Just before 1 a.m. on 3 February 1959, a red-and-white Beechcraft Bonanza took off from Mason City airport in Iowa into a night of light snow and a gusting crosswind. It was airborne for only a few minutes. The wreckage was found after daybreak in a cornfield eight kilometres north-west, and with it the bodies of the 21-year-old pilot, Roger Peterson, and his three passengers: Buddy Holly, aged 22; Ritchie Valens, aged 17; and J.P. Richardson — "The Big Bopper" — aged 28. American radio had lost three stars in one field. A dozen years later, Don McLean's song "American Pie" gave the event the name it has carried ever since: the day the music died.
The three had just played the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, a stop on the Winter Dance Party — a tour whose itinerary has become a byword for bad planning. The route zigzagged absurdly across the frozen Midwest, doubling back on itself so that the buses spent whole nights crossing country they had already covered. And the buses themselves kept breaking down; the heating failed so badly that Holly's drummer, Carl Bunch, was hospitalised with frostbitten feet. Holly, exhausted and out of clean laundry, decided to charter a small plane after the Clear Lake show to fly ahead to the next stop in Moorhead, Minnesota, and get some sleep.
The coin toss and the joke
Who filled the plane's three passenger seats was decided by flu, favours and a coin. Richardson, running a fever, asked Holly's bass player — a young Texan named Waylon Jennings — for his seat, and Jennings gave it up. Ritchie Valens, who had a fear of flying but had never been in a small plane, asked Holly's guitarist Tommy Allsup for his; Allsup flipped a coin, Valens called heads, and heads it was. "That's the first time I've ever won anything in my life," Valens is said to have remarked. The blackest footnote belongs to Jennings. When Holly teased him — "I hope your ol' bus freezes up" — Jennings shot back, "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes." The exchange haunted Jennings, later a country superstar and pioneer of the outlaw movement, for the rest of his life.
The official investigation blamed a combination of weather and pilot error. Peterson was not certified for instrument flying, and the board concluded he likely became disoriented in the snow-dark whiteout, misreading an unfamiliar attitude gyroscope and flying the aircraft into the ground at full cruising speed. The plane, incidentally, was not called "American Pie" — a persistent myth; McLean has confirmed he invented the title.
Three careers cut short
The losses were staggering in different ways. Holly, in barely eighteen months of stardom with and without the Crickets, had recorded hits like "That'll Be the Day", "Peggy Sue", "Everyday" and "Rave On" (writing or co-writing the first three), pioneered the two-guitars-bass-drums line-up, and shown that a bespectacled kid from Lubbock, Texas could write his own hits — a template the Beatles (whose name puns on the Crickets) studied devoutly. Valens, a Mexican-American teenager from Los Angeles, had been famous for barely six months, yet "La Bamba" — a rocked-up Mexican folk song sung in Spanish — made him the first Latino rock star; his story reached a new generation through the 1987 biopic La Bamba, whose Los Lobos title track went to number one on charts he never lived to see. Richardson was the tour's showman, whose novelty hit "Chantilly Lace" masked a sharp writer: he wrote "White Lightning", a country number one for George Jones, and "Running Bear" for Johnny Preston.
The tour, astonishingly, went on that night; among the fill-ins hired was a fifteen-year-old Fargo kid called Bobby Vee, whose career the tragedy launched. In 1971 McLean, who as a thirteen-year-old paper boy had learned of the crash while folding his newspapers, distilled the loss into the eight-and-a-half-minute "American Pie", whose cryptic verses have been decoded by amateurs ever since — McLean long refused to explain them, beyond saying it meant he would never have to work again. The Surf Ballroom still stands, still hosts a memorial concert each February, and a steel guitar-and-records monument marks the crash site at the end of a half-mile walk into the corn. Three young men chartered a plane to get a night's sleep and a load of laundry done — and became the first great martyrs of rock and roll.
Quiz nuggets
- Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson died on 3 February 1959 when their Beechcraft Bonanza crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa.
- Ritchie Valens won his seat on the plane from guitarist Tommy Allsup on a coin toss.
- Waylon Jennings gave up his seat to the flu-stricken Big Bopper and was haunted by his parting joke to Holly.
- The 21-year-old pilot, Roger Peterson, was not certified for instrument flying in the snowy conditions.
- Don McLean's 1971 song "American Pie" coined the phrase "the day the music died".