Did you know that a gun was found on the site of the plane crash that ended the
lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper? So was foul play involved
in the deaths of the three 50s rock and roll stars? Keep watching to find out.
On Feb. 3, 1959, a chartered plane left Clear Lake, Iowa,
and headed for the nearby Moorhead, Minnesota. The pilot was 21-year-old Roger Peterson.
At the time of takeoff, Peterson had no idea there was a severe weather warning in place.
Buddy Holly was just 22 years old at the time, but he'd been performing since he was 16.
He was a regular on his local radio station when he was in high school,
and things seriously took off when, in 1955, he opened for Elvis. Just two years later, he and
his band — Buddy Holly and The Crickets — scored a hit with "That'll Be The Day." Over the next year,
they had a whopping seven Top 40 singles, and the world, as they say, was his oyster.
Ritchie Valens was just 17 years old, but he was already known as rock's first Latino
headliner. He'd hit it big with "La Bamba," "Donna," and "Come On, Let's Go," which is
even more impressive considering he'd only joined his first band just a year before.
And then there was J.P. Richardson — who performed professionally under the name The Big Bopper. A Texas native like Holly.
Richardson got his start — and moniker — as a DJ in Beaumont, Texas.
A songwriter and performer, he had his own hit with "Chantilly Lace"
and — having written several other number one hits of 1959 — ended up on the fateful tour.
In 1959, Buddy Holly had big plans. After an amicable split from The Crickets, Holly was planning on starting his own record label,
his own publishing company, and his own studio. He was short on cash, though, so he signed on
with the Winter Dance Tour, a grueling concert tour that haphazardly crisscrossed the Midwest.
It's not an exaggeration to say it was cursed from the start. It was mid-winter,
and the performers traveled in old, retired school buses that had a tendency to break
down during the drive from one gig to the next — which were usually hundreds of miles apart.
On January 31, Holly and his band were headed across Wisconsin when their bus froze and left
them stranded in howling winds and 30-below-degree temperatures. They even burned newspapers in an
attempt to keep warm, and it didn't work — Holly's drummer ended up with frostbite. It
wasn't the first time misery descended, either. Holly historian Bill Griggs told the Star Tribune:
"The tour from hell — that's what they named it — and it's not a bad name."
After the group was rescued from the freezing cold and their equally frozen bus, drummer Carl
Bunch was hospitalized with frostbite. The rest went on to Hurley, Wisconsin, and from
there it was on to Green Bay, then Appleton for a show that had been canceled. The next day was
supposed to be an off day, but they got word that they'd had a date added in Clear Lake, Iowa — 355
miles away. Once they arrived in Clear Lake, Buddy Holly — and everyone else — had enough.
While they were setting up for the Clear Lake show, Holly chartered a plane from
Dwyer Flying Service. It cost $108 for the plane and pilot, and after the end of the
gig — and a round of autograph signing — the group headed off. Roger Peterson,
the pilot, had promised to file a flight plan from the air but never made contact.
The 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza hit the ground about five miles outside of Clear Lake,
skidded around 500 feet, and much of it disintegrated on impact. The remains of the pilot
were later found inside — the three musicians had been thrown clear but died instantly.
It was Buddy Holly who chartered the small plane, and it was a given that he was going
to get one of the three seats. Originally, he had gotten it for him and his band members,
guitarist Tommy Allsup and bass player Waylon Jennings. Fate had other ideas.
It started with the Big Bopper. He'd been feeling sick, and by the time the Clear Lake
show happened, he was deep into a bout of the flu. He hadn't had the chance to sleep,
and the plane wasn't just more comfortable, it was a chance to grab some shut-eye on the other side.
He approached Jennings, asked to swap, and they did. Years later, Jennings told the Tennessean
that the incident had haunted him for the rest of his life — and not just because of the swap.
"Look, I never even saw a
picture of the plane crash until 15 years later. I wouldn't look at it."
As they said goodbye for what would be the last time,
Holly had joked that he hoped Jennings' bus broke down. Jennings responded:
"I hope your ol' plane crashes."
Jennings told CMT in a 1999 interview:
"I blamed myself. Compounding that was the guilty feeling that I was still alive. I
hadn't contributed anything to the world [...] compared to Buddy. Why would he die and not me?"
After hearing about the deal that The Big Bopper had made with Waylon Jennings, Ritchie Valens
started working on Tommy Allsup for his seat. Allsup refused — repeatedly — until the very end.
It was when Allsup headed back into the club to make sure they'd packed all their gear
that he ran into Valens as he signed a final autograph. He asked one more time,
and Allsup pulled out a coin. They flipped, Valens called heads and won the seat.
"I've did 50 years of suffering, you know, over my story."
Still, Allsup was originally listed as one of the crash victims — he'd given
Buddy Holly his wallet and ID and asked him to pick up his mail when he got to Minnesota.
Allsup went on to a major career of his own, playing guitar for performers like Willie Nelson,
Roy Orbison, Merle Haggard, and — appropriately — Jennings. He was also a talent scout, producer,
and rep for Liberty Records. Allsup died in 2017 — at age 85 — and his son, Austin,
said that he had always seen that coin toss as, quote, "a blessing," one that
he paid tribute to in the name of his Dallas bar — Tommy's Heads Up Saloon.
While it might seem like a given that the remaining dates of the tour would be canceled, that actually didn't happen.
Local acts were brought in to fill the slots of those killed in the plane crash,
and some of those last-minute fill-in acts ended up becoming massive stars in their own right.
Robert Velline of Fargo, North Dakota was just 15 years old when he and his
band — the Shadows — were called in to perform at the Moorhead, Minnesota show.
"When they were talking about going on with the show. And I thought, 'There is no show.
Three stars are dead.'"
Velline — who went on to change his name to Bobby Vee — said the show was the start of
a wonderful career, and it was. Within a matter of months, Vee recorded his first hit — "Suzie
Baby" — and signed with Liberty Records. Between 1959 and 1970 he had 38 songs in the Top 100,
and there's another footnote to this part of the tale, too. One of Vee's fellow bandmates
from the Shadows also went on to an illustrious career in his own right — his name was Bob Dylan.
Vee was still recording and touring decades later, and in 2011 he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
He released one more album — The Adobe Sessions — on the 55th anniversary of
that fateful plane crash. Vee passed away in 2016. He was 73.
Buddy Holly had a terribly short career. His first studio records were made on Jan. 26, 1956 — just three years and a handful of days later,
he was gone. Still, his contributions to music were staggering, and it's impossible
to imagine what he would have done had he lived to the ripe old age he should have.
Rolling Stone has him sitting comfortably at Number 13 on their list of 100 Greatest
Artists list, and it's Grammy-winning artist John Mellencamp who wrote Holly's entry. Mellencamp
referred to Holly as one of popular music's first great singer-songwriters and lauds the "Rave On"
singer for his ability to make every person in the audience feel as though he was speaking to them.
Without Holly, it's unlikely there would have been the Beatles, at least in the
way everyone's familiar with today. The Beatles covered Holly in their early Cavern Club days,
and in 2014, Paul McCartney arranged to have his tour go through Lubbock,
because he had always wanted to play in Holly's hometown.
In 2015, something odd happened — there was a serious call to reopen the investigation into
what had caused the plane crash that awful day in 1959. Federal investigators were, in fact,
considering reopening the case, and the rumors about what might have happened were strange.
Two months after the crash — and the ruling of pilot error — a .22 caliber pistol was found
at the site. That — and the fact that The Big Bopper had actually been found in a neighboring
field — led to rumors that the cause had actually been an accidental discharge of the gun,
and theories suggested that Richardson had been shot.
Texas Monthly spoke with the plane's owner, Jerry Dwyer. In spite of the fact that no bullet holes
in the plane or the bodies were ever identified, Dwyer remained convinced there was more to the
story. He claimed that he was in the midst of writing a book about what really happened,
and added that he had kept pieces of the wreckage because it backed up his theories.
Not long after the possibility of reopening the investigation was announced,
the National Transportation Safety Board had refused the request.
The Big Bopper's son — Jay Richardson — never met his father. His mother was pregnant when the crash happened,
and it was the younger Richardson who hired a University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist
to examine and x-ray his father's remains in an attempt to put rumors to rest once and for all.
The whole thing started in 2007, when Richardson's son was preparing to move him to another area of
the cemetery where he was buried. When they opened the casket, they found a body that
was in "remarkably good condition" and were able to x-ray the remains. The findings were grisly,
but telltale — nearly every bone was broken — ruling out theories that he had survived and
attempted to go for help. Furthermore, there was no trace of a gunshot wound.
Richardson's son later announced he was going to auction off his father's original casket.
His father was later reburied in a different location with a life-sized statue and marker.
Meanwhile, the younger Richardson had been planning on using the money from the auction
to fund a musical about the Big Bopper's life.
Don McLean's "American Pie" is one of those iconic songs that — when it comes right down to it — no one knows the
meaning of. McLean has been notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to revealing
what the song is actually about, there's only a few things people seem to agree on.
The song is a lament for the loss of the American dream amid the chaos of the 1960s, a downward
spiral with a beginning marked by the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper.
McLean has — sort of — confirmed that yes, "The Day the Music Died" was always meant to be about
Holly, who was a childhood idol. But he adds that it was just as much about his own family,
and if there's any consolation, he's said why he doesn't like talking about
the lyrics and exactly what they mean. McLean told The Guardian:
"I don't like talking about the lyrics because I wanted to capture
and say something that was almost unspeakable. It's indescribable."
The music, as they say, may have died that day, but it will never fade away.
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