His profession was tragically brief — Holly was only 22 when he died in the airplane crash that, amongst different things, impressed Don McLean’s “American Pie” — however from the forthright growl of the rocker “Oh, Boy! ” to the discreetly carnal swoops of the ballad “Raining in My Heart,” Holly’s singing matured in leaps. There’s lots of it for the hearing; he recorded incessantly between 1956 and 1959. Didn’t have that very-Sinatra baritone croon up his sleeve, the Detroit wild man born James Osterberg would have been one of the Art & Music most attention-getting vocalists ever, because of his ready-for-anything, scenery-eating yowl. Iggy’s full-bodied screech was the musical embodiment of his dead-end-kid persona, a rock & roll important, and the model for punk singing to come. As Lenny Kaye put it in his Rolling Stone review of Iggy and the Stooges’ 1973 basic Raw Power, Ig’s “double and even triple-tracked .
