Buddy Holly and the day the music died

SIXTY years ago today, on February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly’s bass player Waylon Jennings uttered seven words that would haunt him for the rest of his life. His band — The Crickets, 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 said, “it seemed like half the town’s teenagers had turned out.”

But Holly was fed up. Tired of the cold malfunctioning tour bus, and desperate to avoid the 400-mile drive 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 musicians — 22-year-old Buddy Holly, 17-year-old Ritchie Valens (who won his seat on a coin toss), and 28-year-old JP Richardson Jr (The Big Bopper), as well as the pilot, 21-year-old Roger Peterson. None of them survived.

Twelve years later, in the song American Pie, Don McLean dubbed it “the day the music died”. It was an apt description; all three singers had talent in abundance, but only Holly was changing the landscape of popular music.

With his goofy look and falsetto hiccups, Holly was a far cry from 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 them too — but Holly was a different breed of artist.

Lennon and McCartney named their band The Beatles in homage to The Crickets. And a 17-year-old Bob Dylan attended Holly’s show two nights before his death.

“Something about him seemed permanent and he filled me with conviction,” Dylan said in his 2016 Nobel Lecture. “Then out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked at me right straight there in the eye and he transmitted something, something I didn’t know what. It gave me the chills.”

The music never really died after all.