THE STORY OF A SONG: "I Fought The Law", Bobby Fuller's masterpiece

Chart debut on January 29, 1966 - reached #9;  #33 in England

Following the February 1959 death of their ex-leader Buddy Holly, the Crickets split from manager Norman Petty, and signed with Coral to record in New York. Sonny Curtis came up with the idea for I Fought the Law while he was working on his father’s west Texas farm. The band recorded the number on their first session for the album In Style with the Crickets. Curtis contributed a strong guitar lead, but the rest of the performance was ragged, and with a bland vocal by Earl Sinks, the record went nowhere. (In the 1970s, Curtis would gain pop-culture immortality in his own right for writing and singing the theme song for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Love Is All Around). Seven years later, the song became a rock classic as performed by the Bobby Fuller Four.

Born October 22, 1943 in Baytown, Texas, Fuller was a teenager when Lubbock native Holly died, so he knew the Crickets' music well. As lead singer and guitarist, he formed the quartet in El Paso (including his brother Randy on bass). They released a couple of 1961 singles on the Yucca label, did 1962-1963 singles for Eastwood (a cover of Holly’s Not Fade Away) and Todd, and signed with Exeter in 1964. Their second single for the label that year was I Fought the Law, but it too didn't sell. After additional failed singles on Donna and Liberty, Fuller moved to Mustang in 1965, and a few flops later, he tried a new version of I Fought the Law— and this one exploded. 

Dave Marsh writes that nearly every rock band ever since has tried to mimic the “sheer aggression” of Fuller’s performance, “but nobody's ever come close to capturing the convulsive power of the original’s successive bursts of drums, guitar, and voice.” He notes that the “skittering guitar solo”, Fuller’s hiccupping vocal, and echo-laden production all evoke the Holly sound as updated to a new decade—just as the band’s follow-up Top Forty hit, a cover of Holly's Love's Made a Fool of You, would also do. 

Tragically, on July 18, 1966, just months after finally achieving rock stardom, Fuller died mysteriously of asphyxiation. Over the years, the song has accumulated over three million broadcast performances. In 1995, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honored I Fought the Law as one of the five hundred songs that shaped rock—and in a sense, actually selected it twice, along with John Mellencamp’s rewritten homage, Authority Song.