| Occurrence Type: | Accident |
| Image Upright: | 1.25 |
| Summary: | Crashed following loss of control in poor weather at night |
| Site: | Grant Township, Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, U.S. |
| Coords: | 43.2204°N -93.3814°W |
| Aircraft Type: | Beechcraft Bonanza |
| Operator: | Dwyer Flying Service, Mason City, Iowa, U.S. |
| Tail Number: | N3794N |
| Origin: | Mason City Municipal Airport, Iowa, U.S. |
| Destination: | Hector Airport, North Dakota, U.S. |
| Occupants: | 4 |
| Passengers: | 3 |
| Crew: | 1 |
| Fatalities: | 4 |
| Survivors: | 0 |
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.[1] [2] 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.
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.[3] Holly signed up with General Artists Corporation (GAC) because "he knew they were planning a British tour and he wanted to be in on that."[4]
For the start of the "Winter Dance Party" tour, Holly assembled a band consisting of Waylon Jennings (bass), Tommy Allsup (guitar) and Carl Bunch (drums), 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.[5]
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 . One bus had a heating system that malfunctioned shortly after the tour began in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Richardson and Valens began experiencing flu-like symptoms, and drummer Bunch was hospitalized for severely frostbitten feet, after the tour bus stalled in the middle of the highway in subzero temperatures near Ironwood, Michigan. The musicians replaced that bus with another school bus and kept traveling. As Holly's group had been the backing band for all of the acts, Holly, Valens and DiMucci took turns playing drums for each other at the performances in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Clear Lake, Iowa, with Holly playing drums for Dion, Dion playing drums for Ritchie, and Ritchie playing drums for Holly.[6]
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. The next scheduled destination after Clear Lake was Moorhead, Minnesota, a 365miles 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 325miles 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 disk jockey Charlie Boone.
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 (registration), 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.[7]
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.[8] 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 haunted 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."[9]
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 [we should be the ones flying ahead]...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 equaled the monthly rent his parents paid for his childhood apartment, he could not justify the indulgence.[10]
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 3000feet AMSL with sky obscured, visibility 6miles and winds from 20to. 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 (today's runway 18) at 00:55 (12:55 am) 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.[11] 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 6miles northwest of the airport.[11]
The Bonanza had impacted terrain at high speed, estimated to have been around 170mph, banked 90° to the right and in a nose-down attitude. The right-wing tip struck the ground first, gouging a 12'x2' deep 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 fifty feet 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.[11] 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.[11] [12] 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.[13] [14]
María Elena Holly learned of her husband's death via a television news report. A widow after only six months of marriage, she suffered a miscarriage shortly after, reportedly due to "psychological trauma". Holly's mother, on hearing the news on the radio at home in Lubbock, Texas, screamed and collapsed.[5]
Despite the tragedy, the "Winter Dance Party" tour continued. Fifteen-year-old Bobby Vee was given the task of filling in for Holly at the next scheduled performance in Moorhead, in part because he "knew all the words to all the songs."[15] Jennings and Allsup carried on for two more weeks, with Jennings taking Holly's place as lead singer. Other performers who were recruited for the remainder of the tour were Jimmy Clanton, Fabian and Frankie Avalon.[16]
Meanwhile, funerals for the victims were held individually. Holly and Richardson were buried in Texas, Valens in California and Peterson in Iowa. Holly's widow, María Elena, did not attend his funeral.[17] She said in an interview: "In a way, I blame myself. I was not feeling well when he left. I was two weeks pregnant, and I wanted Buddy to stay with me, but he had scheduled that tour. It was the only time I wasn't with him. And I blame myself because I know that, if only I had gone along, Buddy never would have gotten into that airplane."[18]
The official investigation was carried out by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB, precursor to the NTSB). It emerged that Peterson had over four years of flying experience, of which one was with Dwyer Flying Service, and had accumulated 711 flying hours, of which 128 were on Bonanzas. He had also logged 52 hours of instrument flight training, although he had passed only his written examination, and was not yet qualified to operate in weather that required flying solely by reference to instruments. Peterson and Dwyer Flying Service itself were certified to operate only under visual flight rules, which essentially require that the pilot must be able to see where the aircraft is going. On the night of the accident visual flight would have been virtually impossible due to the low clouds, the lack of a visible horizon and the absence of ground lights over the sparsely populated area.[11]
Furthermore, Peterson, who had failed an instrument checkride nine months before the accident, had received his instrument training on airplanes equipped with a conventional artificial horizon as a source of aircraft attitude information, while the accident aircraft was equipped with an older-type Sperry F3 attitude gyroscope. Crucially, the two types of instruments display the same aircraft pitch attitude information in graphically opposite ways. As a result, when the aircraft took off, Peterson, observing the older model Sperry F3 gyroscope, thought he was climbing when in fact he was descending.[11]
Another contributing factor was the "seriously inadequate" nighttime weather briefing provided to Peterson, which "failed to even mention adverse flying conditions which should have been highlighted".[11] The CAB 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.[11]
On March 6, 2007, in Beaumont, Texas, Richardson's body was exhumed for reburial. Forest Lawn Cemetery moved his body to a more suitable area after plans were made to erect a bronze statue near his gravesite to accompany a newly received historical marker. As the body was to be placed in a new casket while above ground, the musician's son, Jay Perry Richardson, took the opportunity to have his father's body re-examined to verify the original coroner's findings and asked forensic anthropologist William M. Bass to carry out the procedure.
A longstanding rumor surrounding the accident, which this re-examination sought to confirm or dispel, asserted that an accidental firearm discharge took place on board the aircraft and caused the crash. It had also been speculated that Richardson initially survived the crash and crawled out of the wreckage in search of help before succumbing to his injuries, prompted by the fact that his body was found farther from the plane than the other victims. Bass and his team took several X-rays of Richardson's body and eventually concluded that the musician had indeed died instantly from extensive, unsurvivable fractures to virtually every bone in his body. No traces of lead were found from any bullet, nor any indication that he had been shot. Coroner Smiley's original 1959 report was, therefore, confirmed as accurate.[19] [20]
In March 2015, the NTSB received a request to reopen the investigation into the accident.[21] The request was made by L. J. Coon, a retired pilot from New England who felt that the conclusion of the 1959 investigation was inaccurate. Coon suspected a possible failure of the right ruddervator, or a problem with the fuel system, as well as possible improper weight distribution. Coon argued that Peterson may have tried to land the plane and that his efforts should be recognized.[22] [23] The NTSB declined the request in April 2015, saying that the evidence presented by Coon was insufficient to merit the reconsideration of the original findings.[24]
A policy not to report on a person's death until their family had been notified was implemented by authorities in the months after María Elena Holly suffered her miscarriage due to the psychological trauma of hearing about her husband's death on television for the first time.[25]
A memorial service for Peterson was held at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Ventura, Iowa, on February 5. A funeral was held the next day at St. Paul Lutheran Church in his hometown of Alta; Peterson was buried in Buena Vista Memorial Cemetery in nearby Storm Lake.[26]
Fans of Holly, Valens, and Richardson have been gathering for annual memorial concerts at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake since 1979.[27] The fiftieth anniversary concert took place on February 2, 2009, with Delbert McClinton, Joe Ely, Wanda Jackson, Los Lobos, Chris Montez, Bobby Vee, Graham Nash, Peter and Gordon, Tommy Allsup, and a house band featuring Chuck Leavell, James "Hutch" Hutchinson, Bobby Keys, and Kenny Aronoff. Jay Perry Richardson, the son of the Big Bopper, was among the participating artists, and Bob Hale was the master of ceremonies, as he was at the 1959 concert.[28] [29]
In June 1988, a 4feet tall granite memorial bearing the names of Peterson and the three entertainers was dedicated outside the Surf Ballroom with Peterson's widow, parents, and sister in attendance; the event marked the first time that the families of Holly, Richardson, Valens, and Peterson had gathered together.
In 1989, Ken Paquette, a Wisconsin fan of the 1950s era, made a stainless-steel monument that depicts a guitar and a set of three records bearing the names of the three performers killed in the accident. The monument is on private farmland, about NaNmiles west of the intersection of 315th Street and Gull Avenue, 5miles north of Clear Lake. At that intersection, a large plasma-cut steel set of Wayfarer-style glasses, similar to those Holly wore, marks the access point to the crash site.[30]
Paquette created a similar stainless-steel monument to the three musicians located outside the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where Holly, Richardson, and Valens played their penultimate show on February 1. This second memorial was unveiled on July 17, 2003.[31] In February 2009, a further memorial made by Paquette for Peterson was unveiled at the crash site.[32]
A road originating near the Surf Ballroom, extending north and passing to the west of the crash site, is now known as Buddy Holly Place.[33]
Howard Waldrop's short story "Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me" (collected in Howard Who?) describes a fictional attempt by a sextet of famous slapstick characters (Chico and Harpo Marx, Abbott and Costello, and Laurel and Hardy) to prevent the accident from occurring.[40]
TJ Klune's 2020 fantasy novel "The House in the Cerulean Sea" features an orphaned antichrist, Lucy, who collects records of Holly, the Big Bopper, and Valens, and discusses the crash with the protagonist, Linus.