As of Friday, it has been 58 years since the music died.
On Feb. 3, 1959, a small plane carrying rising musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson crashed en route from one tour stop in Mason City, Iowa, to another in Moorehead, Minnesota. The crash was blamed on bad weather, and all three died.
“It was the locus point for that last performance by these great artists,” Terry Stewart, former president and CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, told the Associated Press in 2009. “It warrants being fixed in time.”
Holly, the 22-year-old frontman of the Crickets, Valens, the 17-year-old singer of “La Bamba,” and Richardson, the 28-year-old behind “Chantilly Lace,” were on their Winter Dance Party tour. They’d been traveling across the Midwest, freezing in unheated buses that had a tendency to break down, according to the Washington Post. A fed-up Holly decided to charter a plane, and he recruited his colleagues to travel with him.
Waylon Jennings, a bass player, gave his seat to Richardson, who wasn’t feeling well. Tommy Aslup, a guitarist, lost a coin toss with Valens. Roger Peterson was set to pilot the plane, but he didn’t know about the blizzard in his path.
“The plane stayed in the sky for only a few minutes; no one is quite sure what went wrong. The best guess is that Peterson flew directly into the blizzard, lost visual reference and accidentally flew down instead of up,” Time Magazine’s Claire Suddath wrote in 2009. “The four-passenger plane plowed into a nearby cornfield at over 170 mph, flipping over on itself and tossing the passengers into the air. Their bodies landed yards away from the wreckage and stayed there for ten hours as snowdrifts formed around them.”
Since 1959, the crash has become an infamous event in music history. That’s due in no small part to Don McLean, a songwriter who in 1971 released “American Pie.” Packed with allusions to Karl Marx, James Dean and Jackie Kennedy, the song coined the term “the day the music died.”
The song, inspired by the 1959 air accident, centered around the idea that “things are heading in the wrong direction” and “becoming less idyllic,” as McLean told the Newcastle Herald two years ago.
In any case, decades after both the crash and single, music fans still take Feb. 3 as a chance to remember the legacies of Valens, Holly and Richardson. See messages people posted in their memory on Twitter Friday:
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