Via The Independent:
Sixty years ago today, on 3 February 1959, Buddy Holly’s bass player Waylon Jennings uttered seven words that would haunt him for the rest of his life. His band, led by rock’n’roll wunderkind Holly, had just played a rollicking show in Iowa as part of their Winter Dance Party tour. “Even though it was a Monday night,” Jennings later recalled, “it seemed like half the town’s teenagers had turned out.”
But Holly was fed up. Tired of the freezing cold, constantly malfunctioning tour bus, and desperate to avoid the 400-mile road trip to their next stop, he booked a private plane to Minnesota instead. Jennings was supposed to join him, but at the last minute gave his seat to “The Big Bopper”, who was on the same tour and suffering from a bad case of the flu. When Holly found out, he was teasingly aggrieved. “I hope your damned bus freezes up again,” he joked to his friend. “Well,” shot back Jennings, “I hope your ol’ plane crashes.”
That “ol’ plane” did crash, just a few minutes after it took off. On board were three renowned musicians – 22-year-old Buddy Holly, 17-year-old Ritchie Valens (who won his seat on a coin toss with Tommy Allsup), and 28-year-old J P “The Big Bopper” Richardson Jr – as well as the pilot, 21-year-old Roger Peterson. Holly and Valens were thrown from the plane’s torn fuselage. Richardson was flung into a neighbouring cornfield. Peterson became entangled in the wreckage. None of them survived.
Twelve years later, on his single “American Pie”, Don McLean dubbed the tragedy “the day the music died”. It was an apt description; all three singers on board had talent in abundance. The Big Bopper’s smash hit, the playful, rockabilly number “Chantilly Lace”, had made him a star, and Ritchie Valens was helping pioneer the Mexican American Chicano rock movement. But it was Holly who was changing the landscape of rock’n’roll music.
With his goofy, bespectacled look and frequent falsetto tenor, Holly was a far cry from the rock stars who came before him. At the time, it was virtually unheard of for a singer to write his own songs, arrange them, and orchestrate the instrumentals too – but Holly was a different breed of artist.
Having made a name for himself opening for Elvis Presley, he signed to Decca Records at the age of 19, in 1956. After a handful of disappointing singles, though, he was dropped and instructed not to record with anyone else for five years. Undeterred, he teamed up with producer Norman Petty, formed a new group called The Crickets to get around that five-year clause, and released the honky-tonk anthem “That’ll Be the Day”. This time around, something about his hiccupping vocals, watertight melodies and simple but decisive rhythm and blues guitars struck a chord with young music fans.