The Day the Music Died
1959 airplane crash that killed three American rock musicians
On February 3, 1959, American rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and "The Big Bopper" J. P. Richardson were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, together with pilot Roger Peterson. The event later became known as "The Day the Music Died" after singer-songwriter Don McLean referred to it as such in his 1971 song "American Pie".
At the time, Holly and his band, consisting of Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Carl Bunch, were playing on the "Winter Dance Party" tour across the American Midwest. Rising artists Valens, Richardson, Frankie Sardo and vocal group Dion and the Belmonts had joined the tour as well. The long journeys between venues in poorly heated tour buses adversely affected the performers, with cases of flu and even frostbite.
After performing in Clear Lake, and frustrated by the conditions on the tour buses, Holly chose to charter a plane to reach their next venue in Moorhead, Minnesota. Richardson, suffering from the flu, swapped places with Jennings, taking his seat on the plane, while Allsup lost his seat to Valens on a coin toss. Shortly after takeoff, late at night and in poor, wintry weather conditions, the pilot lost control of the light aircraft, a Beechcraft Bonanza, which crashed into a field, killing all four on board.
The event has since been mentioned or referenced in various media. Various monuments have been erected at the crash site and in Clear Lake, where an annual memorial concert is held at the Surf Ballroom, the venue that hosted the artists' last performances.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Day the Music Died” as 1959 airplane crash that killed three American rock musicians. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 1959 airplane crash that killed three American rock musicians. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1412033. Authority coordinates are 43.220, -93.383. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959 and 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Day the Music Died” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.