The Day The Music Died
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- For the other referent of this phrase, see WABC (AM).
On February 2, Buddy Holly chartered a Beechcraft Bonanza from Dwyer Flying Service to take him and his new Crickets band (Tommy Allsup and Waylon Jennings) to Fargo, North Dakota. Richardson came down with the flu and didn't feel comfortable on the bus, so Waylon gave his plane seat to him. Valens had never flown on a small plane and requested Allsup's seat. They flipped a coin, and Ritchie called heads and won the toss.
Following a performance at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, the small four-passenger Beechcraft took off into a blinding snow storm and crashed into Albert Juhl's corn field several miles after takeoff at 1:05 a.m. Also killed in the crash was pilot Roger Peterson.
N3974N was the registration number of the airplane which crashed outside Clear Lake, not "American Pie" as many think.
When word reached Fargo about the tragedy, a local rocker dubbed Bobby Vee was called in to replace the trio. Thus, in a rather morbid way, his own career was born.
In 1988, Ken Paquette, a Wisconsin fan of the '50s era, erected a stainless steel monument depicting a steel guitar and a set of three records bearing the names of each of the three performers. It is located on private farmland, about one quarter mile west of the intersection of 315th Street and Gull Avenue, approximately eight miles north of Clear Lake, Iowa. He also created a similar stainless steel monument to the three musicians near the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin. That memorial was unveiled on July 17, 2003. Holly, the Big Bopper and Valens played at the Ballroom on Feb. 1st, the day before the fateful flight.
Trivia
- In the 1987 movie La Bamba, about the life of Ritchie Valens, they swapped the circumstances behind The Big Bopper and Ritchie getting on the plane. In the movie, it was Ritchie who had the flu, but still did the coin toss.de:The Day the Music Died