February 3, 1959: The day the music died

quote:

---

Ritchie Valens won a coin toss for another seat on the plane.

---

quote:

---

Valens, who once had a fear of flying, asked [Holly guitarist Tommy] Allsup for his seat on the plane. The two agreed to toss a coin to decide. Bob Hale, a disc jockey with Mason City's KRIB-AM, was emceeing 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.

---

Waylon Jennings, Buddy Holly, and Tommy Allsup





Dion on guitar with the Belmonts backing on vocals. Waylon and Tommy in back.



Green Bay WI, Feb 1. When the drummer got frostbite, the other musicians took turns playing drums. Here Ritchie Valens hits the skins, with Tommy and Waylon up front.



Trivia tidbit: at the show before this in Duluth, one of the attendees was 17 year old Robert Zimmerman. You know him better as Bob Dylan.

LINK

The Widow’s Pique

For more than forty years, María Elena Holly has fiercely guarded the legacy of her late husband, rock and roll icon Buddy Holly.

by Joe Nick Patoski

Texas Monthly
Feb 2001

quote:

---

"You know what they call me?” A coquette’s giggle flutters out the mouth of María Elena Holly—Buddy Holly’s widow to you and me—as she sits at the dining table in her tastefully appointed Turtle Creek townhouse in Dallas. “The Spanish Yoko Ono.” For the better part of this day, and a whole day before that, she has recounted the story of her personal life and her career as the guardian of the name, likeness, and public image of Buddy, the rock and roller from Lubbock who died young and tragically more than forty years ago.That role has defined the 68-year-old María Elena—a blessing and a curse, she will tell you. The upside is obvious, from the creature comforts that surround her to the perks her own celebrity brings, such as being on a first-name basis with Paul McCartney, the former Beatle who bought the rights to Buddy’s publishing catalog. The downside is being compared with Yoko Ono, the widow of another Beatle, John Lennon. Guarding the legacy of a celebrity while keeping the flame lit is no cakewalk, María Elena says. You’re sought out because you’re the closest link to the object of fans’ affection, but you can never be that person.

---

quote:

---

She paints a vivid image of the six months they lived together in an apartment at Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue in New York’s Greenwich Village. He loved listening to jazz at the Village Vanguard and poetry at the local coffeehouses. He wanted to write movie scores. He saw himself as an actor like Anthony Perkins and wanted to take acting lessons— “If he can do that, I can too,” he reasoned. He wanted to record with Ray Charles and loved gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. He wanted to produce young artists and already had one protégé, Lou Giordano. Ritchie Valens had asked Buddy to record him. On a night out at Cafe Madrid with María Elena and his friend Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers, he was so taken with the flamenco guitar that between sets he asked the guitarist to teach him how to play. He told Provi García he wanted to cover Spanish classics, translating them into English. Buddy Holly wanted it all.

“He felt so free about his music and what he wanted to do. He didn’t have anyone telling him no,” she says. “All the time we were together, he’d always say, ’I don’t have the time.’ He was always in such a hurry to do things. He hardly ever slept.” She traveled with him on the road. She helped with his public relations, setting up the photo sessions with the celebrity photographer Bruno; Norman Petty did the photography before that. She was with him when he confronted Petty for money he was owed. She was by his side when he decided to tour again in the middle of winter to get the cash he could not squeeze out of Petty. María Elena wanted to go with him, but Buddy put his foot down. She was pregnant with their first child, so she would stay home.

“Up to this day, I still say that if I would have been there on that tour, Buddy would have never gotten on that plane,” she says, tears welling up in her eyes. But he did. Buddy died when his chartered plane crashed into a snowy field in Iowa, also killing the pilot, Valens, and J. P. Richardson, a.k.a. the Big Bopper, who had scored a hit with “Chantilly Lace.” It was February 3, 1959, a date forever known as the Day the Music Died, thanks to singer Don McLean’s 1971 song “American Pie.” To María Elena, the date marks the end of a fairy tale. Less than a week later she suffered a miscarriage. Looking back, it’s all a blur.

---

quote:

---

Being the keeper of all things Buddy means an endless stream of legal battles, negotiations on licensing agreements that go on forever, and calls during all hours from fans around the world wanting to connect with Buddy. “I didn’t ask for it. I was assigned to it,” María Elena says. “I don’t complain about that. It has been good to me. The Man has been taking care of me, but He said, ’You don’t get something for nothing. You have to work your arse off for it.’” Her own personal crusade was to secure the rights of her late husband’s works. She points toward a circled item from a recent Rolling Stone. It reads that President Clinton backs the Copyright Corrections Act, which reverts the ownership of master recordings back to the artists, rather than to their recording company or manager. María Elena smiles. If protecting Buddy’s image is a job that never ends, at least she is compensated well for her efforts. The stylish furnishings, the art hanging on the wall, the neighborhood she lives in, the Veuve Clicquot (“One of my little pleasures,” she says) all attest to that.Whether it’s the champagne talking or plain old common sense, I know that as charming as María Elena is, I wouldn’t want to be sitting across the table from her trying to negotiate the use of Buddy’s likeness or music. She’s a hard-nosed businesswoman, a reputation burnished by her role in the enactment of Chapter 26 of the Texas Property Code, better known as the Buddy Holly bill, a landmark piece of legislation passed in 1987 that protects the heirs of deceased celebrities from exploitation. María Elena hired lawyer Shannon Jones, Jr., of the Dallas firm Passman and Jones, to help her push the bill through, and they personally lobbied legislators to ratify it.

She’s still at it too. A suit she filed with some of Buddy’s relatives against MCA Records, the company whose labels Buddy recorded for, is in a California court. It involves a dispute over royalties and the ownership of Buddy’s master recordings.

The sad part is that while María Elena has won so many important legal victories, her relationship with Lubbock has only gotten worse.

---

With Crickets drummer Jerry Allison and his GF/future wife Peggy Sue Gerrin (yes, THAT Peggy Sue)

Ritchie Valens and Donna Ludwig (yes, THAT Donna)

The whole story could make a book similar to Bridge At San Luis Rey. Or at least an awesome mini series.
If you've never read that book, you should.