The Day the Music Died
1959 American plane crash
On February 3, 1959, American rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and "The Big Bopper" J. P. Richardson were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, together with pilot Roger Peterson. The event later became known as "The Day the Music Died," a phrase popularized by Don McLean in his 1971 song "American Pie".
At the time, Holly and his band, consisting of Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Carl Bunch, were playing on the "Winter Dance Party" tour across the American Midwest. Rising artists Valens, Richardson and vocal group Dion and the Belmonts had joined the tour as well. The long journeys between venues in poorly heated tour buses contributed to illness and fatigue among the performers.
After performing in Clear Lake, Holly chartered a plane to reach their next venue in Moorhead, Minnesota. Richardson, suffering from the flu, swapped places with Jennings, taking his seat on the plane, while Allsup lost his seat to Valens on a coin toss. Shortly after takeoff, in wintry conditions, the Beechcraft Bonanza crashed into a field, killing all four on board.
The event has since been mentioned or referenced in various media. Various monuments have been erected at the crash site and in Clear Lake, where an annual memorial concert is held at the Surf Ballroom, the venue that hosted the artists' last performances.
Background
In November 1958, Buddy Holly terminated his association with The Crickets. According to Paul Anka, Holly realized he needed to go back on tour again for two reasons: he needed cash because the Crickets' manager Norman Petty had apparently stolen money from him, and he wanted to raise funds to move to New York City to live with his new wife, María Elena Holly, who was pregnant (although he already lived in New York when he started the tour). Holly signed up with General Artists Corporation (GAC) because "he knew they were planning a British tour and he wanted to be in on that."
For the start of the "Winter Dance Party" tour, Holly assembled a band consisting of Waylon Jennings (bass), Tommy Allsup (guitar) and Carl Bunch (drums), with the opening vocals of Frankie Sardo. The tour was set to cover twenty-four Midwestern cities in as many days—there were no off days. New hit artist Ritchie Valens, "The Big Bopper" J. P. Richardson and the vocal group Dion and the Belmonts joined the tour to promote their recordings and make an extra profit.
The tour began in Milwaukee on January 23, 1959, with the performance in Clear Lake, Iowa on February 2 being the eleventh of the twenty-four scheduled events. The amount of travel required soon posed a serious problem. The distances between venues had not been properly considered when the performances were scheduled. Instead of systematically circling around the Midwest through a series of venues in close proximity to one another, the tour erratically zigzagged back and forth across the region, with distances between some tour stops exceeding 400 miles (640 km). As there were no off days, the bands had to travel most of each day, frequently for ten to twelve hours in freezing mid-winter temperatures. Most of the Interstate Highway System had not yet been built, so the routes between tour stops required far more driving time on narrow two-lane rural highways than would now be the case on modern expressways.
GAC, which booked the tour, received considerable criticism for their seemingly total disregard for the conditions they forced the touring musicians to endure:
They didn't care. It was like they threw darts at a map ... The tour from hell—that's what they named it—and it's not a bad name.
The entire company of musicians traveled together in one bus, although the buses used for the tour were wholly inadequate, breaking down and being replaced frequently. Griggs estimates that five separate buses were used in the first eleven days of the tour—"reconditioned school buses, not good enough for school kids." The artists themselves were responsible for loading and unloading equipment at each stop, as no road crew assisted them. Adding to the disarray, the buses were not equipped for the harsh weather, which consisted of waist-deep snow in several areas and varying temperatures from 20 °F (−7 °C) to as low as −36 °F (−38 °C). When the bus was delayed in departing Duluth, Minnesota late on January 31, Valens suggested chartering a plane, but a replacement bus arrived in time.
In the early morning hours of February 1, while traveling from Duluth to a matinee performance in Appleton, Wisconsin, the bus's heating system broke down and its engine froze, leaving the musicians stranded on a remote stretch of U.S. Highway 51 near Pine Lake, Wisconsin. Temperatures reached as low as −40 °F (−40 °C) as they waited for help to arrive, with the musicians burning newspapers inside the bus to keep warm. It was two hours before Iron County sheriffs rescued the group, by which time Carl Bunch had developed frostbite in both feet. Bunch was taken to the nearest hospital in Ironwood, Michigan, where he remained under observation for the next few days, while the planned performance in Appleton was canceled. Taking a Chicago & North Western train from Hurley, the group made it to Green Bay, Wisconsin in time for that evening's performance at the Riverside Ballroom.
With Bunch removed from the tour group, Holly, Valens and Dion DiMucci (and Carlo Mastrangelo of the Belmonts who was a drummer) took turns playing drums for each other at the performances in Green Bay and Clear Lake, Iowa, with Holly playing drums for Dion, Dion playing drums for Ritchie, and Ritchie playing drums for Holly.
On Monday, February 2, the tour arrived in Clear Lake, west of Mason City, Iowa, having driven 350 miles (560 km) from the previous day's concert in Green Bay. Clear Lake had not been a scheduled stop; tour promoters hoped to fill the open date and called Carroll Anderson, the manager of the local Surf Ballroom, and offered him the show. Anderson accepted and they set the show for that night. By the time Holly arrived at the venue that evening, he was frustrated with the ongoing problems with the bus. After Valens closed his set at the Ballroom, he phoned his manager Bob Keane and after a conversation about the undesirable situation with the tour, they agreed that after the show in Moorhead, Ritchie would be going back to California. The next scheduled destination after Clear Lake was Moorhead, Minnesota, a 365-mile (590 km) drive north-northwest—and, as a reflection of the poor quality of the tour planning, a journey that would have taken them directly back through the two towns they had already played within the last week. No respite was in sight after that, as the following day, after having traveled from Iowa to Minnesota, they were scheduled to travel back to Iowa, specifically almost directly south to Sioux City, a 325-mile (520 km) trip.
Holly chartered a plane to fly himself and his band to Fargo, North Dakota, which is adjacent to Moorhead. The rest of the party would have picked him up in Moorhead, saving him the journey in the bus and leaving him time to get some rest. Their gig in Moorhead was to have been a radio performance at the station KFGO with disc jockey Charlie Boone.
Flight arrangements
Anderson chartered a plane from Dwyer Flying Service in Mason City, to fly to Fargo's Hector Airport, the closest airport to Moorhead; the pilot was Roger Peterson, a 21-year-old married man who had "built his life around flying".
Dwyer Flying Service charged a fee of $36 (equivalent to $400 in 2025) per passenger for the flight on the 1947 single-engined, V-tailed Beechcraft 35 Bonanza (registration N3794N), which seated three passengers and the pilot.
The most widely accepted version of events was that Richardson had contracted the flu during the tour and asked 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 damned bus freezes up." Jennings responded: "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes", a humorous but ill-fated response that would haunt Jennings for the rest of his life. Valens, who once had a fear of flying, asked Allsup for his seat on the plane. The two agreed to toss a coin to decide. Bob Hale, a disc jockey with Mason City's KRIB-AM, was emceeing the concert that night and flipped the coin in the ballroom's side-stage room shortly before the musicians departed for the airport. Valens won the coin toss for the seat on the flight.
In contradiction to the testimony of Allsup and Jennings, Dion has since said that Holly approached him along with Valens and Richardson to join the flight, not Holly's bandmates. In a 2009 interview, Dion said that Holly called him, Valens and Richardson into a vacant dressing room during Sardo's performance and said, "I've chartered a plane, we're the guys making the money [we should be the ones flying ahead]...the only problem is there are only two available seats." According to Dion, it was Valens, not Richardson, who had fallen ill, so Valens and Dion flipped a coin for the seat. Dion said he won the toss, but ultimately decided that since the $36 fare equalled the monthly rent his parents paid for his childhood apartment, he could not justify the indulgence.
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