That'll Be the Day
by Buddy Holly
- 114
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 53
- Danceability
- 61
- Acousticness
Buddy Holly went to see The Searchers with his older brother Larry, Jerry Allison and Sonny Curtis in June 1956. John Wayne kept saying "that'll be the day" in the film. The line gave the young musicians the idea for a song. Holly and Allison wrote "That'll Be the Day".
Holly first recorded it with the Three Tunes at Bradley Studios in Nashville on July 22, 1956. Decca, unhappy with his earlier singles, left it on the shelf. His contract barred him from re-recording the Nashville songs for five years, so the producer Norman Petty credited the Crickets on the new recording for Brunswick, a Decca subsidiary. Decca soon re-signed Holly to Coral, another subsidiary, and he ended up with two contracts. The Crickets cut the song on February 25, 1957, in Clovis, New Mexico, with everyone playing live and no overdubs. Brunswick issued it on July 27, 1957, and it was number 1 on Billboard's Best Sellers in Stores chart that year. Decca then put out the 1956 version on September 2, 1957, and it did not chart.
It was the first song the Quarrymen, the Liverpool skiffle group that became the Beatles, recorded as a demo disc. Petty was credited as co-writer though he did not contribute to it.
That'll Be the Day runs at 114 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.11 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 526 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.