Every night brought the same relentless dream. She went to sleep, knowing he waited. He came to her again in the middle of the night, still her husband, forever young, with his life spread before him. Then she imagined it: what he saw and what he thought in those last moments.
It’s been a half century since the day the music died. Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash – the plane crash to people who love rock’n’roll – on February 3, 1959. He died with two other recording artists, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (The Big Bopper), and a young pilot, Roger Peterson. After a performance in Clear Lake, Iowa, their small plane crashed in a frozen corn field in the wee hours of the morning.
Buddy’s bride, Maria Elena Holly, was home in New York. Barely six months wed, she was pregnant, anticipating the family she was starting with her young husband. Then came the news. Maria Elena collapsed, losing the baby.
Few stories are more tragic in the history of popular music. The plane crash ended of the first chapter of the world’s love affair with rock’n’roll, the music that blended the plaint of white country with the beat of black rhythm and blues.
Few young artists were better at this chemical mixture than Buddy Holly, a gawky, bespectacled kid from Lubbock, Texas. At 20, he hit the national stage with a confident boast borrowed from a John Wayne movie, “That’ll Be the Day.” With his group, the Crickets, the blueprint of the modern rock’n’roll band (two guitars, bass and drums) was formed and he lobbed rock classics into the consciousness of American youth: “Not Fade Away,” “Peggy Sue,” “Rave On.” Holly was a changeling, each new recording a step in his musical maturation.
Comfortable in his own artistic skin, he grew apart both from his bandmates and from his Svengali-like manager and warden, Norman Petty, spreading his wings in the heady atmosphere of Greenwich Village in the late 1950s.
In New York, he met and immediately fell in love with Maria Elena Santiago, who became at once wife, muse and business manager, pushing her husband to explore new directions in songwriting and production. Hunched over a reel-to-reel in their apartment, he recorded a slew of new songs: “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “Dearest,” “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” and “Wishing.”
But his split with the Crickets and a financial stalemate with Petty forced him back on the road to bring in some cash. He didn’t want to go. Maria Elena had nightmares of his early death (so she told Buddy biographers Philip Norman and Ellis Amburn). She begged him to stay home. But newly married and with a baby on the way, he reluctantly signed on with the Winter Dance Party tour of the upper Midwest in January and February of 1959.
Buddy was 23.
***
In the fickle teen-age world of the late 1950s, Holly was seen in slight decline, since he hadn’t had a hit record in a few months. Undaunted, he began pitching his songs to other artists, seeing his future self as a behind-the-scenes producer and composer.
The career of Richard Steven Valenzuela was heading the other direction. As Ritchie Valens, he had been performing for only 15 months, playing record hops and junior-high dances in Southern California. His first record, “Come On, Let’s Go,” was a modest hit. But it was his second release, a double-sided hit, that made him one of the top rock’n’roll stars of his day. “Donna,” a slow-dancing / heavy petting number about a real-life girlfriend, was paired with “La Bamba,” a Spanish-language romp that showed Ritchie’s Hispanic roots, making him a pioneer of Latin rock.
Soon, Ritchie was sharing the bill with some of the great rock’n’roll talent of his time – Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jackie Wilson, Eddie Cochran and others. Though a household name for only a matter of minutes, he played a small part (himself) in the Alan Freed teensploitation flick, Go Johnny Go!
And before long, he was headlining tours such as the Winter Dance Party with Buddy Holly. Holly was even thinking of taking over as Ritchie’s manager. On that three-week tour, huddled in the back of the drafty bus, they became close.
Ritchie was 17.
* * *
The big man was the son of a Texas oilfield roughneck, but his daddy wanted more for J.P. Richardson and sent his son off to college. But J.P. ‘s part-time radio job took over his life. Soon he was married and with a family to support, and college was forgotten.
J.P. was a charismatic voice on the air, setting a record by broadcasting uninterrupted for five days straight. When a sponsor suggested that J.P. come up with a gimmick for his radio show, he rechristened himself The Big Bopper. Soon, he parlayed that persona into a hit record called “Chantilly Lace,” supposedly the Bopper’s end of a phone conversation with a sultry woman. It opened the doors for J.P., who had a follow-up hit (“The Big Bopper’s Wedding”) and wrote songs that became hits for country star George Jones (“White Lightning”) and Johnny Preston (“Running Bear”).
Taking his first extended break from his day job, he joined Buddy and Ritchie as co-headliner for the Winter Dance Party tour. It was a miserable trip, and the cramped bus and constant chill annoyed J.P., who always said he was “too old for this.”
He was 28.
* * *
Another brutal winter … strange time for a rock’n’roll package show to come through town . . . but all through the upper Midwest, teen-agers turned up at warm cocoon-like ballrooms to greet the stars of the Winter Dance Party – Buddy, Ritchie, the Big Bopper, Dion and the Belmonts, and a new kid named Frankie Sardo. Up in Duluth, a 17-year-old kid named Bobby Zimmerman – not yet rechristened Bob Dylan – worked his way to the front of the stage and locked eyes with Buddy. “I’ll never forget the image,” he recalled two decades later, by then an iconic star in his own universe.
The musicians made nightly 400-mile trips between venues on a frigid bus with no heater. The cold was so bad that Buddy’s drummer, Carl Bunch, had to leave the tour to be treated for frostbite. The tour rumbled on, through the ice and snow. Huddled under blankets and sleeping bags, the artists came alive onstage each night, giving performances that belied the misery of the trip. Buddy took over on drums to back up Ritchie, the Bopper and the other performers, moving front and center for his closing set each night.
Two weeks into the tour, when the bus reached Clear Lake, Iowa, the situation had become intolerable. Buddy hatched the plan of chartering a plane and began looking for fellow passengers to split the cost of the flight. The flight to the next stop, Fargo, North Dakota, would take three or four hours – preferable to another 10-hour bus ride. Plus, Buddy offered to take the touring company’s two weeks of dirty laundry, so that the Fargo audience would see the performers in clean clothes. Holly initially planned to take his fellow bandmates, guitarist Tommy Allsup and bassist (and future country star) Waylon Jennings. As Buddy bombarded the audience with his hits, the backstage negotiations altered the passenger list for the flight. As co-headliners, Ritchie and the Bopper were eager to get ahead on the tour schedule and get some much-needed rest.
The Bopper begged Jennings to let him have his seat on the plane. He was a large man and the bus-trip hell had been particularly uncomfortable. Jennings was 19, new to the road, and happy to oblige. Around midnight, after the second show at Clear Lake’s Surf Ballroom, Jennings told his boss that the Bopper would be flying in his stead.
“Well, I hope your ol’ bus freezes up,” Buddy said.
“Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes.” Words Jennings would regret every day for the rest of his life.
All night, Ritchie had been trying to talk Allsup out of his seat, but Allsup wouldn’t budge. Ritchie finally suggested a coin flip. Allsup produced a half dollar and said, “Call it” when it flew into the air. Ritchie called heads and when he looked at the coin, he said, “Hey – that’s the first thing I ever won.”
* * *
The plane crashed soon after takeoff. Peterson was a skillful young pilot, but chronic hearing problems affected his sense of balance. It’s likely the pilot and his three young passengers didn’t know what was happening until they saw the frozen Iowa tundra through the windshield.
This, Maria Elena told Amburn and Norman, was the image that woke her at night. She imagined Buddy’s thoughts – of her . . . of their unborn baby.
Don McLean was a 12-year-old paperboy in upstate New York when he opened his afternoon bundle and saw the headlines. A decade later, as a young musician, he was moved to write a song in tribute to Buddy, Ritchie and the Bopper. “I can’t remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride,” McLean sang in the introduction to his hit song “American Pie.” It was McLean’s song, with its reference to “the day the music died,” that sealed February 3, 1959, as a date that lives in rock’n’roll infamy.
But the music didn’t die. Generations of musicians drew on the music of Buddy, Ritchie and the Bopper. Just ask Lennon, McCartney, Jagger, Richards, Santana and other disciples.
And it wasn’t “the death of innocence” either. It was a plane crash that killed four young men. But what the plane crash did do was cast doubt on the altar of youth. The young fans who mourned the three singers could no longer see themselves as invincible. If these deeply talented young men were susceptible, then weren’t we all. For a generation that saw itself as the best and the brightest, the plane crash was a tattered rite of passage to an uneasy adulthood awaiting in the 1960s.
(A shorter version of this appears in the February issue of American History magazine.)
