Utilisateur:Newnewlaw/The Day the Music Died

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The Day the music died
Photo de la carcasse de l'avion
Photo de la carcasse de l'avion
Caractéristiques de l'accident
Date
Caractéristiques de l'appareil
Lieu d'origineAéroport municipal de Mason City
Lieu de destinationAéroport international Hector
modifier Consultez la documentation du modèle

Le 3 février 1959 les rockeurs Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson ainsi que leur pilote [[Roger Peterson (pilote)|Roger Peterson]] sont mort dans un accident d'avion près de Clear Lake, Iowa. Cette journée sera plus tard connue, grâce à à une chanson de Don McLean, "American Pie" comme "The Day the Music Died" (traduction : "le jour où la musique est morte").

A l'époque, Holly et son groupe, composé de Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup et Carl Bunch, jouaient sur la tournée "Winter Dance Party" à travers le Midwest. Les autres artistes, Valens et Richardson s'était joint à la tournée.

Les longs trajets entre chaque date, à bord d'autocars inconfortables apporta grippe et engelures aux artistes.  Après un spectacle à Clear Lake, et frustré de ces conditions, Holly a fatalement décidé d'affréter un avion pour se rendre à son prochain concert à Moorhead, Minnesota. Dans l'avion, Richardson qui avait la grippe, pris la place de Jennings, et Valens la place d'Allsup après avoir gagné à pile ou face.

Peu après le décollage, tard dans la nuit et dans de difficiles conditions météorologiques hivernales, le pilote perdit le contrôle de son avion léger, un Beechcraft Bonanza, qui s'est écrasé dans un champs de maïs, ne laissant aucun survivant.

Contexte[modifier | modifier le code]

Buddy Holly terminated his association with the Crickets in November 1958. For the start of the "Winter Dance Party" tour, he assembled a band consisting of Waylon Jennings (bass), Tommy Allsup (guitar), and Carl Bunch (drums), and the opening vocals of Frankie Sardo. The tour was set to cover 24 Midwestern cities in as many days. New hit artist Ritchie Valens, J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson and Dion DiMucci (of Dion and the Belmonts fame) joined the tour to promote their recordings and make an extra profit.[1][2]

Winter Dance Party Tour schedule, 1959

The tour began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 23, 1959. The amount of travel soon became a logistical problem. The distance between venues had not been properly considered when the performances were scheduled. Adding to the disarray, the tour bus was not equipped for the weather. Its heating system broke down shortly after the tour began, in Appleton, Wisconsin. While flu spread among the rest of the performers, drummer Bunch was hospitalized in Ironwood, Michigan, for severely frostbitten feet. The musicians replaced that bus with a school bus and kept traveling.[3] As Holly's group had been the backing band for all of the acts, Holly, Valens, and DiMucci took turns playing drums for each other at the performance in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Clear Lake, Iowa.[4]

On Monday, February 2, the tour arrived in Clear Lake. The town had not been a scheduled stop, but the tour promoters, hoping to fill an open date, called the manager of the local Surf Ballroom, Carroll Anderson, and offered him the show. He accepted, and they set the show for that night. By the time Holly arrived at the venue that evening, he was frustrated with the tour bus and decided to charter a plane to take him, after the show, to Fargo, North Dakota. The party would have picked him up for the next tour stop, in Moorhead, Minnesota, saving him the journey in the bus and leaving him time to get some rest.[3]

Flight arrangements[modifier | modifier le code]

refer to caption
A V-tailed Bonanza similar to N3794N, the accident aircraft

Manager Anderson called Hubert Dwyer, owner of the Dwyer Flying Service, a company in Mason City, Iowa, to charter the plane to fly to Hector Airport in Fargo, the closest one to Moorhead.[5] Flight arrangements were made with Roger Peterson, a 21-year-old local pilot. The flying service charged a fee of $36 per passenger for the flight on the 1947 single-engined, V-tailed Beechcraft 35 Bonanza (registration N3794N[6]), which could seat three passengers plus the pilot.[7] A popular misconception, originating from Don McLean's eponymous song about the crash, was that the plane was called American Pie. In fact, no record exists of any name ever having been given to N3794N.[8]

Richardson had contracted flu during the tour and asked Waylon Jennings for his seat on the plane. When Holly learned that Jennings was not going to fly, he said in jest: "Well, I hope your ol' bus freezes up." Jennings responded: "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes", a humorous but ill-fated response that haunted him for the rest of his life.[9]

Ritchie Valens, who had once had a fear of flying, asked Tommy Allsup for his seat on the plane. The two agreed to toss a coin to decide.[5] Bob Hale, a DJ with KRIB-AM, was working the concert that night and flipped the coin in the ballroom's side-stage room shortly before the musicians departed for the airport. Valens won the coin toss for the seat on the flight. Dion had been approached to join the flight, although it is unclear exactly when he was asked. Dion decided that since the $36 fare (equivalent to US$Modèle:19590 in today's money)[10] equaled the monthly rent his parents paid for his childhood apartment, he could not justify the indulgence.[10]

Take-off and crash[modifier | modifier le code]

After the show ended, Anderson drove Holly, Valens, and Richardson to the Mason City Municipal Airport.[11] The weather at the time of departure was reported as light snow, a ceiling of 3,000 feet (910 m) AMSL with sky obscured, visibility 6 miles (9,700 m) and winds from 20 to 30 mph (32 to 48 km/h). Although deteriorating weather was reported along the planned route, the weather briefings pilot Peterson received failed to relay the information.[12]

Mason City and Clear Lake, Iowa

The plane took off normally from runway 17 (today's runway 18) at 12:55 a.m. Central Time on Tuesday, February 3.[13] Dwyer, the owner of the flight service company, witnessed the take-off from a platform outside the control tower. He was able to see clearly the aircraft's tail light for most of the brief flight, which started with an initial left turn onto a northwesterly heading and a climb to 800 ft. The tail light was then observed gradually descending until it disappeared out of view. Around 1:00 a.m., when Peterson failed to make the expected radio contact, repeated attempts to establish communication were made, at Dwyer's request, by the radio operator, but they were all unsuccessful.[14]

Later that morning, Dwyer, having heard no word from Peterson since his departure, took off on another airplane to retrace his planned route. Within minutes, at around 9:35 a.m., he spotted the wreckage less than 6 mi (9.7 km) northwest of the airport.[14] The sheriff's office, alerted by Dwyer, dispatched Deputy Bill McGill, who drove to the crash site, a cornfield belonging to Albert Juhl.[15]

The Bonanza had impacted terrain at high speed, estimated to have been around 170 mph (270 km/h), banked steeply to the right and in a nose-down attitude. The right wing tip had struck the ground first, sending the aircraft cartwheeling across the frozen field for 540 feet (160 m), before coming to rest against a wire fence at the edge of Juhl's property.[14]

The bodies of Holly and Valens had been ejected from the torn fuselage and lay near the wreckage. Richardson's body had been thrown over the fence and into the cornfield of Juhl's neighbor Oscar Moffett, while pilot Peterson's body was entangled in the plane's wreckage.[14] With the rest of the entourage en route to Minnesota, it fell to ballroom manager Carroll Anderson, who had driven the party to the airport and witnessed the plane's takeoff, to identify the bodies of the musicians.[16] County coroner Ralph Smiley certified that all four victims died instantly, citing the cause of death as "gross trauma to brain" for the three artists and "brain damage" for the pilot.[17][18]

Aftermath[modifier | modifier le code]

Holly's pregnant wife, María Elena, learned of his death from the reports on television. A widow after only six months of marriage, she suffered a miscarriage shortly after, reportedly due to "psychological trauma". Holly's mother, on hearing the news on the radio at home in Lubbock, Texas, screamed and collapsed.[1] María Elena Holly did not attend the funeral and has never visited the gravesite. She later said in an interview: "In a way, I blame myself. I was not feeling well when he left. I was two weeks pregnant, and I wanted Buddy to stay with me, but he had scheduled that tour. It was the only time I wasn't with him. And I blame myself because I know that, if only I had gone along, Buddy never would have gotten into that airplane."[19]

The "Winter Dance Party" tour did not stop; Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup continued performing for two more weeks, with Jennings taking Holly's place as lead singer.[20] Meanwhile, the funerals of the victims were being held individually; Holly and Richardson were buried in Texas, Valens in California, and pilot Peterson in Iowa.

Official investigation[modifier | modifier le code]

A tangled mass of metal with a wing and landing gear wheel barely recognizable, on a snowy field
The wreckage of N3794N as found by the authorities on the morning of the accident

The official investigation was carried out by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB, precursor to the NTSB). It emerged that pilot Roger Peterson, who was working on his instrument rating at the time, had passed his written examination, but was not yet qualified to operate in weather that required flying solely by reference to instruments. He, and Dwyer Flying Service itself, was certified to operate only under visual flight rules, which essentially require that the pilot must be able to see where he is going. However, on the night of the accident, the low clouds obscuring the stars, the lack of a visible horizon, and the absence of ground lights over the sparsely populated area would have made visual flight virtually impossible.[14]

Furthermore, Peterson, who had failed an instrument checkride nine months before the accident, had received his instrument training on airplanes equipped with a conventional artificial horizon, as source of aircraft attitude information, while N3794N was equipped with an older-type Sperry F3 attitude gyroscope. Crucially, the two types of instruments display the same aircraft pitch attitude information graphically in opposite ways.

The CAB concluded that the accident was due to "the pilot's unwise decision to embark on a flight" that required instrument flying skills he had not demonstrated to have. A contributing factor was the pilot's unfamiliarity with the old-style attitude gyroscope fitted on board the aircraft, which may have caused him to believe he was climbing when he was, in fact, descending (an example of spatial disorientation). Another contributing factor was the "seriously inadequate" weather briefing provided to the pilot, which "failed to even mention adverse flying condition which should have been highlighted".[14][21]

Subsequent investigations[modifier | modifier le code]

On March 6, 2007, in Beaumont, Texas, the body of J.P. Richardson was exhumed to rebury it in a more fitting part of the local Forest Lawn cemetery. The musician's son Jay Perry took the opportunity to have his father's body re-examined to verify the original findings, and asked forensic anthropologist William Bass to carry out the procedure.

Among the rumors surrounding the accident this second examination sought to verify was that an accidental firearm discharge took place on board the aircraft and caused the crash, since two months after the event, a farmer had found at the crash site a .22 pistol known to have belonged to Buddy Holly. Another rumor had Richardson surviving the initial impact and crawling out of the aircraft in search for help, prompted by the fact that his body was found farther from the wreckage than the other three.

Dr. Bass and his team took several X-rays of Richardson's body and eventually concluded that the musician had indeed died instantly from extensive, nonsurvivable fractures to almost all of his bones; no traces of lead from any bullet was found, either. Coroner Smiley's original report was therefore confirmed.[22][23]

Possible reopening of the investigation[modifier | modifier le code]

On March 3, 2015, it was announced that the National Transportation Safety Board, the successor to the Civil Aeronautics Board, had agreed to consider reopening the investigation into the accident. A final decision may not be made until 2016.[24] The new investigation was proposed by L. J. Coon, a retired pilot from New England, who felt that the conclusion of the 1959 investigation was inaccurate. Coon suspected a possible operational failure of the right rudder and also requested a review of the fuel readings, as well as a possible improper weight distribution. Coon also argued that Peterson may have tried to land the plane and requested that his efforts should be recognized.[25] Coon approached the National Transportation Safety Board's cold case unit with his personal investigation because he felt that the verdict "amount(ed) to an injustice for Roger Peterson".[26]

Legacy[modifier | modifier le code]

Notification of victims' families[modifier | modifier le code]

Following the miscarriage suffered by Holly's wife and the circumstances in which she was informed of his death, a policy was later adopted by authorities not to disclose victims' names until after their families have been informed.[1]

Memorials[modifier | modifier le code]

Films[modifier | modifier le code]

Memorial concerts[modifier | modifier le code]

Fans of Holly, Valens, and Richardson have been gathering for annual memorial concerts at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake since 1979.[28] The 50th-anniversary concert took place on February 2, 2009, with Delbert McClinton, Joe Ely, Wanda Jackson, Los Lobos, Los Lonely Boys, Chris Montez, Bobby Vee, Graham Nash, Peter and Gordon, Tommy Allsup, and a house band featuring Chuck Leavell, James "Hutch" Hutchinson, Bobby Keys and Kenny Aronoff. Jay P. Richardson, the son of the Big Bopper, was among the participating artists, and Bob Hale was the master of ceremonies, as he was at the 1959 concert.[29][30]

Monuments[modifier | modifier le code]

A sculpture of sort, consisting of two white posts holding a black spectacles frame in Buddy Holly's characteristic style
Signpost near the Clear Lake crash site

In 1988, Ken Paquette, a Wisconsin fan of the 1950s era, erected a stainless steel monument that depicts a guitar and a set of three records bearing the names of the three performers perished in the accident. The monument is on private farmland, about 1⁄4 mi (0.40 km) west of the intersection of 315th Street and Gull Avenue, 5 mi (8.0 km) north of Clear Lake. A large plasma-cut steel set of Wayfarer-style glasses, constructed by Michael Connor of Clear Lake, similar to those Holly wore, sits at the access point to the crash site.

Paquette also created a similar stainless steel monument to the three musicians located outside the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where Holly, the Big Bopper, and Valens played their second-to-last show on the night of February 1, 1959. This second memorial was unveiled on July 17, 2003.[31] In February 2009, a further memorial made by Paquette for pilot Roger Peterson was unveiled at the crash site.[32]

Roads[modifier | modifier le code]

A road originating near the Surf Ballroom, extending north and passing to the west of the crash site, is now known as Buddy Holly Place.[33]

Songs[modifier | modifier le code]

  • Eddie Cochran's "Three Stars" (1959) is the first song to commemorate the musicians.
  • Don McLean later addressed the accident in his song "American Pie" (1971), dubbing it "the Day the Music Died",[34] which for McLean symbolized the "loss of innocence" of the early rock-and-roll generation.[1][35]
  • Waylon Jennings mentioned the accident in his song "A Long Time Ago" (1978), which he co-wrote with Shel Silverstein. In the song, he says, "Don't ask me who I gave my seat to on that plane | I think you already know."

See also[modifier | modifier le code]

  • 1963 Camden PA-24 crash
  • Death of Stevie Ray Vaughan
  • Bill Graham helicopter crash

References[modifier | modifier le code]

  1. ↑ a b c et d (en) Claire Suddath, « The Day the Music Died », Time,‎ (lire en ligne)
  2. ↑ Everitt 2004, p. 10.
  3. ↑ a et b Everitt 2004, p. 13.
  4. ↑ « Connection to Buddy Holly Death », WeGoNews.com (consulté le )
  5. ↑ a et b Everitt 2004, p. 14.
  6. ↑ "FAA Registry".
  7. ↑ Schuck, Raymond 2012, p. 16.
  8. ↑ « American Pie », sur Snopes.com (consulté le )
  9. ↑ Jennings et Kaye 1996, p. 70.
  10. ↑ (en) Dion DiMucci, The Wanderer, Beech Tree Books, , p. 89
  11. ↑ Everitt 2004, p. 15.
  12. ↑ Everitt 2004, p. 16.
  13. ↑ Everitt 2004, p. 17.
  14. ↑ a b c d e et f Civil Aeronautics Board, « Aircraft Accident Report » [PDF], National Transportation Safety Board, (consulté le )
  15. ↑ Everitt 2004, p. 18.
  16. ↑ Everitt 2004, p. 21.
  17. ↑ « Death certificates », sur Awesome Stories (consulté le )
  18. ↑ « Coroner's investigation », sur Awesome Stories (consulté le )
  19. ↑ William Kerns, « Buddy and Maria Elena Holly married 50 years ago », Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, (consulté le )
  20. ↑ Carr et Munde 1997, p. 155.
  21. ↑ « Aircraft Accident Report: File No. 2-0001 » [PDF], Civil Aeronautics Board,
  22. ↑ Bill Griggs, « Big Bopper Exhumation » (consulté le )
  23. ↑ (en) « Autopsy of 'Big Bopper' to Address Rumors About 1959 Plane Crash », The Washington Post,‎ (lire en ligne)
  24. ↑ « Board considers reopening investigation into plane crash that caused the death of Buddy Holly », KITV, (consulté le )
  25. ↑ (en) Kilen, Mike, « NTSB considers reopening Buddy Holly crash case », Des Moines Register, Gannett Company,‎ (lire en ligne)
  26. ↑ (en) Pilkington, Ed, « Buddy Holly plane crash : officials consider reopening 1959 probe », The Guardian, Guardian News and Media Limited,‎ (lire en ligne)
  27. ↑ a et b McDonald 2010, p. 33.
  28. ↑ « Winter Dance Party History » [archive du ], Surf Ballroom
  29. ↑ (en) Jon Bream, « Fans Pack Surf Ballroom for Tribute to Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper », CMT News,‎ (lire en ligne)
  30. ↑ Joe Coffey, « Holly, Valens, Richardson Remembered: 50 Winters Later », Premier Guitar, (consulté le )
  31. ↑ Jennifer Jordan, « The Day the Music Died » [archive du ], Articles Tree, (consulté le )
  32. ↑ (en) Jennifer Jordan, « Memorial to Buddy Holly pilot dedicated at crash site », Des Moines Register,‎ (lire en ligne)
  33. ↑ « Clear Lake, Iowa: Buddy Holly Crash Site », RoadsideAmerica.com (consulté le )
  34. ↑ Crouse 2012, p. 86.
  35. ↑ Theodore Thimou, « Preview: The Twice-Famous Don McLean Plays Rams Head » [archive du ], Bay Weekly, (consulté le )

Books[modifier | modifier le code]

Further reading[modifier | modifier le code]

External links[modifier | modifier le code]

[[Catégorie:1959 en musique]] [[Catégorie:Accident ou incident aérien en 1959]] [[Catégorie:Comté de Cerro Gordo]] [[Catégorie:Expression anglaise]]

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