What was Revealed the Day the Music Died?

In the early morning hour of February 3, 1959, 55 years ago, a small one engine aircraft carrying three young musicians departed the Mason City airport for North Dakota.  This group was composed of three of four headliners playing in the "Winter Dance Party" tour of the upper Midwest during those cold, dark winters seemingly unique to the nation's upper Midwest.  Don McLean wrote a famous song commemorating the outcome of that event, and titled it simply American Pie. McLean, who wrote the song in 1971, would first learn of the death of these three young musicians while working on his paper route on the morning of February 3, hence the phrase in the song--"February made me shiver/with every paper I'd deliver." This post is not on the song but rather background history leading up to an event that saw three young and budding stars lose their lives, Buddy Holly, Big Bopper (JP Richardson), and Ritchie Valens. There was not room on the four seated plane (the last position occupied by the pilot) for Dion DiMucci, the fourth major headliner on the tour.

Tour Poster (Source: Google Images)

The Winter Dance Party Tour was organized by the General Artists Corporation (GAC), which was not like the large money promoters we see today, but rather led by a druggist whose major music interest was in selling records in his drugstores and making money as a promoter. When the tour started it was scheduled to have 24 shows over the course of 24 days crisscrossing the Midwest during a winter colder than the one being experienced this year. The tour started during a blizzard, and temperatures would plummet over the next three weeks, rarely reaching above zero. Back then it was referred to simply as a cold snap, but in our technological world today we need a more technical term and so it is now called a polar vortex. Apparently, the druggist did not understand geography because the bookings literally had them traveling from between locations often 300 to 400 miles in one day. The tour began in Milwaukee, WI at Devine's Ballroom on January 23, 1959 where almost 6,000 persons attended. Eleven performances in as many days,would be performed, but it was to have been one more, or 12 in 11 days. They did not travel like the young stars of today, on private airplanes, but mostly using ill-equipped buses with little working heat. Prior to the trip to Duluth, drummer Carl Bunch was already losing feeling in his feet, and Buddy Holly had collapsed a few days prior backstage. Colds and flu spread through the group. Richie Valens did not take the advice of his manager and bail out before the 370 mile trudge from Fort Dodge, IA to Duluth, MN.

Tour Map (Wikipedia)

The tour played at the Duluth, MN Armory on the night of January 31, 1959. It was here that a young man named Robert Zimmerman, of Hibbing, MN, would hear the groups play; he angled near the stage to get a better glimpse of Buddy Holly. Robert Zimmerman would recount this event in 1998 while accepting a Grammy award under the name of Bob Dylan. The rickety old bus, usually used for a Baptist Church group, departed Duluth and headed on a 340 mile journey for east central Wisconsin to perform two gigs on the following day--one in Appleton and one in Green Bay. Just after midnight the bus approached a hill 15 miles south of Hurley, WI, but the extreme cold weather cause the engine to seize and send a piston through the engine wall. Most of the group was born and raised in the warmer climates, many from Texas, Valens from California. Dion was the exception, he was from New York. Dion would comment that the winter weather the group experienced in Wisconsin made the east coast winters seem like Palm Beach. Some members wanted to try to walk to safety, but perhaps it was their being scared of bears (as they reportedly were), or the wind breaking tree limbs like twigs, but they decided to stay in the bus. Dion would come up with the idea of burning newspapers on the floor of the bus to help keep the group warm in temperatures of 35 below zero. A semi-truck driver would approach an hour after the breakdown, and would slow down to avoid hitting the group of men who went in the road to try to flag him down for help, but he would simply bypass the group. It would be two hours later that a sheriff deputy would come upon the group, as the truck driver at least had the decency to let the sheriff know about the stranded travelers when he next stopped. The drummer for Buddy Holly would be hospitalized in Iron River for frostbite. The group would be housed in Hurley's Carnival Club, a strip joint where they were fed breakfast.

Showing a desire for cash over the welfare of the young musicians, the druggist's company would order the men to continue, although the Appleton matinee was canceled. The cancellation was likely more due to the new travel arrangements having them take the train from Hurley to Green Bay. Fortunately for them, 1959 had a mode of intercity transportation we lack today. The train would depart Hurley at 11:30 am. At Green Bay, the tickets for the February 1st performance were 90 cents if purchased in advance, and $1.25 at the door. 2,200 people crowded into the Green Bay's Riverside Ballroom. The day after their Green Bay appearance was to have been a day off, but with a promoter more into cash than caring for a sick and tired group of musicians, he added a venue in north central Iowa, the Surf Ballrooom of Clear Lake. On February 2, 1959 another old re-purposed school bus carrying the band members would depart Green Bay and head down Highway 41, where they would pass by the gate of Austin Strobel Airport. Interestingly, at 2:20 pm on that same day, a North Central Airlines flight would arrive in the cold of the Green Bay airport, dropping off a man who would breathe life into a decrepit team and obtain his own legendary status as head coach and General Manager of the Green Bay Packers.

Last known photo of Buddy Holly taken in Green Bay, WI
(Source:  Google Images)

Holly would have a short career, only 1 1/2 years, and would not have been on the tour but for needing the cash, in large part to lack of care by his manager. Buddy Holly would move up the charts with songs like Peggy Sue, Oh Boy, and That'll Be the Day. Milwaukee was the largest city in which the group would play, and places like Clear Lake, IA are lucky to be a pin prick on a state map. Justin Bieber, who at 19 is a millionaire, would not understand, much less appreciate the trials and travel schedules the early ground breakers of the rock-n-roll era.

Mason City, IA Newspaper of 2/3/1959.
(Source:  newsarchives)

Buddy Holly had enough of long, cold bus trips in the below zero weather gripping the north central part of the Nation.  Before his performance at the Surf Ballroom, he would decide to fly to the next gig arriving in Fargo, ND for another added performance in Moorhead, MN, rather than travel by bus.  As Dion, the only one of the four major musicians to be on that tour to survive tells it, the plane could only take three passengers.  Buddy was going, and a coin flip determined he (Dion) and Bopper to be the two to join Buddy Holly on what would be an ill-fated plane ride.  However, when Dion found out the cost, $36, for the one way charter, he recognized it as one month's rent, and thinking back to lessons he learned from his frugal mother, would decide the price too steep, and give his seat to Richie Valens. As Dion recalls in an article in St Anthony's Messenger "Only the four of us knew who was getting on the plane when we left the dressing room that night. Of the four who were in that room, I’m the only one who survived beyond February 3, 1959."  The owner of the flight service would watch the tail light of the plane disappear.  With no word from surrounding airports, a search was on, and the plane company owner would locate the plane at 5:30 in the morning in the snow covered fields of north central Iowa.  We have distant family members in this area of Iowa, and my grandfather's cousins formed a band in 1932 first known as the Hovel Bros. Band.  They would play throughout much of north central Iowa, and perhaps at one point played at the Surf.  But these farmers and machinists were not destined for stardom, but would be well known within their parochial area of Iowa.  Their band, albeit with different members, would play on for at least 61 years and last be known the Ponderosa Gang.  Buddy Holly and the Crickets were not as fortunate.

1993 news article on Hovel Bros. Band
(Source:  Carol Ryan)

As Dion DiMucci goes on to say, sometimes cliches sound hollow and other times they are outright cruel, and this was shown by the promoters who exclaimed that the show must go on.  Despite loosing three of their close musicians and friends, Dion would complete the extended tour on February 18.  Returning to New York he would suffer from survivor's guilt, having been the one to give up his seat.  He says he leaned on his wife, and his addictions.  Dion would later recognize the gift of friendship he had with these men.  He would find this to be particularly true during a 2005 pilgrimage to Rome where he had a grace filled experience when seeing the irons in which some of the apostles had once been held.  A young priest noting the experience simply said to him: "Dion, relationships don't end."  It would take years for Dion to reference his involvement in this tragic event, although he made what he terms an "oblique reference to it in a song in the '60's."  However, much more poignantly than what I will ever be able to compose he has this to say in that St Anthony article:

But Don McLean got more notice with his song about “the day the music died.” I prefer to think about it as the day the music was born.  In Buddy Holly and the Crickets, rock music had found its lasting form: two guitars, a bass and drums. The news of Buddy and his “widowed bride” touched a lot of people deep inside, and it made them love their music all the more because they knew the artists were mortal. The songs may last forever, but we singers were trying to outrun the clock.

Years later I read a line about a natural process, and it seemed to provide a good analogy for what happened to us and to rock and roll back in 1959. Jesus told his disciples: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”  (John 12:24).

Richie Valens, The Bopper, and Buddy Holly had their careers cut short by a 21 year old pilot who failed to properly check the weather forecast.  Yet, they have become legends in their own right.  As tragic, and melancholic as it may be to have lost three young talented musicians, Dion is right to think of this not as the day the music died, but as the day the music was born. In his song, Don McLean asks "Do you recall what was was revealed the day the music died?  It is what Dion realized in his grace filled encounter in 2005 the music did not die; relationships are on-going, and more importantly the three men admired most, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost did not take the last train for the coast.  Present they are, just wanting to be revealed