3 February 1959—50 years ago.
The story of the plane crash in that Iowa cornfield is so well known that the facts are recognized even by those who only heard the story long after the fact. The implications of the accident that took the lives of Richie Valens, the Big Bopper (J.P. Richardson), and Buddy Holly continue to be debated even today.
All three of these young musicians had experienced modest success and had brilliant futures ahead of them, but historians of rock and roll especially consider the death of Buddy Holly a loss. After a brief career (four years if the clock starts when he was in junior high school), Buddy Holly has been called “the single most influential creative force in early rock and roll” (Bruce Eder). In these earliest days of rock, Holly appeared with Elvis Presley and with Bill Haley and the Comets, but he broke out on his own with “That’ll Be the Day” in 1956. As Holly worked to create a career, he recorded both as a single artist and with a group he founded, known as the Crickets. The story may be apocryphal or merely rock legend, but the new young group forming in Liverpool, England, called their group “the Beatles” in tribute to the Crickets from the dusty, West Texas town of Lubbock.
Holly went solo and was traveling with Valens, Waylon Jennings, and Richardson, going from one Midwestern gig to another in early 1959 before the fatal crash. Hard as it is to believe, these talented but obscure artists, more famous in death than ever in life, endured numerous hardships for their art. The bus on which they were traveling lost its heating system and the group’s drummer suffered frostbite on his feet and had to leave the tour—which meant for a while that the singers took their turns on the drums for various one-night stands. On the fateful night after a concert in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the group drove down to Clear Lake, Iowa, and then were due in Moorhead, Minnesota the next day. Buddy decided to charter a plane to travel north to take him, Waylon Jennings, and Tommy Allsup to their next performance. Richie Valens asked to go on the plane, so he and Allsup flipped a coin to see who would get the cherished seat on the Beechcraft plane. Allsup lost. Richardson had been sick with the flu so he asked Jennings to switch with him and Waylon agreed, later revealing that he was not sure he could come up with the $36 charge for each of the passengers. Thus it was that Valens, the Big Bopper, and Buddy all boarded the plane on that snowy night, intent on meeting up with the band the next day in Minnesota. And thus these three careers were ended before they really got started.
Don McLean’s song, “The Day the Music Died,” is aptly named.
The story of the plane crash in that Iowa cornfield is so well known that the facts are recognized even by those who only heard the story long after the fact. The implications of the accident that took the lives of Richie Valens, the Big Bopper (J.P. Richardson), and Buddy Holly continue to be debated even today.
All three of these young musicians had experienced modest success and had brilliant futures ahead of them, but historians of rock and roll especially consider the death of Buddy Holly a loss. After a brief career (four years if the clock starts when he was in junior high school), Buddy Holly has been called “the single most influential creative force in early rock and roll” (Bruce Eder). In these earliest days of rock, Holly appeared with Elvis Presley and with Bill Haley and the Comets, but he broke out on his own with “That’ll Be the Day” in 1956. As Holly worked to create a career, he recorded both as a single artist and with a group he founded, known as the Crickets. The story may be apocryphal or merely rock legend, but the new young group forming in Liverpool, England, called their group “the Beatles” in tribute to the Crickets from the dusty, West Texas town of Lubbock.
Holly went solo and was traveling with Valens, Waylon Jennings, and Richardson, going from one Midwestern gig to another in early 1959 before the fatal crash. Hard as it is to believe, these talented but obscure artists, more famous in death than ever in life, endured numerous hardships for their art. The bus on which they were traveling lost its heating system and the group’s drummer suffered frostbite on his feet and had to leave the tour—which meant for a while that the singers took their turns on the drums for various one-night stands. On the fateful night after a concert in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the group drove down to Clear Lake, Iowa, and then were due in Moorhead, Minnesota the next day. Buddy decided to charter a plane to travel north to take him, Waylon Jennings, and Tommy Allsup to their next performance. Richie Valens asked to go on the plane, so he and Allsup flipped a coin to see who would get the cherished seat on the Beechcraft plane. Allsup lost. Richardson had been sick with the flu so he asked Jennings to switch with him and Waylon agreed, later revealing that he was not sure he could come up with the $36 charge for each of the passengers. Thus it was that Valens, the Big Bopper, and Buddy all boarded the plane on that snowy night, intent on meeting up with the band the next day in Minnesota. And thus these three careers were ended before they really got started.
Don McLean’s song, “The Day the Music Died,” is aptly named.
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