The Day the Music Died, dubbed so by a lyric in the Don McLean song "American Pie", is
a reference to the deaths of rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and
J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 3,
1959. Pilot Roger Peterson was also killed. After terminating his partnership with the
Crickets, Buddy Holly assembled a new band consisting of Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup,
and Carl Bunch, to play on the '"Winter Dance Party" tour. The tour also featured rising
artists Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, who were promoting their own recordings as
well. The tour was to cover 24 Midwestern cities in three weeks.
The distance between venues and the conditions prevalent aboard the poorly equipped tour
buses adversely affected the performers. Cases of flu spread among the band members, and
Carl Bunch was hospitalized due to frostbite. Frustrated by the conditions, Holly decided
to charter a plane when they stopped for their performance in the Surf Ballroom in Clear
Lake, Iowa, to reach their next venue in Moorhead, Minnesota. Carroll Anderson, owner of the
Surf Ballroom, chartered the plane from the Dwyer Flying Service. Richardson, who was
affected by the flu, swapped places with Waylon Jennings, taking the latter's place on the
plane, while Tommy Allsup lost his place to Ritchie Valens on a coin toss. Dion DiMucci
decided not to board the plane for the $36 fee.
The investigation of the accident determined that soon after take off, a combination of
poor weather conditions and pilot error caused spatial disorientation that made pilot Roger
Peterson lose control of the plane. Hubert Dwyer, owner of the flight service company,
could not establish radio contact and reported the aircraft missing the next morning. He
took off in his own Cessna 180 and spotted the wreckage less than six miles northwest
of the originating airport in a cornfield. He notified the authorities who dispatched
Deputy Bill McGill, who drove to the wreck site and found the bodies of the passengers
and pilot. They were later identified by Carroll Anderson.
Background
Buddy Holly terminated his association with the Crickets and his manager Norman Petty
during a reunion in Lubbock, Texas, on November 3, 1958. For the start of the "The Winter
Dance Party" tour, he assembled a band consisting of Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Carl
Bunch. The tour was set to cover 24 Midwestern cities in as many days. New hit artist Ritchie
Valens, J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, and Dion DiMucci joined the tour to promote
their recordings and make an extra profit. The tour began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on
January 23, 1959. The amount of travel created a logistical problem with the tour. The distance
between venues had not been considered when scheduling each performance. Adding to the
disarray, the tour bus was not equipped for the weather. Its heating system broke down
shortly after the tour began, in Appleton, Wisconsin. While flu spread among the rest
of the performers, Holly's drummer, Carl Bunch, was hospitalized in Ironwood, Michigan, for
severely frostbitten feet. The musicians replaced that bus with a school bus and kept traveling.
As Holly's group had been the backing band for all of the acts, Holly, Valens, and DiMucci
took turns playing drums for each other at the Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Clear Lake,
Iowa, performances. On February 2, the tour arrived in Clear Lake,
where they were to play at the Surf Ballroom. The venue had not been a scheduled stop, but
the tour promoters, hoping to fill an open date, called Surf Ballroom manager Carroll
Anderson and offered him the show. He accepted and they set the show for that night. By the
time Holly arrived at the venue that Monday evening, he was frustrated with the tour bus.
Holly decided to charter a plane to take him to Fargo, North Dakota, so the party could
pick them up to the next stop in Moorhead, Minnesota, to avoid traveling in the bus,
and to have enough time to do laundry. The plane
Carroll Anderson called Hubert Dwyer, owner of the Dwyer Flying Service, a company in
Mason City, Iowa, to charter the plane to get to Fargo, North Dakota. Flight arrangements
were made with Roger Peterson, a 21-year-old local pilot. The flying service charged a
fee of $36 per passenger for the single-engined, 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza 35, N3794N. The Bonanza
sat three passengers and the pilot. Richardson had contracted flu during the tour and asked
Waylon Jennings for his seat on the plane. When Holly learned that Jennings was not going
to fly, he said in jest, "Well, I hope your ol' bus freezes up." Jennings responded, "Well,
I hope your ol' plane crashes," a humorous but ill-fated response that haunted Jennings
for the rest of his life. Ritchie Valens, who had once had a fear of
flying, asked Tommy Allsup for his seat on the plane. Allsup and Valens decided to toss
a coin to decide. Bob Hale, a DJ with KRIB-AM, was working the concert that night and flipped
the coin in the ballroom's sidestage room shortly before the musicians departed for
the airport. Valens won the coin toss for the seat on the flight. Dion had been approached
to join the flight, although it is unclear exactly when he was asked. Dion decided that
since the $36 fare equaled the monthly rent his parents paid for his childhood apartment,
he could not justify the indulgence. Crash
When the show ended, Carroll Anderson drove Holly, Valens, and Richardson to the airport.
The plane departed from the ramp and taxied to then-Runway 17 at around 12:55 a.m. Central
Time on Tuesday, February 3. The weather report indicated light snow with a ceiling of 5,000
feet and winds from 29 to 37 mph. Though there were indications of deteriorating weather
along the route, the weather briefings Peterson received failed to relay the information.
The Civil Aeronautics Board investigated the crash. The results of the CAB investigation
suggest that, soon after takeoff, Peterson became disoriented due to the unfamiliar way
the attitude indicator in the aircraft functioned, combined with an inability to find a point
of visual reference on a starless night with no visible lights on the ground. He lost control
of the plane, and the tip of the right wing hit the ground. The aircraft tumbled across
a cornfield belonging to Albert Juhl. The Bonanza was at a slight downward angle and
banked heavily to the right when it struck the ground at around 170 mph. The plane appears
to have crumpled and then skidded another 570 feet across the frozen landscape before
the broken wreckage came to rest against a wire fence at the edge of Juhl's property.
Dwyer, the owner of the plane and the flight service company, who had witnessed the takeoff,
decided to establish radio contact, but all attempts were unsuccessful. Later that morning,
when Hector Airport in Fargo, North Dakota, had not heard from Peterson, Dwyer contacted
authorities and reported the aircraft missing. Dwyer took off in his Cessna 180 and flew
Peterson's intended route. Within minutes he spotted the wreckage less than six miles
northwest of the airport. The Sheriff's office dispatched Deputy Bill McGill, who drove to
the wreck site. The bodies of Holly and Valens lay near the plane. Richardson's body was
thrown over the fence and into the cornfield of Juhl's neighbor Oscar Moffett. Peterson's
body was entangled in the plane's wreckage. With the other participants on "The Winter
Dance Party" en route to Moorhead, it fell to Surf Ballroom manager Carroll Anderson,
who drove the musicians to the airport and witnessed the plane's takeoff, to make positive
identifications of the musicians. The county coroner Ralph Smiley declared that all four
had died instantly from "gross trauma" to the brain.
Investigation
Civil Aeronautics Board investigators concluded that the crash was due to a combination of
poor weather conditions and pilot error, resulting in spatial disorientation. Peterson, working
on his instrument rating at the time, was still taking flight instrumentation tests
and was not yet certified for flight into weather that required flying solely by instruments
rather than by his own vision. The final Civil Aeronautics Board report noted that Peterson
had taken his instrument training on airplanes equipped with an artificial horizon attitude
indicator and not the far-less-common Sperry Attitude Gyro the Bonanza was equipped with.
Peterson had also failed his instrument checkride shortly before the accident. Critically, the
two instruments display aircraft pitch attitude but depict such information in a visual manner
opposite of one another; therefore, the board considered that this could have caused Peterson
to think he was ascending when he was, in fact, descending. They also concluded that
Peterson did not receive adequate warnings about weather conditions that, given his known
limitations, might have caused him to postpone the flight out of prudence.
2007 investigation In 2007, Richardson's son had his father's
body exhumed and an autopsy performed to verify the original finding. This was done, in part,
because of the long-known discovery of Holly's .22 caliber pistol by Juhl in the cornfield
two months after the wreck. This gave rise to the question of whether an accidental firearm
discharge had caused the crash, and whether or not Richardson was not hurt as badly and
tried to crawl for help, since his body was found farther from the crash site. William
M. Bass undertook the procedure and confirmed Smiley's original report. The well-preserved
body of Richardson showed "massive fractures from head to toe" confirming that he also
died on impact. Aftermath
Holly's pregnant wife, María Elena, watched the first reports of his death on television.
A widow after six months of marriage, she miscarried the following day, attributed to
"psychological trauma". His mother, who heard the news on the radio in Lubbock, Texas, collapsed.
Because of María Elena's miscarriage, the authorities, in the months following, implemented
a policy against announcing victims' names until after families are informed. María
Elena Holly did not attend the funeral, and has never visited the gravesite. She later
told the Avalanche-Journal: "In a way, I blame myself. I was not feeling well when he left.
I was two weeks pregnant, and I wanted Buddy to stay with me, but he had scheduled that
tour. It was the only time I wasn't with him. And I blame myself because I know that, if
only I had gone along, Buddy never would have gotten into that airplane."
Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup continued the tour for two more weeks, featuring Jennings
as the lead singer. Meanwhile, Holly's funeral was held on February 7, 1959, at the Tabernacle
Baptist Church in Lubbock. The service was officiated by Ben D. Johnson, who had presided
at the Hollys' wedding just months earlier. The pallbearers were Jerry Allison, Joe B.
Mauldin, Niki Sullivan, Bob Montgomery, Sonny Curtis, and Phil Everly. Holly's body was
interred in the City of Lubbock Cemetery. His headstone carries the correct spelling
of his surname and a carving of his Fender Stratocaster guitar.
The first song to commemorate the musicians was Three Stars by Eddie Cochran. The accident
was later the subject of the 1971 Don McLean song "American Pie". The song dubbed it in
popular culture as "The Day The Music Died", which for McLean, symbolized the "loss of
innocence" of the early rock-and-roll generation. The accident was depicted in Buddy Holly's
1978 biographical film The Buddy Holly Story, as well as in Ritchie Valens' 1987 biopic
La Bamba. Memorial
In 1988, Ken Paquette, a Wisconsin fan of the 1950s era, erected a stainless steel monument
that depicts a guitar and a set of three records that bear the names of each of the three performers.
The monument is on private farmland, about one-quarter mile west of the intersection
of 315th Street and Gull Avenue, five miles north of Clear Lake. A large plasma-cut-steel
set of Wayfarer-style glasses, similar to those Holly wore, sits at the access point
to the crash site. Paquette also created a similar stainless steel monument to the three
musicians that is located outside the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where Holly,
the Big Bopper, and Valens played their second-to-last show on the night of February 1, 1959. This
second memorial was unveiled on July 17, 2003. In February 2009, a new memorial made by Paquette
for pilot Roger Peterson was unveiled at the crash site. A road originating near The Surf
Ballroom and extending north and passing the west of the crash site is now known as Buddy
Holly Place. Memorial concerts
Fans of Holly, Valens, and Richardson have been gathering for annual memorial concerts
at the Surf Ballroom since 1979. The 50th anniversary concert took place on February
2, 2009, with Delbert McClinton, Joe Ely, Wanda Jackson, Los Lobos, Los Lonely Boys,
Chris Montez, Bobby Vee, Graham Nash, Peter and Gordon, Tommy Allsup, and a House Band
featuring Chuck Leavell, James "Hutch" Hutchinson, Bobby Keys, Kenny Aronoff and Tommy Allsup.
Jay P. Richardson., the son of the Big Bopper was among the participating artists; Bob Hale
was the master of ceremonies for this event as he was at the concert in 1959.
References
Books
Further reading
External links
fiftiesweb.com Bakotopia Magazine's 50th Anniversary memorial
article 1959: Buddy Holly killed in air crash
Voices of Oklahoma interview with Tommy Allsup. First person interview conducted with Tommy
Allsup on September 8, 2011. Original audio and transcript archived with Voices of Oklahoma
oral history project.