1959 WDP History

The Legacy of the 1959 Winter Dance Party

In January of 1959, Buddy Holly, Dion and the Belmonts, Ritchie Valens, JP “The Big Bopper” Richardson Jr. and Frankie Sardo set out on a 24-city, three-week tour of the Midwest dubbed “The Winter Dance Party.”

Each stop drew capacity crowds, but the performers found themselves crammed into a drafty bus that soon had a broken heating system.

By February 1st, Carl had been hospitalized with frostbite, and Buddy, Ritchie, and Dion ended up taking turns drumming for each other at the Green Bay shows.

Though Clear Lake wasn’t on the original schedule, promoters had contacted the Surf’s then-manager Carroll Anderson in hopes of filling an open date. The price for tickets was upped from fifty cents to a dollar twenty-five.

By the time Buddy arrived at the venue, he had decided to lease a flight to Fargo, North Dakota, and beat the bus to their next-day concert at the Armory in Moorhead, Minnesota. It was Carroll Anderson that called Dwyer Flying Services out of Mason City and helped make arrangements to fly to Fargo that night. From there, owner H. Jerry Dwyer enlisted a 21-year-old pilot by the name of Roger Peterson to fly that night.

Despite the frustrations, the performers didn’t let any of it show on stage. Radio DJ Bob Hale emceed the event as the musicians continued to back each other on drums.

But as the show went on, behind the scenes seemed to revolve around who would join Buddy on that flight. There are conflicting accounts of the night regarding who was supposed to be on the plane, but most agree on the following: Buddy sought to ease his financial burden of chartering the plane, but only two more seats remained. Dion opted out after being told the flight would cost $36 each, leaving Holly’s current band mates Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup as the first people asked that agreed to share the flight.

The Big Bopper had come down with an illness and asked Waylon if he could fly in his place.

Waylon agreed, and Buddy joked with him, “I hope your bus freezes up!” to which Jennings retorted, “Well, I hope your ‘ole plane crashes!” The exchange reportedly haunted the performer for the rest of his days, though the late country music legend did return to the Surf for a concert in 1995.

Tommy Allsup had been more reluctant to give up his seat to a pleading Ritchie Valens, in part because he had a registered letter in Fargo to pick up. It wasn’t until later that night when Ritchie asked one last time in the hallway that Allsup suggested flipping a coin for it. Ritchie called heads and ended up as the third passenger.

After the show, Carroll drove the three to the airport. Peterson checked in with the Air Communications Station several times prior to departure to check in on the weather conditions.

Shortly after takeoff, one wing hit the ground and the plane plowed into a cornfield at 170 miles per hour, flipping over on itself and tossing the passengers into the air. All four were killed instantly, and the plane’s wreckage was strewn over 300 yards of snow-covered fields.

After Dwyer made it to the airport, he found himself unable to make radio contact. When the Fargo control tower alerted the Mason City airport that the flight had never arrived, Dwyer worried that it was detained by fog.

It wasn’t until the next morning that he was able to take off in his own plane and followed the intended route. Within minutes, the wreckage was spotted less than six miles northwest of the airport. As the rest of the tour was now hours away, Carroll Anderson was called to identify the bodies.

A mystery still surrounds what went wrong that night. A Civil Aeronautics Board report stated that Peterson experienced dangerous complications during flight; spacial disorientation from the poor weather conditions, combined with misinterpretation of instrument readings aboard the Beechcraft Bonanza that differed from the more common instruments he had been trained on could have been at fault. The Board also concluded that Peterson had not been given accurate weather conditions, and the pilot likely would have postponed the flight with sufficient warning.

Upon hearing the news on TV, Buddy’s pregnant widow Maria Elena suffered psychological trauma and miscarried. Because of this, authorities found it necessary to implement a policy against announcing victims’ names until after families had first been notified.

The night has also been immortalized in film and song, including “Three Stars” by Eddie Cochran and perhaps more famously the 1972 Don McLean song “American Pie.