Peggy Sue has died

Peggy Sue - yes that one

Peggy Sue Gerron was 17 years old, a senior at a Catholic girls school, when the world heard her name radiate over the airwaves on its way to rock ’n’ roll immortality.

And she was in the crowd the night Buddy Holly and the Crickets played it for her for the first time at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, as she sunk down in her chair and blushed while dozens of people screamed her name.

“Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue,” Buddy Holly sang in the 1957 single, “Oh how my heart yearns for you!”

The “Peggy Sue” of Buddy Holly and the Crickets fame would go on to become one of the most influential songs in rock history. But Peggy Sue herself — whose love interest was not Holly, but Crickets drummer Jerry Allison — would drift out of the ’50s to trade poodle skirts for dental hygienist scrubs, going on to raise a family and start a business in California.

As she wrote on her own website: “Peggy Sue is much more than a song.”

On Monday, Peggy Sue Gerron died in Lubbock, Texas, her hometown. She was 78.