The Day the Music Died: Clear Lake, Iowa, February Third

A few miles east of Interstate Thirty-Five, in a farm field north of Clear Lake, Iowa, a small memorial marks the place where American rock and roll changed forever. On the morning of February third, nineteen fifty-nine, a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza went down in darkness and frozen mud shortly after takeoff from the Mason City Municipal Airport, killing all four people aboard.

The victims were Buddy Holly, twenty-two years old, who had recorded That'll Be the Day and Peggy Sue and was already one of the defining figures of the music. Ritchie Valens, seventeen, had scored with Come On Let's Go and La Bamba. J.P. Richardson, known as the Big Bopper, had a massive novelty hit with Chantilly Lace. And the pilot, Roger Peterson, twenty-one, who had not been certified for instrument flying in the conditions that night.

The three musicians were on the Winter Dance Party Tour, a brutal run of twenty-four shows in twenty-four days across the upper Midwest in the dead of winter. The tour bus had a broken heater. Holly chartered a small plane to get ahead of the schedule and fly to the next stop. His bandmate Waylon Jennings gave up his seat to the Big Bopper, who was ill. Ritchie Valens won a coin toss against Tommy Allsup for the other seat.

They played their last concert the night before at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, less than ten miles from where the plane went down.

The phrase the day the music died came twelve years later, from Don McLean's song American Pie. McLean, who had been a teenage newspaper boy in New York when he read the headline, used the crash as the opening image of an eight-minute meditation on the loss of American innocence. The phrase stuck. It became the most famous description in rock history for a moment that, everyone agreed, felt like something ending.