February 4, 2019

On Feb. 3, 1959, 60 years ago yesterday, a plane crash in the Midwestern state of Iowa took the lives of young rock and roll music stars Buddy Holly, J.P. Richardson (known as the “Big Bopper”), and Ritchie Valens. All three stars had achieved quick success, and their deaths at the early heights of popularity shocked the American public. The lasting impact of the tragedy led singer Don McLean to pen the 1971 hit song “American Pie,” which remembers the rockers’ deaths as “the day the music died.”

Buddy Holly was the most famous of the artists killed in an Iowa plane crash 60 years ago on Feb. 3, 1959. He was 22 years old. Credit: © Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Images

Buddy Holly was born in Texas in 1936. He began playing the piano when he was 11 years old but soon turned to playing the guitar. He performed as a country singer during the early 1950′s. In 1957, he and his his band The Crickets gained fame with the song “That’ll Be the Day.” That same year, Holly recorded his first solo hit, “Peggy Sue.” His other hits with the Crickets included “Oh, Boy!,” “Maybe Baby,” and “Rave On.” As a solo artist, Holly recorded the 1959 hits “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” and “Raining in My Heart.” Holly was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. The Crickets were inducted in 2012.

Rising star Ritchie Valens was just 17 years old when he died in a plane crash on Feb. 3, 1959. Credit: © Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Ritchie Valens was born Richard Valenzuela in Los Angeles, California, in 1941. He taught himself to play guitar and other instruments as a youth, and was influenced musically by his family’s Latin culture. He recorded his first hit song, “Come On, Let’s Go,” while still in high school. His most famous song, the Spanish-language hit “La Bamba,” was the B-side of the hit ballad “Donna.” Valens’s life was dramatized in the 1987 motion picture La Bamba starring Lou Diamond Phillips. Valens was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

J. P. Richardson, better known as the Big Bopper, was the oldest of the young artists killed in the 1959 Iowa plane crash: he was 28 years old. Credit: © General Artists Corporation

J. P. Richardson was born in Texas in 1930. Richardson served in the United States Army and worked as a disc jockey at a radio station (where he was known on air as the Big Bopper). He started his music career writing songs for such artists as George Jones and Johnny Preston. In 1958, Richardson recorded the hit song “Chantilly Lace” and became a full-time musician.

In January 1959, Holly, Valens, and Richardson joined the “Winter Dance Party” tour through the northern Midwest. After performing at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 2, the three boarded an overnight plane bound for their next show in Minnesota. The plane crashed in bad weather, killing the pilot and all three musicians. Notable members of the tour who took the long cold bus ride safely to Minnesota instead of the risky flight included guitarist and future country music star Waylon Jennings (a member of Holly’s band at the time) and the group Dion and the Belmonts.