The Day the Music Died

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Memorial at the crash site at Mason City

The Day the Music Died is a popular name given to February 3, 1959, when musicians Buddy Holly , Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper were killed in a plane crash. It is also the central line of verse in the song American Pie .

prehistory

The three-week concert tour "The Winter Dance Party" took some rock 'n' roll singers and bands through several cities in the American Midwest in early 1959 . The tour bus that brought the musicians from place to place turned out to be not very suitable for winter, the heating system failed shortly after the tour started. Buddy Holly's drummer Carl Bunch even had to be hospitalized for frostbite on his feet. On 2 February 1959 Holly had enough of the bus and chartered with his remaining bandmates Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup , a light aircraft of the type Beechcraft BonanzaIn order km to the nearly 600 remote venue Moorhead (Minnesota) , near the airport, Fargo ( North Dakota to arrive).

Jiles Perry "The Big Bopper" Richardson, who presumably caught the flu on the cold tour bus, asked Waylon Jennings to be on the plane. Jennings agreed, and when Buddy Holly heard about this exchange, he jokingly said to Jennings: “I hope your old bus freezes up for good!”, To which Jennings replied, also jokingly, “And I hope your plane crashes ! ". Jennings followed this dialogue years later. In turn, Ritchie Valens, who had never flown in a small plane, asked Tommy Allsup if he could have his seat; the latter then let a coin toss decide, from which Valens emerged as the winner. Dion DiMucci of the Dion & the Belmonts originally wanted to fly, too, but the price of 36 dollars per person - the equivalent of a month's rent for his parents' apartment - was too high for him, and he decided on the tour bus.

crash

The crash site on the day of the accident

At around 1 a.m., right after the concert in the Surf Ballroom of Clear Lake , Iowa , the Beechcraft took off from Mason City Municipal Airport, three kilometers away, when it was snowing. Less than five minutes later, she fell into a grain field eight kilometers north of Clear Lake. All inmates (the pilot Roger Peterson and the musicians Holly, Richardson and Valens) were killed. According to research, the likely causes of the crash were poor weather conditions and human error on the part of the pilot. It is believed that Peterson flew straight into the blizzard, lost orientation, and therefore accidentally flew down instead of up. Using the instruments, it was later reconstructed that the machine must have crashed into the field at about 170 miles per hour, overturned and thrown three of the occupants out. Only Peterson was trapped in the wreck. Due to the bad weather, the accident site could only be reached ten hours later and the bodies recovered.

aftermath

The 1971 song American Pie by Don McLean refers to that day with a few passages; the phrase "The Day The Music Died" was coined by this song. Even the song Three Stars of Eddie Cochran deals with the three downed musicians. In their piece, Buddy Holly's glasses , the doctors sing about the whereabouts of the visual aid after the plane crash. In 1998 it was transferred from the police archives to Buddy Holly's hometown, where it can be seen in the "Buddy Holly Center". Bernd Begemann sang about the plane crash in 1993 in his song Buddy, Better Take the Bus .

In 1988 the fan Ken Paquette erected a steel cross and memorial at the crash site - consisting of a guitar and three records, each with the name, the most famous song title and the record company name of the three artists. The street to the west of the accident site, which runs in a north-south direction, is called "Buddy Holly Place". A similar monument was Paquette near the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay ( Wisconsin created), where they had occurred the night before. The memorial was unveiled on July 17, 2003.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ $ 36 in 1959 corresponds to $ 284 in purchasing power in 2012
  2. ^ The Night The Music Died [1] , January 31, 2012
  3. ^ The Night The Music Died [2] , January 31, 2012
  4. ↑ Civil Aeronautics Boad - Aircraft Accident Report (original accident report from September 15, 1959) [3] (PDF; 5.7 MB) , January 31, 2012
  5. ↑ The patron saint of zero talent types on the taz website , accessed on December 15, 2010.
  6. ^ Description of the approach to Buddy Holly Place , accessed on July 22, 2013.

Coordinates: 43 ° 13 ′ 12 ″  N , 93 ° 23 ′ 0 ″  W.