The Day the Music Died
On February 3, 1959, American rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and "The Big Bopper" J. P. Richardson were all killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, together with pilot Roger Peterson. The event became known as "The Day the Music Died" after singer-songwriter Don McLean referred to it as such 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 on board the cold, uncomfortable tour buses adversely affected the performers, with cases of flu and even frostbite.
After stopping at Clear Lake to perform, and frustrated by the conditions on the tour buses, Holly chose to charter a plane to reach their next venue in Moorhead, Minnesota. Richardson, suffering from flu, swapped places with Jennings, taking his seat on the plane, while Allsup lost his seat to Valens on a coin toss. Soon after takeoff, late at night and in poor, wintry weather conditions, pilot Peterson lost control of the light aircraft, a Beechcraft Bonanza, which crashed into a cornfield, 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. Holly signed up with General Artists Corporation 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, Tommy Allsup and Carl Bunch, with the opening vocals of Frankie Sardo. The tour was set to cover twenty-four Midwestern cities in as many daysthere 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. 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:
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 to as low as. 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 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 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 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 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 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 per passenger for the flight on the 1947 single-engined, V-tailed Beechcraft 35 Bonanza, which seated three passengers and the pilot. A popular misconception, originating from Don McLean's song about the crash, was that the plane was called American Pie; no record exists of any name ever having been given to N3794N.
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. Valens is apocryphally said to have remarked, "That's the first time I've ever won anything in my life."
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 ...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. In his interview, no mention is made of Jennings or Allsup being invited on the plane. 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.
Take-off and crash
After the show ended, Anderson drove Holly, Valens and Richardson to nearby Mason City Municipal Airport, where the elevation is AMSL. The weather at the time of departure was reported as light snow, a ceiling of AMSL with sky obscured, visibility and winds from. Although deteriorating weather was reported along the planned route, the weather briefings Peterson received failed to relay the information.The plane took off normally from runway 17 at 00:55 CST on Tuesday, February 3. Hubert Jerry Dwyer, owner of the flying service, watched the southbound take-off from a platform outside the control tower. He was able to clearly see the aircraft's tail light for most of the brief flight, which started with an initial 180 degree left turn to pass east of the airport, climbing to approximately AGL. After an additional left turn to a northwesterly heading, the tail light was observed gradually descending until it disappeared. Around 1am, when Peterson failed to make the expected radio contact, repeated attempts were made to establish radio contact, without success. Later that morning at daylight, after several attempts to contact the plane were unsuccessful, Dwyer retraced Peterson's planned route by air, and around 9:35 am he spotted the wreckage less than northwest of the airport.
The Bonanza had impacted terrain at high speed, estimated to have been around, banked 90° to the right and in a nose-down attitude. The right-wing tip struck the ground first, gouging a furrow, crumpling then breaking off. The fuselage then hit the ground right-side down and bounced a few feet back into the air, traveling another through the air, simultaneously rolling inverted due to the remaining left wing still generating lift. The plane struck the ground a final time, in an inverted, nose-down position, the nose hitting and flipping the plane over into a right-side up, tail-first position. The momentum of the heavy engine caused the fuselage, left wing remaining attached and intact to the end, to roll upon itself into a virtual ball, rolling nose-over-tail across the frozen field for, before coming to rest tail-first against a wire fence. The bodies of the performers had been ejected from the fuselage and lay near the plane's wreckage, while Peterson's body, which was entangled in the wreckage, could only be retrieved after the cockpit was cut open using blowtorches. With the rest of the entourage en route to Minnesota, Anderson, who had driven the party to the airport and witnessed the plane's takeoff, had to identify the bodies of the musicians. The county coroner, Ralph Smiley, reported that all four victims died instantly, the cause of death being "gross trauma to brain" for the three musicians and "brain damage" for the pilot.