The Buckinghams in Concert

“Sweet Soul Song,” is the title track from Holvay’s 2020 debut EP on his own MOB Town Records and his Official Video debuted today on YouTube. Just a few fast decades ago, James Holvay, a preteen from Brookfield, Illinois, would get his first guitar. He assembled his first band, Jimmy and the Jesters, as a teenager. Swept up in his love of the early groove of R&B music, he would ultimately become a fulltime musician, songwriter, and band co-founder for the next 20 years of his life. What was at first a high school flirtation with music, saw Holvay through college and propelled him head-first into a burgeoning new Wild West known as the recording industry, and eventually, the music business. But, if you’d have predicted in 1965, when he wrote “Kind of a Drag,” and made a rough demo recording of that song for Carl Bonafede to take back to his band, The Buckinghams, for consideration that James Holvay would be releasing his first solo music video in his career in 2021, after a l...

From Chicago to LA and back again, There’s magic in the air tonight and it’s thanks to a story, some 50+ years in the making, of how a group of talented musicians, many of them undiscovered, would come together, in a story of reaching the top of the charts on Billboard , Cashbox , and Record World , fueled by determination to carve out each leg of a journey that would take his songs all over the world. One man would stay the course over 50 years in between paths that kept him far from the stage and spotlights in between each foray into music. But still the music kept calling his name. When it comes to The Buckinghams, it just so happened that the body of work he wrote solo or with Gary Beisbier made possible a #1 hit record for The Buckinghams and the devotion to their music that comes from being named by Billboard Magazine as "The Most Listened to Band in America." Am I talking of the music of The Buckinghams, the five-man band from Chicago who found fame and acclaim...