That'll Be The Day

"It was already snowing at Minneapolis, and the general forecast for the area along the intended route indicated deteriorating weather conditions." So begins the Civil Aeronautics Board investigators report six months after the crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J.P. "the Big Bopper" Richardson and pilot Roger Peterson in the early hours of February 3, 1959.

On February 2, 1959, the Winter Dance Party tour was eleven days into a scheduled twenty-four performances.  The distance between events had not been fully considered when scheduling the performances, so many hours were spent on a bus not properly equipped for the weather. The heating system broke down shortly after the tour began, flu spread rapidly among the rest of the performers and Holly's drummer suffered severely frostbitten feet.

Holly chartered a plane for his band to fly to Moorhead, MN, the next stop on the tour.  Richardson, who had the flu, convinced Waylon Jennings to give up his seat, and Ritchie Valens won a coin toss for another seat on the plane.  The rest, as they say, is history.
 
Paradise Lost by John Milton and The Inferno by Dante Alighieri both speak to innocence lost.  Don McLean's 1971 single "American Pie" expresses another metaphor for the loss of innocence, turning the death of Buddy Holly and the plane crash into moment when the United States lost its last bit of innocence.

Still, it was not, as McLean wrote, the Day the Music Died.  Britain devoured Holly records faster than the record company could produce them. Demo tapes, previously unreleased recording sessions, whatever Decca had to sell, all shot up the British charts and turned Holly into one of the forefathers of the British Invasion that would strike America five years later. John Lennon and George Harrison learned to play guitar in part by listening to Buddy Holly records. Holly presented the model for many bands that came after: write your own songs, two guitars, a bass and drums. The fledgling Beatles, as the Quarry Men, recorded Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” as their first official tune before renaming themselves with a nod to Holly’s band, the Crickets. The first Rolling Stones' single released in the US was cover of Holly's "Not Fade Away."

In 1959, not even the musical pioneers themselves were certain that rock ’n’ roll would survive much into the 1960s, whether before or after the Day the Music Died.  Seems silly today, as we look back across the years, to have doubted the insistent beat of the music would sustained a global movement.  The beat does go on.