Jerry Allison, the drummer in the 1950s rock band Buddy Holly and the Crickets whose rough-hewed style on “Peggy Sue” and “That’ll Be the Day” and on later recordings by the Everly Brothers set the template for percussionists including Mick Fleetwood and Ringo Starr, died Aug. 22 at his home in Lyles, Tenn. He was 82.

The cause was cancer, said Crickets guitarist Sonny Curtis.

“We always tried to keep everything relatively simple,” Allison told music blogger Scott K. Fish. “That was part of the plan. I have run across a lot of drummers in the 25 or 30 years – however long it’s been – and they play every lick they know. And a lot of them, they play so much you can’t even pick it up on a recorder.”

In truth, Allison, along with his idols Earl Palmer and Charles Connor – Little Richard’s drummers – innovated many of rock ‘n’ roll’s classic drum licks. On Holly’s recordings, Allison not only played on a four-piece drum kit, but sometimes used his sticks on a cardboard box or simply played a lone cymbal, as on “Well … All Right.” On Holly’s love ballad, “Every Day,” the percussion came from him slapping his thigh. On “Not Fade Away,” Holly played a Bo Diddley beat while Allison wove snare fills in and out of the guitar rhythm.

His work on “Peggy Sue,” is a deceptively simple use of paradiddles, a rudiment that most beginning drum students are taught to practice with a metronome. Allison recorded it on a lone and highly reverbed snare drum – the variation in tone and dynamics came from producer Norman Petty pulling the drums in and out of the mix – and he later moved the same rhythm between the snare and the tom-toms when the Crickets performed the song on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in December 1957.

Several drummers have noted that the “Peggy Sue” paradiddles require stamina to consistently play in time at a fast tempo. Years later, Fleetwood borrowed the pattern for the Fleetwood Mac song “Second Hand News” (1977).

“Peggy Sue,” which Holly initially thought should be done to a cha-cha or Latin rhythm, was originally going to be titled “Cindy Lou” for Holly’s niece. However, Allison had his sights set on a young woman from Lubbock, Texas, Peggy Sue Gerron, who would first hear the song during a Crickets concert in Sacramento, where she attended college.

“My heart pounded, and my cheeks were on fire,” she wrote decades later in her autobiography, “Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue?” “With people all around me bouncing, swaying and singing my name over and over, I sank down in my seat, covered my face with my hands, and cried out to myself, ‘What have y’all done to me?’ ” (Allison and Gerron, who married and quickly divorced, honeymooned in Acapulco, Mexico, with Holly and his new bride, Maria Elena Santiago.)

“That’ll Be The Day” was co-written by Allison and Holly after hearing John Wayne utter the title phrase in the 1956 Western “The Searchers.” With an earworm of a melody and lyrics that hide their bitterness behind Holly’s nonchalant delivery, the much covered tune is among rock ‘n’ roll’s ultimate kiss-off songs:

“Well, that’ll be the day

“When you say goodbye

“Yes, that’ll be the day

“When you make me cry

“You say you’re gonna leave

“You know it’s a lie

“Cause that’ll be the day

“When I die”

The song, now ranked 39 on Rolling Stone’s list of 500 greatest rock songs, sold more than 1 million copies and was later covered by performers including Linda Ronstadt. It was also placed in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry of culturally significant music in 2005.

Allison, who rarely took a lead vocal, had a minor solo hit, “Real Wild Child,” which he released under his middle name Ivan, with Holly on guitar. The tune peaked at No. 68 on the Hot 100 in 1958 and was later covered by punk rocker Iggy Pop in the ’70s.

In 1958, Holly moved to New York with his new wife, and his bandmates decided to stay in West Texas. The Crickets soldiered on with singer Earl Sinks and brought Lubbock guitarist Sonny Curtis into the fold. Holly died in a plane crash while on tour in February 1959 with fellow headliners Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson Jr., known as the Big Bopper.

In the early 1960s, the Crickets became the tour band for the Everly Brothers and Allison contributed the distinctive tom-tom fills to their recording “(‘Til) I Kissed You” (1962).

Jerry Ivan Allison was born in Hillsboro, Texas, on Aug. 31, 1939. He began drumming in his junior high marching band and by high school was working with Holly, who was three years his senior, sometimes just as a duo.

“We’d be playing at things like supermarket openings,” Allison told the Lansing (Mich.) State Journal in 1979. “Sometimes we’d get as much as $10 apiece.”

Holly and Allison, both fans of the popular doo-wop group the Spiders, rejected a series of insect names including the Beetles before settling on Crickets because, Allison said, they “make a happy sound.” Ironically, an English group would later choose the rejected name – with a different spelling, Beatles – in homage to the Crickets.

The Crickets’ recordings, post-Holly, included Curtis’s song “I Fought the Law,” later a hit for the Bobby Fuller Four and English punk rockers the Clash, and “More Than I Can Say,” co-written by Allison and Curtis, and later covered by Bobby Vee and Leo Sayer. Vee, a Holly-esque singer whose career took off after the Texas singer’s death, teamed up with Allison on the 1962 album, “Bobby Vee Meets the Crickets.”

In the ’60s and ’70s, Allison and Curtis focused on songwriting, starting a Nashville-based publishing company, Mark Three. The company’s copyrights included Curtis’s “Love Is All Around,” the theme to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

In later decades, Allison continued to play oldies and rockabilly shows with a rotating crew of Crickets and accompanied singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith on her 1997 album “Blue Roses From the Moons.” Allison, who owned the Crickets’ name, officially retired the group in 2012.

When not performing, recording or writing songs, Allison farmed with his wife of 63 years, the former Joanie Sveum, in Lyles, Tenn. Allison had no children.

Reflecting on the success of “Peggy Sue,” Allison once said: “When you listen to that song, tell me what in the world – why anybody would buy a song with those lyrics? But it’s the interpretation that comes across and that driving rock and it just bites you, you know?”