On February 3, 1959, American rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and "The Big Bopper" J. P. Richardson were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, together with pilot Roger Peterson. The event later became known as "The Day the Music Died", a phrase popularized by Don McLean 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 in poorly heated tour buses contributed to illness and fatigue among the performers.
After performing in Clear Lake, Holly chartered a plane to reach their next venue in Moorhead, Minnesota. Richardson, suffering from the flu, swapped places with Jennings, taking his seat on the plane, while Allsup lost his seat to Valens on a coin toss. Shortly after takeoff, in wintry conditions, the Beechcraft Bonanza crashed into a field, 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.
Early in 1957, Buddy Holly was dropped by Decca Records after his singles sold poorly. He then moved back to Lubbock, Texas and he started a new band with drummer Jerry Allison and guitarist Niki Sullivan. Holly and his new band, The Crickets, started recording with producer Norman Petty in Clovis, New Mexico. Petty signed the group to Coral Records: Holly as a soloist and The Crickets as a band. By the end of 1957, the group was enjoying success: Holly's solo release "Peggy Sue" sold one million copies by December, while the same month the band made their first televised appearance on The Arthur Murray Party. Holly and the Crickets started 1958 with a tour through the north-eastern United States in January, followed by an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and a week-long tour of Australia. The band then toured England for fifteen days in March. By that summer after the end of his latest tour, Holly married MarÃÂa Elena Santiago. Following their honeymoon, they settled in New York City. Holly would then return to Clovis for his recordings, and in September 1958 he produced a single for then-KLLL's DJ Waylon Jennings. As he toured, Holly's interests expanded to the business side of his career: he considered that moving full-time to New York City would bring him closer to his label, his publisher, and the major tour booking agencies. Meanwhile, the singer grew unhappy with the management of Petty, who opposed Holly and the Crickets appearing on Hollywood magazine promotions and the popular rock-and-roll movies of the time. Additionally, Petty controlled the finances of Holly and the Crickets and all of their expenditures were paid by him upon approval. Maria Elena Holly later stated: "any money you got had to go through Norman". After their performance with Holly on American Bandstand, The Crickets flew on their own to New Mexico to finish their business dealings with Petty. The band members were not fully convinced to move to New York City and they had Petty persuade them to keep them as their manager. As the band communicated their decision to Holly, the singer let them retain the name and he continued as a soloist. Holly desired to stop touring but while he was easily released from his management contract, he had to hire attorney Harold Orenstein to dispute the control of his royalties with an unresponsive Petty, who had full access to the funds. While the contest with Petty paralyzed Holly's plan to build his own studio in Lubbock to produce new artists, he took classes at Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio and he worked in his physique and personal image to shift the focus of his career. In need of money, Holly turned to promoter Irving Feld, who convinced him to join on a package tour of the ballrooms of the upper Midwest organized by the General Amusement Corporation. Holly then assembled a band consisting of Jennings (bass), Tommy Allsup (guitar) and Carl Bunch (drums), with the opening vocals of Frankie Sardo.
Headlining the tour with Holly was J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, whose single "Chantilly Lace" peaked at number 3 on November 3, 1958. The success of his song led him to quit his job as a DJ for KTRM in Beaumont, Texas to dedicate himself to perform and tour full-time. Richardson had appeared twice on The Dick Clark Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show. The Winter Dance Party also included Ritchie Valens who had a double hit with his single "Donna" and its flipside, "La Bamba", which reached number 2 and number 22 on the Billboard Hot Singles chart respectively. Valens also appeared on American Bandstand by December 1958 where he performed "Donna", he later played a small part in the rock-and-roll movie Go, Johnny, Go!, and he was featured on NBC's The Music Shop with his performance of "Donna" and "La Bamba" in January 1959. The fourth act billed in the package show was Dion and the Belmonts: The band had originally been on tour with Holly for three weeks in late 1958 on the Biggest Show of Stars, during which they befriended the singer. That year, they appeared in American Bandstand singing "I Wonder Why", and they later were signed to appear on the Winter Dance Party.
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.
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 tourâÂÂ"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 . When the bus was delayed in departing Duluth, Minnesota late on January 31, Valens suggested chartering a plane, but a replacement bus arrived in time.
In the early morning hours of February 1, while traveling from Duluth to a matinee performance in Appleton, Wisconsin, the bus's heating system broke down and its engine froze, leaving the musicians stranded on a remote stretch of U.S. Highway 51 near Pine Lake, Wisconsin. Temperatures reached as low as as they waited for help to arrive, with the musicians burning newspapers inside the bus to keep warm. It was two hours before Iron County sheriffs rescued the group, by which time Carl Bunch had developed frostbite in both feet. Bunch was taken to the nearest hospital in Ironwood, Michigan, where he remained under observation for the next few days, while the planned performance in Appleton was canceled. Taking a Chicago & North Western train from Hurley, the group made it to Green Bay, Wisconsin in time for that evening's performance at the Riverside Ballroom.
With Bunch removed from the tour group, Holly, Valens and Dion DiMucci (and Carlo Mastrangelo of the Belmonts who was a drummer) took turns playing drums for each other at the performances in Green Bay and Clear Lake, Iowa, with Holly playing drums for Dion, Dion playing drums for Ritchie, and Ritchie playing drums for Holly.
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. After Valens closed his set at the Ballroom, he phoned his manager Bob Keane and after a conversation about the undesirable situation with the tour, they agreed that after the show in Moorhead, Ritchie would be going back to California. The next scheduled destination after Clear Lake was Moorhead, Minnesota, a drive north-northwestâÂÂand, 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 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 disc 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.
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. 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 would haunt 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.
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. Dion said he won the toss, but ultimately decided that since the $36 fare equalled the monthly rent his parents paid for his childhood apartment, he could not justify the indulgence.
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 AMSL with sky obscured, visibility and winds from . 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. 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 northwest of the airport.
The Bonanza impacted terrain at high speed, estimated to have been around , banked 90ð to the right and in a nose-down attitude. The right-wing tip struck the ground first, gouging a 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 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. 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. 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.
MarÃÂa 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.
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." 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.
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, MarÃÂa Elena, did not attend his funeral. 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."
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.
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.
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". 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.
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 alleged that an accidental firearm discharge aboard the aircraft contributed to the crash. It was also 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.
In March 2015, the NTSB received a request to reopen the investigation into the accident. 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 suggested that Peterson may have attempted an emergency landing and that his efforts should be recognized. 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.
A policy not to report on a person's death until their family had been notified was implemented by authorities in the months after MarÃÂa Elena Holly suffered her miscarriage due to the psychological trauma of hearing about her husband's death on television for the first time.
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.
Fans of Holly, Valens, and Richardson have been gathering for annual memorial concerts at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake since 1979. 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.
A series of tribute concerts called the Winter Dance Party Tour was started by John Mueller, who starred as Buddy Holly in the musical '. The recreation and live show is endorsed by the estates of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P Richardson.
In June 1988, a 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, Wisconsin resident and 1950s fan Ken Paquette 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 west of the intersection of 315th Street and Gull Avenue, 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.
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. In February 2009, a further memorial made by Paquette for Peterson was unveiled at the crash site.
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.
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.
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.
In the animated series The Venture Brothers, the villainous duo of Red Mantle and Dragoon are implied to be Holly and Richardson, with the crash being used as a cover up of their abduction and turn to life of crime. The fate of Valens is never stated.