Sixty-one years ago Monday, a 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza took flight from a small-town Iowa airport, carrying three pioneers of early American rock ‘n’ roll music.
The musicians, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, chartered a plane with hopes of cutting travel time between frigid Midwestern tour stops. A few extra hours of sleep waited at the destination, Moorhead, Minnesota.
But the plane wouldn’t make it out of Clear Lake, Iowa, crashing in a field just miles north of the Surf Ballroom, where the early rock stars wrapped a gig hours earlier. It was one of the first tragedies to strike modern American music and a figurative end to 1950s culture. Don McLean coined it “The Day the Music Died” in his 1971 opus “American Pie.”
And the events that unfolded Feb. 3, 1959, at the airport in neighboring Mason City, Iowa, haunted one of Holly’s bandmates — a forefather to country music’s original outlaw movement — for years to come.
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