned her the second Grammy Award of her career, for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female.
So when she and producer Peter Asher were assembling Simple Dreams in 1977 — the album that would become the best-selling studio record of her career — Holly was a natural place to look for energy. Asher, an Englishman who had come up in the duo Peter and Gordon before becoming a producer and manager, had shaped Ronstadt’s records since Don’t Cry Now in 1973, and together they had built the era’s defining interpreter’s catalogue: albums on which her voice and taste were the connective tissue across country, folk, soul, and rock sources. Simple Dreams was the method at its most confident. On one LP she moved from Warren Zevon’s Poor Poor Pitiful Me and Carmelita to the Rolling Stones’ Tumbling Dice, from Orbison’s Blue Bayou to the traditional ballad I Never Will Marry — and opened the whole record with Buddy Holly.
Ronstadt later said the inclusion of It’s So Easy was a last-minute decision, an afterthought, reportedly added to give the album and her concerts a burst of uncomplicated rock and roll. It opens the album, which tells you something about how the “afterthought” was actually regarded once recorded: a two-minute-twenty-seven-second shot of adrenaline placed where it would announce the record’s intentions.
Asher’s production sharpened everything. Where the Crickets’ original is loose and lean, Ronstadt’s version is a polished 1977 rock record — driving guitars, a tight rhythm section, and her voice, at the absolute peak of its powers, riding on top with echo and confidence. She doesn’t sing it like a revival. She sings it like she wrote it.
Two Singles in the Top Five
Asylum released Simple Dreams in September 1977, and It’s So Easy followed as a single on September 20, with the Spanish-language Lo Siento Mi Vida on the B-side. It entered the Hot 100 in early October and climbed steadily, reaching its peak of number five on December 10, 1977, where it stayed for three weeks, on its way to an eighteen-week chart run. It reached number nine in Canada and number eleven on the UK Singles Chart — an unusually strong British showing for a singer whose audience was primarily American.
What made the moment historic was what sat two places above it. At the same time, Ronstadt’s recording of Roy Orbison’s Blue Bayou was peaking at number three. She thus became the first artist since the Beatles — and the first female artist ever in that position — to hold two singles in the top five of the Hot 100 simultaneously. The two records were a perfect pair of advertisements for her range: Blue Bayou was all ache and atmosphere, a voice floating over a song about going home; It’s So Easy was joy at full sprint. Between them, Simple Dreams spent weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, displaced Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours in the process, and became, at the time, the second best-selling album ever made by a female artist, behind only Carole King’s Tapestry.
The industry noticed. Ronstadt appeared on the covers of Rolling Stone, Time, and People; she was, for a season, simply the biggest female star in rock. The album kept producing hits into the new year, too: Poor Poor Pitiful Me followed It’s So Easy into the top forty in early 1978, and Tumbling Dice became a single that spring. And still, in interviews years later, she described the number-five hit that opened her biggest album with a shrug: an afterthought that we threw in. There may be no better illustration of the difference between artists and audiences — the singer remembered the session’s casualness; millions of listeners remembered two and a half minutes of joy.
Why the Flop Became a Standard
The afterlife of It’s So Easy confirmed the hit. It became a permanent feature of Ronstadt’s concerts — the purpose for which it had reportedly been chosen in the first place — and when she performed it for her 1980 HBO concert special in Hollywood, later released as Live in Hollywood, it plays like a declaration of ease from a singer utterly in command of her instrument. In 2005 the recording reached a new audience in the film Brokeback Mountain, where its brightness cuts poignantly against the film’s landscape of unspoken feeling.
The deeper lesson of the song is about interpretation itself. The Crickets’ original and Ronstadt’s cover share a melody, a lyric, and a tempo of the heart — but the 1958 record is a supremely talented young man’s sketch, and the 1977 record is the finished painting, made by an artist who understood that Holly’s genius had always been about clarity. Every element of her version is a decision: the pace, the echo on the vocal, the guitars pushing her forward. She had been preparing to sing Buddy Holly her entire life; It’s So Easy is what that preparation sounded like when everything went right.
Nineteen years separated the flop from the hit. The song didn’t change. The world around it did — and it found, at last, the singer who could make falling in love sound as easy as the title promised. As afterthoughts go, it has few equals in pop history: a last-minute addition that out-charted almost everything the album’s planners had actually planned.