Title: The Day the Music Died
Content:  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 Midwest. Rising artists Valens, Richardson, and Dion and the Belmonts had joined the tour as well. The long journeys between venues on board the cold, uncomfortable tour buses adversely affected the performers, with cases of flu and even frostbite. After 
Title: The Day the Music Died
Content:  at Clear Lake to perform, and frustrated by such conditions, Holly chose to charter a plane to reach their next venue in Moorhead, Minnesota. Richardson, suffering from flu, swapped places with Jennings, taking his seat on the plane, while Allsup lost his seat to Valens on a coin toss. Soon after takeoff, late at night and in poor, wintry weather conditions, the pilot lost control of the light aircraft, a Beechcraft Bonanza, which subsequently crashed into a cornfield, killing all four on board. The event has since been mentioned in several songs and films. Various monuments have been erected at the crash site and in Clear Lake, where an annual memorial concert is also held at the Surf Ballroom, the venue that hosted the artists' last performances.
Title: The Day the Music Died
Content:  of Holly and Valens had been ejected from the fuselage and lay near the plane's wreckage. Richardson's body had been thrown over the fence and into the cornfield of Juhl's neighbor Oscar Moffett, while Peterson's body was entangled in the wreckage. With the rest of the entourage en route to Minnesota, Anderson, who had driven the party to the airport and witnessed the plane's takeoff, had to identify the bodies of the musicians. 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.
Title: February 1959
Content: American singers J.P. Richardson, 28, "The Big Bopper", Buddy Holly, 22, and Ritchie Valens, 17, were killed in the crash of a private plane on their way to Fargo, N.D. They had boarded the plane at Mason City, Iowa, along with pilot Roger Peterson. Waylon Jennings had given his seat to Richardson, and Valens and Holly's guitarist Tommy Allsup had flipped a coin to see who would get the other seat on the plane.  The plane, a Beechcraft Bonanza, took off at 12:50 a.m. and crashed minutes later on the farm of Delbert Juhl, killing all four persons on board.   This became popularly known as "The Day the Music Died". ; American Airlines Flight 320 from Chicago crashed into the East River while trying to land at La Guardia Airport, killing 65 of the 73 persons on board. ; Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King and Lawrence D. Reddick departed from Idlewild Airport New York for a tour of The Middle East and India. ; Died: Vincent Astor, 67, American philanthropist who inherited a fortune after the death of his father on the RMS Titanic in 1912, then donated most of it to various charities. 
Title: The Day the Music Died
Content:  the songs". Jennings and Allsup carried on for two more weeks, with Jennings taking Holly's place as lead singer. Meanwhile, funerals for the victims were held individually. Holly and Richardson were buried in Texas, Valens in California, and Peterson in Iowa. Holly's widow, María Elena, did not attend the funeral. 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."
Title: The Day the Music Died
Content: Tommy Dee recorded "Three Stars" (1959), commemorating the musicians. ; In 1961, Mike Berry recorded "Tribute to Buddy Holly", which describes the night of the flight. It reached number 24 on the UK Singles Chart and was notoriously banned by the BBC for being "too morbid". ; Don McLean, a fan of Buddy Holly, later addressed the accident in his song "American Pie" (1971), dubbing it "the Day the Music Died", which for McLean symbolized the "loss of innocence" of the early rock-and-roll generation. ; In 1978, Waylon Jennings briefly added his own memories of the incident onto his song "A 
Title: The Day the Music Died
Content:  of any name ever having been given to N3794N. The most widely accepted version of events was that Richardson had contracted the flu during the tour and asked 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. Valens, who once had a fear of flying, asked Allsup for his seat on the plane. The two agreed to toss a coin to 
Title: The Day the Music Died
Content:  vacant dressing room during Sardo's performance and said, "I've chartered a plane, we're the guys making the money [we should be the ones flying ahead]...the only problem is there are only two available seats." According to Dion, it was Valens, not Richardson, who had fallen ill, so Valens and Dion flipped a coin for the seat. In his interview, no mention is made of Jennings or Allsup being invited on the plane. Dion said he won the toss, but ultimately decided that since the $36 fare equaled the monthly rent his parents paid for his childhood apartment, he could not justify the indulgence.
Title: The Day the Music Died
Content:  Anderson called Hubert Jerry Dwyer (1930–2016), owner of the Dwyer Flying Service in Mason City, to charter the plane to fly to Fargo's Hector Airport, the closest one to Moorhead. Flight arrangements were made with Roger Peterson, a 21-year-old local pilot described as a "young married man who built his life around flying". The flying service charged a fee of $36 per passenger for the flight on the 1947 single-engined, V-tailed Beechcraft 35 Bonanza (registration ), which seated three passengers and the pilot. A popular misconception, originating from Don McLean's song about the crash, was that the plane was called American Pie; no record 
Title: The Day the Music Died
Content:  this re-examination sought to confirm or dispel, asserted that an accidental firearm discharge took place on board the aircraft and caused the crash. Another longstanding theory surmised that Richardson initially survived the crash and subsequently crawled out of the wreckage in search of help before succumbing to his injuries, prompted by the fact that his body was found farther from the plane than the other victims. Bass and his team took several X-rays of Richardson's body and eventually concluded that the musician had indeed died instantly from extensive, unsurvivable fractures to virtually every bone in his body. No traces of lead were found from any bullet, nor any indication that he had been shot. Coroner Smiley's original 

Question: who missed the plane the day the music died?
Answer: Tommy Allsup.
Waylon Jennings.