The Night the Music Died

A group of men examine the wreckage of the plane that carried Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens.

(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

One day in early February 1959, a 13-year-old in New Rochelle, New York, cut open the stack of newspapers he was about to deliver and read that three rock ’n’ roll stars, Buddy Holly, J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, and Ritchie Valens, had died in a plane crash in Iowa. The boy later said he felt “like someone had punched me in the face.” It was a feeling shared by many in America and around the world. Years later, in 1971, that paperboy, Don McLean, would write the song “American Pie,” which gave an enduring name to the event: the Day the Music Died.

In fact the tragedy had happened in the middle of the night. Buddy Holly had chartered a small plane to take him and his band, the Crickets, from Mason City, Iowa, to Fargo, North Dakota, near the site of their next show. Holly was the headliner of a package tour called the Winter Dance Party, which had already made its way through a handful of small halls in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.

The Winter Dance Party was typical of many multiple-artist tours that crisscrossed the country at the time, some of them with as many as 20 acts on the bill. The Winter Dance Party had only a few. In addition to the immensely talented 22-year-old Texan Buddy Holly (born Charles Hardin Holley), who in his brief career had already had three top-ten hits with “Peggy Sue,” “Oh, Boy!” and “That’ll Be the Day,” there were also Ritchie Valens (né Valenzuela), a 17-year-old Californian whose ballad “Donna” (with its B-side a Spanish-language song called “La Bamba”) was steadily climbing the charts, and the Big Bopper (Jiles Perry Richardson), a 28-year-old former disc jockey from Texas who had had a number-six single the year before with his novelty song “Chantilly Lace.” The fourth major act on the tour was Dion and the Belmonts. They had had a hit with their doo-wop anthem “I Wonder Why.”

The tour was rough on the performers. It was a particularly harsh winter in the Midwest, and they often had to travel on freezing buses for hundreds of miles through snowstorms to get to their next booking. It was so cold that at one point Holly’s drummer was hospitalized with frostbite on his feet. And being on tour meant that the performers were away from their families. Holly’s wife, Maria, was expecting, and he called her from pay phones on the road twice a day; Richardson’s wife, too, was pregnant, with their second child. By the time they played their eleventh show of the tour, at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, the performers were sick of the road.

Richardson, in fact, had come down with the flu, and he wasn’t looking forward to another cramped, frigid night on the bus. When he heard that Holly was arranging to charter a plane for himself and his band, he asked Holly’s bass player—a young man named Waylon Jennings, who would later become a country music star—if he could take his place. Jennings acquiesced. Later that day Holly teased his bassist about giving up the plane ride. “He said, ‘Well, I hope your bus freezes up,’” Jennings recalled years later. “And I said, ‘Well, I hope your plane crashes.’ I was awful young, and it took me a long time to get over that.”

Meanwhile Ritchie Valens, who had a cold, asked Holly’s guitar player, Tommy Allsup, if he’d be willing to give up his seat. Allsup agreed to flip a coin for it, and Valens won the toss. The flight’s passengers would be Holly, Richardson, and Valens, along with the plane’s young, inexperienced pilot, Roger Peterson. All would die in the crash, blamed on pilot error, which took place shortly after the flight’s departure in a snowstorm, at about 12:55 a.m. on February 3, 1959.

Holly’s wife, Maria, learned of the accident watching television; she miscarried Holly’s and her child two weeks later. Adrienne Richardson gave birth to a son, Jay Perry Richardson, 84 days after the crash. And fans all over the world grieved as they saw the pictures of the wrecked airplane, with the musicians’ bodies lying nearby, in the newspapers.

As the 1960s dawned, the rock ’n’ roll that Holly and the other performers had loved moved on. Eventually the Beatles (who were avid Holly fans), the Rolling Stones, and countless other bands seized the popular imagination, and the story of Holly, Richardson, and Valens receded into the past. But the 1970s brought a resurgence of interest. Don McLean’s song, a tribute to the three performers, became a number-one hit in 1972. A somewhat fictionalized 1978 film biography, The Buddy Holly Story, starring Gary Busey as Holly, was a box-office success and even won an Oscar for its music; Holly’s story also spawned a hit stage musical. A 1987 biopic of Valens starring Lou Diamond Phillips, La Bamba, also became a hit and sent Valens’s song, in a version by the group Los Lobos, back onto the charts. And the Big Bopper’s son, Jay, still performs his father’s songs on stage.

Fans continue to visit the crash site, particularly on the February 3 anniversary. In 1988 one fan erected a small shrine on the spot, with a stainless-steel guitar and records bearing the three musicians’ names. Nearby the Surf Ballroom, in Clear Lake, holds a commemorative event every February. It seems clear that the memory of Holly, Richardson, and Valens will not fade away anytime soon.

—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.