Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Fifty years ago Tuesday, singers Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson died in a plane crash after a concert in Clear Lake, Iowa.

The seeds for that plane crash were sown 50 years ago tonight, when, on the way from Duluth, Minn., to scheduled concerts in Appleton and Green Bay, a bus carrying Holly, Valens, the Big Bopper, singer Dion DiMucci (of Dion and the Belmonts) and Holly’s band the Crickets, whose bass player was Waylon Jennings, froze and became stranded on U.S. 51 outside Hurley.

The 35-below-zero temperatures those on the bus endured was one bad night in a series of Winter Dance Tour nights that began in Milwaukee Jan. 23, 1959, and, after a concert in Kenosha one night later, zigzagged on successive nights to Mankato, Minn., Eau Claire, Montevideo, Minn., St. Paul, Minn., Davenport, Iowa, Fort Dodge, Iowa and Duluth.

The Crickets’ drummer was hospitalized in Ironwood, Mich., and the rest of the musicians got to Green Bay (the afternoon concert scheduled for the old Cinderella Ballroom in Appleton was canceled) for the scheduled Feb. 1 concert at the Riverside Ballroom. (The quality of the photos here is amazing, because they were slides.)

The next day, the musicians traveled by bus to Clear Lake for a concert scheduled at the last minute. After that concert, they were to head by bus to Moorhead, Minn., but Holly, sick of the bus by this point, chartered a plane instead. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Pamela Huey describes it:

As many a Holly aficionado knows, Allsup and Jennings were supposed to be on the plane. But they gave up their seats to Valens and the Bopper, who was sick. Allsup lost out to Valens in a last-minute coin toss.

When Buddy learned that Waylon’s seat had gone to the Bopper, he told his bass player with a grin, “Well, I hope your damned bus freezes up again.”

“Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes,” responded Jennings, who was haunted for years by that exchange.

The plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing Holly, Valens (whose life story was depicted in the movie “La Bamba”), Richardson and the plane’s pilot.

An excellent story of their last days can be found at the Classic Wisconsin Web site.

Additional irony: The Crickets were replaced in the Moorhead, Minn., concert by a band fronted by 15-year-old Robert Velline of Fargo, N.D. Velline went on to become Bobby Vee, who has had 38 Top 100 hits and seven gold records in a 40-year career that might never have happened were it not for that plane crash.