The Winter Dance Party, 1959

The Buddy Holly crash-site memorial

The Winter Dance Party of 1959 is best known for the tragic plane crash and deaths of three popular rock & roll musicians, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper. Don McLean’s famous 1971 song, American Pie, immortalized the tragedy as “the day the music died”.

Rock & roll music took off in 1956 when Elvis had a string of hits and influenced just about every rock & roll artist who came after him. The major pioneers of Rock were Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. But by the end of 1959, all of these musicians would be gone from the music scene.

The Winter Dance Party tour began on January 23rd in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These concerts lasted a total of 24 days, crisscrossing six mid-western states in the dead of winter--Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky. The musical acts were Buddy Holly, Dion and the Belmonts, Richie Valens, the Big Bopper and Frankie Sardo.

Buddy Holly was the most famous of the tour group musicians, already having a string of hits. His first hit single with The Crickets was That’ll Be the Day in February 1957, others being, Every Day, Not Fade Away, Peggy Sue, Maybe Baby, Oh Boy and Rave On.

Dion and the Belmonts was a quartet from the Bronx, a white Doowop group with three songs on the Billboard top 100, I Wonder Why, No One Knows and Don’t Pity Me. They were on American Bandstand in early 1958 and after that appearance their records began to get national airplay. Their first major tour was in late 1958 with The Coasters, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and Bobby Darin. But their most famous songs, A Teenager in Love and Where or When, didn’t come out until after the Winter Dance Party. In the early 1960s, Dion would go on to become one of the most popular recording artists of the time with hits like Run around Sue, The Wanderer and Ruby Baby.

Richie Valens at 17 was a performer on the rise. He had three hit songs on the charts at the time of the tour, Come on Let’s Go, Donna, and his biggest hit La Bamba, a Mexican folk song that Valens sang in a rock & roll style. La Bamba is on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

The Big Bopper (JP Richardson) was a popular DJ from Beaumont, Texas. He was also a musician and song writer. He wrote the song White Lightning for George Jones which became Jones’ first number one hit on the country charts. He also wrote Running Bear for Johnny Preston, which became a hit after Richardson’s death in the plane crash. Richardson recorded Chantilly Lace for Mercury records and followed it with Big Bopper’s Wedding. Both songs were still actively playing on the radio at the time of his death.

Frankie Sardo was from Brooklyn and had a regional hit with Fake Out. He was not nationally known and was the opening act of the Winter Dance Party concerts.

Buddy’s original band, The Crickets, were not part of the tour. In 1958 Buddy moved to New York City and met Maria Elaina, the secretary for Southern Publishing. They fell in love and on August 15, 1958, Buddy took Maria back to Lubbock to get married in a private ceremony. Separating from his manager and the Crickets, Buddy and Maria returned to New York city and moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village. Maria was pregnant at the time.

Buddy recruited a new back-up group, which would also be the back-up band for the other musicians on the Winter Dance Party tour--Carl Bunch on drums, Tommy Alsup on guitar and Waylon Jennings on bass.

Waylon was from Littlefield, Texas, a small town 36 miles northwest of Lubbock, Buddy’s hometown. The two met in 1958 in a restaurant in Lubbock and became friends. At the time Waylon was working as a DJ and performer at KDAV, a local radio station. Buddy was already an established recording artist and produced Waylon’s first record, Jole Blon.

In 1956-57 Buddy and Jerry Allison were a country singing duo that played at the Lubbock, Texas Youth Center and shared bills with well-known artists that passed through the area. At one concert they were the opening act for Elvis, who was not yet nationally known. According to Allison, before that concert they were country musicians, but seeing Elvis changed everything. They became enthusiastic converts to this new style of music, rock & roll, and “Buddy began writing songs with a new intensity”.

In March of 1958, Buddy Holly and the Crickets did a month long tour in England and was a major influence on the early rock & roll scene there. The Crickets’ records in the UK sold faster than the record company could produce them.  Young John Lennon and George Harrison, in part, learned to play guitar by listening to the Crickets’ records and Lennon wore Buddy’s style of glasses for a while. The Quarrymen changed their name to the Beatles, inspired by Holly’s band the Crickets, and The Rolling Stones’ first hit song in the U.S. was a cover of Holly’s Not Fade Away.

In January and February of 1959, the Midwest was extremely cold. The musicians traveled from one venue to another in reconditioned school buses with faulty heaters. They had no “Roadies”, so the musicians had to heft their own equipment. Sometimes there were as many as 300-400 miles between shows and the temperatures were below freezing.

The 9^th concert was at the National Guard Armory in Duluth, Minnesota on January 31^st, three days before the fatal crash. A sixteen-year-old Robert Zimmerman, from Hibbing, Minnesota, who later changed his name to Bob Dylan, was in the audience, right up in front of the stage. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Dylan writes about seeing Holly perform:

 “From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. Buddy played the music I loved. He was the Archetype, everything that I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once and that was a few days before he was gone. If I had to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. I had to travel a hundred miles to see him play and I wasn’t disappointed. He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit, everything about him. Then out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me straight, dead in the eye and he transmitted something. I didn’t know what, and it gave me the chills.”

Two shows were scheduled for February 1^st in Appleton Wis. 336.5 miles from Duluth. With over 200 miles to go, one of the buses broke down outside of Hurley, Wis.  It was 20 below zero. The matinee had to be cancelled. Carl Bunch, the drummer, got frostbitten feet and was sent off to a hospital. Another bus came and picked up the musicians and took them the rest of the way. With Carl gone, Buddy, Richie Valens and Dion took turns playing drums for the concerts in Green Bay and Clear Lake.

Surf Ballroom, Clear Lake, Iowa

The Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa was the 11th concert on February 2nd. It was originally built in 1933, a wooden framed building on Witke’s beach on Clear Lake. Carl Fox wanted to create a ballroom that resembled an ocean beach club. He furnished it with bamboo and rattan furniture, murals of the ocean surf and pictures of palm trees on the walls. It was a venue for dancing to the big bands of the 30s and 40s. It attracted the popular orchestras of the time such as: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Glen Miller, Stan Kenton and Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. In 1947, the building burned down and was rebuilt in 1948 across the street. In 2009 the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame designated the ballroom as an historical landmark and in 2011 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

People who were interviewed after the Winter Dance Party, Clear Lake concert said they saw no signs that any of the musicians were suffering from the cold and poor traveling conditions. They all said they had a great time and enjoyed the music.

The next concert was at the Armory in Moorhead, Minn. just across the river from Fargo, North Dakota. Frustrated with the long, cold uncomfortable traveling conditions, Buddy chartered a plane for Waylon, Tommy and himself, to fly from Clear Lake to Fargo, North Dakota. After the Clear Lake concert, Carol Anderson, the Surf Ballroom manager, drove the three musicians to the Mason City Municipal Airport. The flight cost $36 per person.

The single engine Beechcraft Bonanza had room for only three passengers. JP Richardson (the Big Bopper) was fighting a bad cold, so Waylon gave him his seat. Richie Valens had a fear of flying, but did not want to spend another night riding on the cold uncomfortable bus, so he asked Tommy for his seat. Bob Hale, a local DJ and the MC for the concert, flipped a coin and Tommy lost, so Richie got the remaining seat. It was reported that after the coin toss Valens said, “That’s the first time I’ve ever won anything in my life”.

1947 Beechcraft Bonanza at the Mason City, Iowa Airport

Some of the fans were on the tarmac to see their heroes off. The three musicians boarded the plane at 12:30am on February 3^rd. As they were boarding, Holly jokingly said to Waylon, “Well I hope your damn bus freezes up.” And Waylon replied, “Well I hope your ol plane crashes.” Years later Waylon said in an interview that he felt guilty all of his life for saying that to his good friend Buddy.

The pilot, 21-year-old Roger Peterson, flew for Dwyer Flying Service. He had just over four years of flying experience with 128 flight hours in Bonanzas and 52 hours of instrument flight training. He had passed the written test, but was not certified to fly by instruments only. His training was on a conventional artificial Horizon instrument that displayed the sky on top and ground on the bottom. But the plane he flew that night had a Sperry F-3 altitude gyroscope that had the ground on top and the sky on the bottom.

That night there was low cloud cover with no visible horizon. Peterson had not heard about a blizzard warning. They took off and must have flown right into it. Being a rural area, there were no ground lights to visually orient the young pilot. The plane crashed in a cornfield five miles after take-off. It hit the ground going 170 miles per hour. The right wing-tip gouged the frozen ground for 57 feet before the plane spun into a cartwheel for 540 feet and finally stopped, resting against a barbed wire fence.

Because of the blizzard, they did not discover the wreckage until the morning. The bodies of the three musicians had been ejected from the plane and lay all night in the open field, not far from the wreckage. Peterson’s body was entangled in the crumpled plane and had to be removed with blow torches. The civil aeronautics investigator concluded that the probable cause of the accident was “the pilot’s unwise decision to attempt a flight at night that required skills he did not have”.  Holly was 22, Valens was 17 and the Big Bopper was 28.

Holly’s mother heard about her son’s death over the radio. Maria Elaina learned of her husband’s death by a television report. After only six months of marriage, she instantly became a widow. Shortly thereafter, she miscarried and lost their baby. In the months following the crash, authorities adopted the policy of not releasing the names of crash victims until the family members have been notified. The public did not find out about the marriage and Maria’s pregnancy until after Buddy’s death. One more song made the charts after Holly’s death, It Doesn’t Matter Anymore. It shot up to number 13 on the charts. The music industry had discovered that after an artist’s death, there was great opportunity for record sales.

Buddy Holly’s career lasted just a year and a half and he had only one number one hit, That’ll Be the Day. But his influence on popular music was immense. Buddy and his band The Crickets, set the standard for rock & roll bands. They were a self-contained band with two guitars, bass and drums and would become the blue print for later bands. Buddy wrote and produced all of his songs, which was unheard of at the time.

The Winter Dance Party continued after the crash. There were 13 more concerts scheduled after Clear Lake and the main three acts were gone. For the next show in Moorhead, Minnesota, fifteen-year-old Bobby Vee filled in for Buddy and Waylan filled in for Buddy for the rest of the tour. Some of the other performers to fill in for the remainder of the tour were, Jimmy Clanton, Fabian and Frankie Avalon. These handsome young singers were more in line with the crooners of the previous generation. As the decade changed, the airways of the early 60s would be taken over by theirs and others’ soft pop rock music. The raw creative force of early rock & roll did seem to have died out.

Don McLean was a thirteen-year-old paperboy in New York City in the winter of 1959.  On the morning after the crash, he cut open a bundle of papers and read the front page headlines, “Iowa Air Crash kills 3 Singers”. In 1971 he wrote the song American Pie.

“But February made me shiver, with every paper I’d deliver, bad news on the doorstep, I couldn’t take one more step, I can’t remember if I cried, when I read about his widowed bride, but something touched me deep inside, the day the music died.”