Half a century on, Buddy Holly's widow is fighting with the woman made famous by his hit song Peggy Sue. Maria Elena Holly is demanding that Peggy Sue Gerron should withdraw a tell-all memoir about the rock'n'roll pioneer which claims that he once suggested that they should run off together.

“It's very interesting that this woman makes up all these stories,” Mrs Holly said from her home in Dallas. “He never, never considered Peggy Sue a friend.”

But Ms Gerron, who married Holly's drummer, insists that she is the true “First Lady of rock'n'roll”. “It's my book, my memoirs,” she said. “We were very, very good friends. He was probably one of the best friends I ever had.” Buddy Holly, who burst on to the music scene with the 1957 hit That'll Be the Day, recorded Peggy Sue in the same year, when Ms Geron was a 17-year-old high-school pupil in Texas. Their first meeting, according to her website, came when Holly accidentally knocked her down in the hallway at Lubbock High School while running, with guitar and amplifier, to get on stage for a music assembly in the school auditorium. “I'm too late to pick you up,” he said, “but you sure are pretty.”

The classic song was originally going to be called Cindy Lou after his niece. After a bumpy recording session Holly decided to rewrite it and his drummer, Jerry Allison, suggested that he call it Peggy Sue. Soon afterwards he married Ms Gerron. Three weeks later Holly tied the knot, with Ms Gerron and Mr Allison as maid of honour and best man.

Holly also recorded Peggy Sue Got Married, which Francis Ford Coppola made the title track for his 1986 film about a woman who regrets her high-school choice of husband. Holly died on February 3, 1959, at the age of 22 in a plane crash that also killed the singers Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson — memorialised in Don McLean's American Pie as “the day the music died”.

Ms Gerron said she wrote her memoir, Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue?, to tell the “real story”. Mark Faulk, her publisher, said the book recounted how Holly suggested to Ms Gerron in a lift in New York that they both get divorced and run off together.

“From what is in the book, they had - I don't know how to say this - a very close relationship. I do not believe there was any type of illicit affair at all. I cannot remember they even had a kiss. But there was definitely a bond beyond friendship,” he said.

Mrs Holly is insisting that the book be withdrawn. “Confusion and tarnishment of Buddy Holly's name and Mrs Holly's reputation are likely to result from this unauthorised book,” her lawyers wrote in a cease-and-desist letter.

Ms Gerron plans to go ahead. “I feel I have every right to write my book. That's why we live in America.” she said.

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