I was driving back from Bay Ridge last Saturday, getting ready to listen to WFMU’s lovably inane Fool’s Paradise — “a two hour excursion to nowhere featuring vintage rockabilly, R&B blues, vocal groups, garage, instrumentals, hillbilly, soul and surf” — when I chanced on an interview with one-time Buddy Holly sideman Sonny Curtis. Sonny missed that last plane ride with Buddy, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens and went on to write an eclectic collection of enduring rock staples. Sonny would be assured a pretty good table in that big club in the sky if he had written nothing other than “I Fought the Law,” but if you throw in “Walk Right Back” and “Love Is All Around” (aka the Mary Tyler Moore theme, famously covered by the Replacements), you’ve got bonafide rock royalty.

Not that you’d know it to listen to him. What struck me most about Sonny (I had no idea he was alive, let alone making phone calls to punk stations in New Jersey) was his humility. We’re not talking phony showbiz without-the-little-people-who-would-I-be kind of cheese; Sonny is a guy who feels fortunate to have eked out a career making the music he loves, and that he arguably helped invent, and sounded authentically flabbergasted to hear DJ Michael Shelley refer to him as a legend. To hear Sonny tell it, he just caught some good breaks. It was all about work, an endless hustle, one that led him down commercial alleys to put processed bread on the table (he wrote jingles for MacDonalds to the “You Deserve a Break Today” theme). He’s playing next month in Connecticut with some semblance of the Crickets. Bring the family.

This is a guy who, as a teenager, wrote “Rockin’ Around with Ollie Vee” for Holly. It’s the first song you hear the Crickets play, at a skating rink, in the Buddy Holly Story, and one of the first old rock songs I discovered in high school, when the Blind Faith version of “Well All Right” led me back to the original, a Holly song that svengali/sleaze bag Norman Petty conveniently claimed to have co-written — and Sonny wouldn’t even say nothing nasty about Norman Petty, which is easier than taking shots at Colonel Tom Parker.

And how can you argue with the logic of lines like “I needed money ’cause I had none”? When Bobby Fuller sang “I Fought the Law” it had a kind of wistful fatalistic quality while the Clash cover ripped the doors off the jail cell as Joe Strummer led a doomed prison break through the joint, Hate and Love tatooed on the knuckles of his hands, taking no prisoners. It was Sonny who gave them — and Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead and who knows how many others who covered that song — the tabula rasa to write their confessions on. And rather than feel resentful for not basking in the glory, Sonny just sounds like he’s happy to be around and playing. He deserves a jail break today. Call him a free man.