The Day the Music Died
Don McLean coined the phrase “the day the music died”, an expression that would later be used as a reference to the day of February 3, 1959, when rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, JP Richardson, and Richard Valens died in a plane crash in Iowa together with their pilot Roger Peterson. At the time, Holly was touring across the Midwest together with his band, and rising artists JP Richardson and Richard Valens were joining them.
A group of men view of the wreckage of a Beechcraft Bonanza airplane in a snowy field outside of Clear Lake, Iowa, early February 1959. The crash, on February 3, claimed the lives of American rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. ‘The Big Bopper’ Richardson. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Because the tour buses were cold and the journeys between venues were long, Holly decided that they had enough with the cases of frostbite and flu that were affecting their performances. Consequently, they chose to charter a plane to reach their next venue, but soon after takeoff late at night, the plane crashed into a cornfield. No one survived. Holly’s band members Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup were supposed to be on board as well, but they exchanged places with Jennings and Valens at the last minute and took the bus instead.