Don Mclean American Pie 1972 The Day the Music Died
The Day the Music Died
After terminating his partnership with The Crickets, Buddy Holly assembled a new band consisting of Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Carl Bunch to play on the Winter Dance Party tour.
The tour also featured rising artist Ritchie Valens and Big Bopper Richardson, who were promoting their records, as well.
The tour was to cover twenty-four Midwestern cities in three weeks. The distance between venues, and the poorly equipped buses, affected the performers and their bands.
Cases of flu spread among them and Holly's drummer was hospitalized due to frostbite.
Frustrated by the conditions, Holly decided to charter a plane when they stopped for their performance in the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa to reach their next venue in Moorhead, Minnesota.
Carroll Anderson, owner of the Surf Ballroom, chartered the plane from the Dwyer Flying Service.
Big Bopper Richardson, who was affected by the flu, swapped Waylon Jennings' place on the plane, while Tommy Allsup lost his place to Ritchie Valens on a coin toss.
Meanwhile Dion DiMucci decided to not board the plane for the US$36 fee.
The investigation of the incident determined that soon after takeoff, a combination of poor weather conditions and pilot error caused spatial disorientation that made pilot Roger Peterson lose control of the plane.
Hubert Dwyer, owner of the flight service company, could not establish radio contact and reported the aircraft missing the next morning.
He took off in his own Cessna 180 and spotted the wreckage less than 6 miles (9.7 km) northwest of the airport in a cornfield belonging to Albert Juhl.
He notified the authorities who dispatched Deputy Bill McGill, who drove to the wreck site and found the bodies of the passengers and pilot.
They were later identified by Carroll Anderson.
 Monument at the crash site, September 16, 2003. |
|
| Accident summary | |
|---|---|
| Date | Tuesday February 3, 1959 |
| Type | Controlled flight into terrain |
| Site | near Clear Lake, Iowa, United States 43°13′12″N 93°23′0″W |
| Passengers | 3 |
| Crew | 1 |
| Fatalities | 4 (all) |
| Aircraft type | Beechcraft Bonanza |
| Operator | Dwyer Flying Service in Mason City, Iowa |
| Registration | N3794N |
| Flight origin | Mason City Municipal Airport |
Background and beginning of the tour
Buddy Holly terminated his association with The Crickets and his manager Norman Petty during a reunion in Lubbock, Texas, on November 3, 1958.
For the start of the "The Winter Dance Party" tour, he assembled a band consisting of Waylon Jennings (bass), Tommy Allsup (guitar), and Carl Bunch (drummer).
The tour was set to cover twenty-four Midwestern cities in as many days.[1][2]
In addition the new hit artist Ritchie Valens,[3], J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson and Dion DiMucci, joined the tour to promote their recordings and to make an extra profit.[4]
The tour began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on January 23, 1959.
The amount of travel created a logistical problem with the tour.
The distance between venues had not been considered when scheduling each performance.
Adding to the disarray, the tour bus that carried the musicians was not equipped for the weather. Its heating system broke shortly after the tour began, in Appleton, Wisconsin.
While flu spread among the rest of the performers, Holly's drummer, Carl Bunch, was hospitalized in Ironwood, Michigan for severely frostbitten feet.
The musicians replaced the bus with a school bus and kept traveling.[4]
As Holly's group had been the backing band for all of the acts, Holly, Valens, and Dion DiMucci (of Dion and the Belmonts) took turns playing drums for each other at the Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Clear Lake, Iowa, shows.[5]
On February 2, the tour arrived in Clear Lake, Iowa, where they were to play at the Surf Ballroom.
The Surf Ballroom had not been a scheduled stop, but the tour promoters, hoping to fill an open date, called Surf Ballroom manager Carroll Anderson and offered him the show.
He accepted and they set the show for Monday, February 2. By the time Holly arrived at the venue that Monday evening, he was frustrated with the tour bus.
Holly decided to charter a plane to take him to the next stop in Moorhead, Minnesota, to avoid traveling in the bus, and to have enough time to do laundry.[4]
The plane
Carroll Anderson called Hubert Dwyer, owner of the Dwyer Flying Service, a company of Mason City, Iowa, to charter the plane to get to Fargo, North Dakota.[6]Flight arrangements were made with Roger Peterson, a 21-year-old local pilot.
The flying service charged a fee of $36 per passenger for the single-engined, 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza 35 (V-tail), (N3794N).
The Bonanza sat three passengers and the pilot.[7]
Richardson had contracted flu during the tour and asked Waylon Jennings for his seat on the plane.
When Holly learned that Jennings wasn't going to fly, he said in jest, "Well, I hope your ol' bus freezes up."
Jennings responded, also in jest, "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes," a humor-driven but ill-considered response that haunted Jennings for the rest of his life.[8]
Meanwhile, Ritchie Valens, who had once had a fear of flying, asked Tommy Allsup for his seat on the plane.
Allsup and Valens decided to toss a coin to decide.[6]
Bob Hale, a DJ with KRIB-AM, was working the concert that night and flipped the coin in the ballroom's sidestage room shortly before the musicians departed for the airport.
Valens won the coin toss for the seat on the flight.
Dion had been approached to join the flight, although it is unclear exactly when he was asked.
Dion decided that since the $36 fare (approximately $270 in today's money) equaled the monthly rent his parents paid for his childhood apartment, he couldn't justify the indulgence.[9]
Memorial
The monument is on private farmland, about one quarter of a mile west of the intersection of 315th Street and Gull Avenue, five miles (8 km) north of Clear Lake.
A large plasma-cut-steel set of Wayfarer-style glasses, similar to those Holly wore, sits at the access point to the crash site.
Paquette also created a similar stainless steel monument to the three musicians that is located outside the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where Holly, the Big Bopper, and Valens played on the night of February 1, 1959.
This second memorial was unveiled on July 17, 2003.[24]
In February 2009, a new memorial made by Paquette for pilot Roger Peterson was unveiled at the crash site.[25]
A road originating near The Surf Ballroom and extending north past the west of the crash site is now known as Buddy Holly Place.[26]
Source: Wikipedia.org
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