My song today is ‘True Loves Ways’. This song is attributed to Norman Petty and Buddy Holly and recorded with the Dick Jacobs Orchestra in October 1958, four months before the singer's death. It was first released on the posthumous album ‘The Buddy Holly Story: Volume 2’ in March 1960. The song was a hit in Great Britain in 1960, reaching Number 25 on the pop singles chart. In a 1988 re-release of the recording by MCA, the single reached Number 65 on the ‘UK Singles Chart’ in a 5-week chart run.
Although Holly's widow, Maria Elena Holly, claims that the song was written for her as a wedding gift, producer Norman Petty's productions claim that the song was recorded song two weeks prior to Buddy's first meeting with Maria.
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Until I recorded this song recently, I had grown up with the belief that this song was titled ‘True Love Waits’ and not ‘True Love Ways’.
I believe in the love between a mother and her child, a man and a woman, brothers and sisters and the closest of friends, but what is this ‘true love’ in essence? How does it affect us?
There have been thousands and even millions of quotations about the meaning of ‘true love’, but the only thing I know is that when ‘true love’ comes your way, your life is never the same again.
There isn’t anything the least bit rational about falling into ‘true Love’. Should it ever come your way, it will hit you like an express train; wham bam! Before you know it and have had the chance to pick your stunned body off the ground, the way you now perceive things today will be entirely different than the way you saw them yesterday. You will no longer be able to see anything rationally. When ‘true love’ hits you, it instantly takes your body to another stratosphere, leaving you and your loved one on ‘cloud nine’, which is that splendid cloud of isolation which permits no other entry to except the enraptured couple in love.
‘True love’ makes one lose control, lose a sense of perspective, lose the ability to protect oneself. True love is utterly chaotic, and the greater and more intense the loving feeling, the greater the ensuing chaos.
Ask anyone impartial who witnesses such a changed state in another, and they’ll tell you that there’s no talking reason with them. They’ll tell you that it’s as though the person is high on L.S.D. or some other opiate, and they’ll be accurate in their description of this irrational body change that ‘true love’ has brought about.
There is simply no way things can be discussed rationally by two people madly in love with each other and an impartial third party! Anyone who doesn’t see the world the way the loving couple sees it, the more convinced the loving couple come to believe that they are surrounded by a bunch of losers and saddos.
Love does make this world of ours go around and around, but ‘true love ways’ takes the couple into a galactic dizzy spin. By the time the world has slowed down in its love orbit, and the romantic duo finds themselves back down on earth, rooted in reality once more; they find that the rest of the world has moved on in their love-sick absence.
They now find themselves married with two snotty-nosed children who give them sleepless nights and shitty days. Instead of flying as free as all lovebirds are supposed to fly, they discover that their wings have been clipped by the cold reality of ‘survival’ in the real world, along with being weighed down with the albatross of a forty-year mortgage around their necks and the provision of financial support to their children for the rest of their lives. The household costs are now immeasurably higher than the couple’s weekly income is (or is ever likely to be). Economic considerations now determine that the wife must stop being a mother to her two young children (who are now at the age where they need their mother’s daily presence more and more) and go out to work also to meet the household expenditure. And what for, you might ask? What does this young working mother profit by abandoning her children by going out to work daily with a load of guilt on her back that she will never again rid herself of, plus a tattooed forehead which reads ‘BAD, BAD MOTHER’. It doesn’t even make any economic sense, because she hardly earns marginally more than it cost to pay a responsible childminder to look after her young children, with whom she’d much rather have spent her day.
Ten years down the line, both man and wife can see themselves being knocked off their feet again by a track of locomotives heading straight towards them. This time it isn’t the ‘love train’ that knocks them for a six and flattens them, but the ‘never-have-enough-money-train’ and the ‘fed-up-being-married-train’, and the ‘I’m-knackered-all-the-time-train’ and the ‘I’ve-got-a-headache-coming-on-train’ and the ‘Has-it-all-been-worth-it-train?’
True love ways are sometimes great ways, and at other times, ‘any-way-but-ways’.
Love and peace Bill xxx