Traveling by plane can be dangerous, as musicians know.
The list of music luminaries who we've lost in plane crashes includes true icons, but
also partial or entire bands who were victims of bad weather, pilot error, or simply cruel
fate.
Here are the plane crashes that nearly wiped out entire bands.
In 1977, Lynyrd Skynyrd were riding high on the release of their fifth album, "Street
Survivors," as they departed on what was to be their biggest tour to date.
Rather than using a tour bus, the band had chosen to charter a private plane: a Convair
CV-240 operating out of Texas.
According to History, the plane had been previously considered for this same use by Aerosmith,
who had checked it out, but passed due to concerns about the crew.
If they had made a different decision, we'd probably be writing about them.
On October 20, 1977, Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane simply ran out of gas on its approach to Baton
Rouge, Louisiana.
The pilots (who would posthumously shoulder the blame for the crash) made a panicky request
for an alternate landing site to Houston air traffic control roughly 13 minutes before
going down in a wooded area outside Gillsburg, Mississippi.
Although 20 people survived the crash, it claimed the lives of lead singer Ronnie Van
Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and his sister and backup singer Cassie Gaines.
Although the band would eventually soldier on with Ronnie's brother Johnny taking over
lead vocals, they wouldn't release another album until 1991, and they never again achieved
the stratospheric levels of success they did before fate intervened.
Reba McEntire has had one heck of an enviable career over four decades and nearly three
dozen albums.
She's one of the great stalwarts of country music, with hit record after hit record without
ever changing up her traditionally influenced vocal style.
She's also appeared in a ton of movies and TV shows, including her eponymous sitcom,
which ran for six seasons between 2001 and 2007.
But smack dab in the middle of it all, a plane crash claimed eight of the 10 members of her
backing band.
As the star wrote in her 1994 autobiography, Reba: My Story, she was supposed to have been
on the plane, but remained behind in Saginaw, Michigan, after the night's gig due to a touch
of bronchitis.
A combination of the pilots' unfamiliarity with the area and the instructions an air
traffic controller who told them that it was just fine to buzz a nearby mountain at under
3,000 feet resulted in the plane clipping an outcropping with its wing, sending it tumbling
into rocky terrain, where it exploded in a ball of fire.
McEntire, of course, recovered professionally, but one never quite recovers personally from
such a loss.
Discussing the tragedy with Oprah Winfrey over 20 years later, the "Queen of Country"
broke down, saying:
"I don't guess it ever quits hurting."
Otis Redding was an absolute legend; his voice could make you dinner, give you some sweet
romance, rock your infant child to sleep, and do the dishes.
Memphis band the Bar-Kays were approaching that status as well, and their 1967 tour with
Redding was helping to cement it.
One of their two surviving members, James Alexander, told WREG Memphis that it was,
quote, "an amazing thing" just to be mentioned in the same breath with him.
Redding and the Bar-Kays played over a hundred shows together that year, one that should've
ended in triumph, but instead ended in tragedy when their small plane, carrying Redding and
every Bar-Kay member except Alexander, crashed into a Wisconsin lake.
Alexander rushed to the scene to be greeted by his shell-shocked bandmate Ben Cauley,
the only survivor of the crash.
Redding had just finished recording a rough version of what was to be his breakout crossover
tune, which instead became the first posthumous #1 pop hit in history, according to Best Classic
Bands.
Despite being a first draft, "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" is about as close to
a perfect song as you can get.
Cauley passed away in 2015; Alexander is still around, and he's the father of R&B producer
Jazze Pha, whom he named after his bandmate Phalon Jones.
En route to Zurich from Berlin in November 2001, Crossair Flight 3597 encountered violent
weather, and went down in the woods.
Of the 33 people on board, 24 perished, according to CNN.
Somewhat lost in the shuffle was the fact that among them were up-and-coming singer
Melanie Thornton, and two of the three members of the Dutch-German dance pop outfit Passion
Fruit.
The group, active since 1999, had scored hits in Germany with fun titles like "The Rigga-Ding-Dong-Song,"
"Sun Fun Baby," and "Bongo Man"; sure, they may not have been the Beatles, but their fans
loved them.
Particularly shocking was the fact that it was Crossair's second fatal crash in only
two years, and the airline ceased operations only a few months later, according to the
Chicago Tribune.
The cause of the crash was found to be pilot error, which you may recognize as a recurring
theme here.
In 2009, a commuter plane operated by small regional carrier Colgan Air experienced a
mid-air stall; according to the experts from the National Transportation Safety Board,
the pilot apparently then panicked, pulling back on the control column instead of pushing
forward, not once, but three times.
As a result, the plane tragically crashed into a house.
Among the 49 lost were Gerry Niewood and Coleman Mellett, the saxophonist and guitarist, respectively,
for the band headed by smooth jazz icon Chuck Mangione, whom you may know as a favorite
of Peggy on King of the Hill.
"Mmmm, that Chuck Mangione's one class act."
Mangione called the crash a "horrible, heartbreaking tragedy," and it prompted a strenuous reevaluation
of Colgan Air's training protocols.
This didn't seem to help, however; about a year and a half later, according to Fox News,
a Colgan flight en route to Lake Charles, Louisiana landed at the wrong airport, resulting
in action from the FAA.
Colgan ceased operations less than a year later.
Patsy Cline became a country music legend before even turning 30, but fate kind of seemed
to have it in for her, and she seemed determined to tempt it.
At 28, she was involved in a serious car crash, her second, which required months in the hospital
and major facial reconstructive surgery to recover from, but that only slowed her down
temporarily.
She spent the next couple years flying all over the place, country-ing it up with fellow
artists Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins, who had perhaps two coolest names we've ever
heard.
A week before the plane crash that took the lives of all three, City Pages reports that
she told a friend:
"Honey, I've had two bad ones.
The third one will either be a charm or it'll kill me."
The third one came after performing a benefit concert in Kansas City; fellow songstress
Dottie West had a bad feeling about Cline flying, and offered her a seat in her car
for the return trip to Nashville.
Cline, anxious to get home to her family, replied:
"Don't worry about me, Hoss.
When it's my time to go, it's my time."
Unfortunately, those words proved prophetic.
Once again, the inexperience of her small plane's pilot, who was her manager, Randy
Hughes, proved to be the determining factor in the crash.
Unbelievably, adding tragedy upon tragedy, fellow country artist Jack Anglin perished
in a car crash on the way to Cline's funeral.
Ricky Nelson was Justin Timberlake before Justin Timberlake was Justin Timberlake.
He didn't just have an enviable career; he had several, and seemingly transitioned easily
between them.
He began his showbiz career as a child star on the classic sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie
and Harriet, the stars of which were his real life parents.
At 16, he made his first album, and at 17, he scored his first #1 single.
At 19, he appeared in the classic Western Rio Bravo, kicking off a long film and television
career in his own right; the guy had pretty much conquered the world while still a teenager,
so when he embarked on a comeback tour in his 40s, nobody had any reason to think he
couldn't do it again.
But on New Years' Eve 1985, tragedy struck when Nelson boarded an old Douglas DC-3 propeller
plane with a history of mechanical problems.
He and his Stone Canyon Band had spent the better part of the year touring with Fats
Domino (who was not on board the plane), and they were on their way to Dallas for another
concert when the plane simply burst into flames in mid-flight, crashing into a pasture in
Texas.
Everyone aboard except the pilots was lost, including Nelson, his entire band, their sound
guy, and Nelson's fiancée, Helen Blair.
Jim Croce struggled for years to finally make it in the music world.
He wrote his first hit song, "You Don't Mess Around With Jim," in the cab of the truck
he was driving to make ends meet.
The New York coffee house circuit was where he finally found an audience receptive to
his sound, which was partially shaped by his friend and guitarist, Maury Muehleisen.
His fourth album, Life and Times, gave him his first #1 hit, "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown",
and for a couple of years, the singer-songwriter was finally getting his due.
He had just completed work on his fifth album, I Got a Name, when, on October 20, 1973, he
and Muehleisen along with three others lost their lives as their tiny, single-engine plane
struck a tree while attempting to take off.
Croce left behind not only his burgeoning career, but his wife, Ingrid, and a two-year
old son, A.J.
Ingrid went on to become a successful restaurateur, while A.J. followed in his dad's footsteps
to become a respected singer-songwriter who carries his father's name with him.
You may have heard of the "Day the Music Died", February 3, 1959.
On that day, a small plane went down in bad weather, taking with it three absolute trailblazers
of rock 'n roll: J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, one of the first rockabilly stars; Ritchie
Valens, the first Latino rock star; and Buddy Holly, whose mighty influence on the budding
genre would continue to be felt for literally decades.
The three had been on tour together spreading the good word of rock throughout the land,
and the crash that claimed their lives destroyed the innocence of teeny-boppers far and wide.
The plane had been chartered by Holly for himself and his band alone; Valens and Richardson,
suffering from a touch of the flu, had actually talked their way onto the doomed craft, according
to Rolling Stone.
Valens persuaded guitarist Tommy Allsup to give up his seat, and Richardson asked the
same of bassist Waylon Jennings, whom you may know went on to have a country-western
career of some note.
Jennings told Holly that he would just go ahead and take the bus to their next tour
stop, to which Holly jokingly replied that he hoped the bus would break down.
Jennings retorted: "I hope your ol' plane crashes."
Of course, Jennings went on to become the leather-wearing, bad boy outlaw of country,
because if you had inadvertently cursed one of the greatest musicians of all time, you'd
break bad, too.
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