"Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue", immortalized by Buddy Holly, dies at the age of 78.

On Monday, Peggy Sue Gerron died at the University Medical Center Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, confirmed a hospital spokeswoman at the Washington Post. She was 78 years old.

Gerron was born in Olton, Texas, and grew up in Lubbock, where she will meet Holly and Allison, the man she will marry later. All three attended Lubbock High School. And once Allison and Gerron began to stabilize, they frequently joined Holly and his girlfriend for Cokes at the Hi-D-Ho Drive-In, as Gerron recounted in his 2008 memoir, "Qu & What happened to Peggy Sue?

But by the time Holly and the Crickets' music began to take off, Gerron moved to Sacramento to finish his studies at Catholic High School. Their path would not cross until she had received the call of her old friend, Allison, inviting her to the Sacramento Auditorium show, where they were on tour.

Allison had planned to court her with surprise "Peggy Sue".

The song was never supposed to be called "Peggy Sue", as many crickets, including Allison, said during interviews. Originally, the group planned to call it "Cindy Lou," named after Holly's niece. But producer Norman Petty had a problem with his chakha rhythm, as Allison had told NPR in 2000. Allison had stated that he would agree to change it to a paradon, a quick drum beat, if Holly agreed to change the name to "Peggy Sue," he told NPR. He wanted to impress Gerron.

And that apparently worked.

"I think Buddy was playing a little cupid there," Gerron told the American Statesman of Austin in 1999, referring to Sacramento's performance.

Once Gerron graduated from high school in 1958, she married Allison, resulting in the sequel to "Peggy Sue" written by Holly and titled "Peggy Sue Got Married".

"That's what I heard / Of course, the story could be wrong," he sang in the title of 1958. "It's she / I've been told / well, she's wearing a gold band / Peggy Sue married a short time ago. "

Holly recorded the song on a tape recorder at home in December 1958 – two months before her tragic death in a plane crash in Iowa, alongside singer Ritchie Valens, JP "The Big Bopper" Richardson and the pilot. That day, February 3, 1959, became known as "the day the music died" in Don McLean's song "American Pie."

Holly's "Peggy Sue Got Married" was released posthumously, later inspiring a Francis Ford Coppola film of the same name, starring Kathleen Turner and Nicholas Cage, but with an extremely different plot.

Allison and Gerron had been married for nine years. After their divorce, she went to Pasadena Junior College in California and became a dental assistant, according to her website, then met her second husband. The couple had two children together and they eventually created their own plumbing and sewer cleaning company called Rapid Rooter.

Nevertheless, she said, her replacement identity as Peggy Sue "internationally recognized", as she described on her website, never left her.

"I think they froze me in time," she told the BBC in 2009. "I think when most people think of me, it's a young woman frozen in a bygone era. But that did not limit me. You must be you.

Gerron finally returned to Lubbock in the mid-1990s to care for her sick mother and then write her memoirs, she said on her website. The memoir, however, was not universally welcomed: Holly's widow, Maria Elena Holly, threatened to sue Gerron for the book, claiming it contained fictitious events.

Gerron, who was then divorced from her second husband, claimed in the book that Holly, as the song indicated, was her true love and that without her death, each of them would divorce and marry. She said Holly even flirted with her on her honeymoon, but Maria Elena Holly told KCBD that Gerron and Allison had not joined them on their honeymoon. Gerron had maintained that the information was collected from 150 entries of his diary of the period.

Funeral arrangements have not yet been announced, reported the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

Friends and family told local news agencies that she would be remembered in Lubbock, where she could often be heard on local radio to share stories about Holly. One would remember her for keeping "the joy of the 50s," said her son-in-law, Tom Stathos, at KCBD.

And of course for his role in the history of rock.

"One thing she taught me is never to discriminate against music, no matter what it is, because it's part of your soul," said his grandson, Jeff. Rackham, at KCBD. "This song will probably be stuck in my head forever."

Here are the words of "Peggy Sue" by Buddy Holly.