The Winter Dance Party tour - 50 Years Ago

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the death of 1950s rockers Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper (aka J.P. Richardson) and Richie Valens. Their well-documented plane crash happened after a February 2, 1959 concert at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, IA.

The musicians (along with Dion and the Belmonts) were part of the Winter Dance Party tour, a 24-date tour. Enthusiasm for the tour was high early on, but it eventually turned sour as the bands and performers were playing to small audiences in frozen towns in the upper Midwest, with all the musicians crammed into a cold tour bus. Holly's drummer even came down with frostbite. When they arrived at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, they were cold and tired.



After the night's performance, Holly basically said 'F--- that bus" and chartered a small plane for himself and his remaining backup musicians -- Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup -- to fly them to the tour's next gig in Moorhead, Minnesota. But Jennings gave his seat up to the Big Bopper, who was running a fever and was tiring of fitting his bulky body into the bus seats. And Allsup lost his seat in the plane to Richie Valens in a coin toss.

The flight took off in a heavy snowstorm with a young pilot named Roger Peterson. According to his Wikipedia entry... "The plane, a 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza (registration number N3794N), took off in light snow from Mason City Airport around 1:00 on the morning of February 3, 1959. The plane banked 180 degrees to the left and aimed north, achieving an altitude of 2000 feet MSL, cleared the airport, turned towards the northwest and faded from view. Minutes later the Beechcraft crashed in a cornfield eight miles northwest of the airfield, killing Peterson and his three passengers. The Civil Aeronautics Board concluded the primary cause of the crash was pilot error, citing Peterson's inability to interpret the newly-installed Sperry altitude gyroscope he was forced to read due to the weather conditions with a secondary factor being that the pilot had not been informed of adverse flash weather forecasts. The theroy is that Peterson may have read the gyroscope backwards as a result of vertigo and thought that the plane was gaining altitude when it was actually descending."

Valens was only 17 years old, Holly was 22 and Big Bopper 29 years old. More details behind the events leading up to the tragic airplane crash are at the History of Rock site.

2/3 UPDATE - Wall Street Journal covers the anniversary and describes a new 2CD Buddy Holly set (out next week) called "Memorial Collection".

Below is an 8-minute present day video that covers the history and legacy of the Winter Dance Party tragedy.