Buddy Holly's "Tour from Hell"

Tonight, January 31, is the 50th anniversary of "The Night The Music Almost Died." That's the interesting viewpoint offered by Pamela Huey, a staff writer for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune.

A few days from now, thousands of blogs will feature stories about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly. Ms. Huey's article explains that the reason he and the others were on the plane was that they had just experienced a hellish winter bus tour of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Herewith some excerpts:

...the little-known story of the bus breakdown and the rest of the grueling tour is worth telling to understand why Holly chartered the airplane at Mason City two nights later...

The midwinter tour was particularly difficult for Texans Holly and his reconstituted Crickets, and for [Richie] Valens, a Southern California boy who hadn't taken a winter coat... General Artists Corp. had organized the tour with no thought to geographic sanity...

Griggs estimates they had five different buses before driving into Clear Lake -- "reconditioned school buses, not good enough for school kids." There were no roadies to set up and pack up, and only icy two-lane highways to get from town to town...

"We had started up this incline, it was snowing real bad, and the bus just started going slower and slower, and the lights got dimmer and dimmer, and all of a sudden the bus stopped," Allsup recalls. "The driver said, 'The bus is frozen.' ... It was so cold, and we were just sitting there right in the middle of the road. Everybody started thinking we were about to freeze to death."

Dion's Belmonts started lighting newspapers to generate some warmth. Holly drummer Carl Bunch was in pain and having difficulty moving his legs. Allsup looked at Bunch's feet; they had turned brown...

Holly historian Griggs thinks the Wisconsin bus breakdown was the last straw: "Buddy had his mind made up then. He thought, 'I don't want to go another 400 miles on this bus.'"

Much more at the link for the lengthy Star Tribune writeup. Newspaper story links tend to have short cyberlives because they don't archive them for long for nonsubscribers, so if the link is dead and you want to read the story, Google the author's name and a relevant quote; the story will undoubtedly be picked up elsewhere.

At the top, a video of Buddy Holly and the Crickets appearing on the Arthur Murray Dance Party on December 29, 1957, introduced by Kathryn Murray. Crash image credit to Hulton Archive, Getty Images; it's amazing how small and forlorn that plane wreckage looks against the fence of that farm field. More photos and brief newsreel footage of the crash site are here at YouTube.