The Day the Music Died

On February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson were killed when their chartered plane crashed in Iowa a few minutes after takeoff.  Investigators blamed the crash on bad weather and pilot error. The pilot, 21 year old Roger Petersen also died.

Holly, Valens and Richardson were part of the Winter Dance Party, a tour that had started in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and headed to small cities in Minnesota and Iowa.

After mechanical difficulties with the tour bus, Holly chartered a plane. However, The Big Bopper, who had the flu, convinced Holly's band member Waylon Jennings to give up his seat, and Ritchie Valens won a coin toss for another seat on the plane.

The plane took off around 1:00 AM from Mason City Airport into a blinding snowstorm and crashed only minutes later in a cornfield, killing all three musicians and the pilot. Because the plane didn't catch fire when it crashed, no one noticed the wreckage until the next day, about a quarter mile from the nearest country road.

The bodies of Holly and Valens lay near the plane. Richardson's body was thrown over the fence and into a neighboring cornfield.  Peterson's body was found in the plane's wreckage.

Buddy Holly, from Lubbock, Texas, was just 22 when he died.  He and his high school friends started a band playing country, before switching to rock and roll.  By the mid-1950s, Holly and his band, The Crickets, had a regular radio show and toured internationally, playing hits like "Peggy Sue".  Holly wrote all his own songs, many of which were released after his death.

Before he died Buddy Holly and the Crickets had just scored a No. 1 hit with "That'll Be the Day." The band broke up in November 1958.

Ritchie Valens, was only 17 when the plane went down but had already scored hits with "Come On, Let's Go," "Donna" and "La Bamba,". In 1987, Valens' life was portrayed in the movie La Bamba, and the title song, performed by Los Lobos, became a No. 1 hit. Valens was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, 28, started out as a disc jockey in Texas and later began writing songs. Richardson's most famous recording was the rockabilly "Chantilly Lace," which made the Top 10. He developed a stage show based on his radio persona, "The Big Bopper."

Singer/songwriter  Don McLean memorialized Holly, Valens and Richardson in the 1972 No. 1 hit "American Pie," which refers to February 3, 1959 as "the day the music died."