In April 2022, a Beatles concert poster at Heritage Auctions became the most expensive object of its kind ever auctioned when it sold for $275,000. Just seven months later, that record was broken again when another concert poster sold at the same auction house for $447,000: the Buddy Holly and the Crickets Winter Dance Party poster.
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This is probably the only surviving poster for the concert, which took place on February 3, 1959 in Moorhead, Minnesota, as part of the Winter Dance Party tour, a multi-band concert series in the American Midwest. However, three of the musicians whose portraits grace the poster were never to arrive in Moorhead: "The Big Bopper" JP Richardson, Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash near Mason City, Iowa, en route to the concert. Don McLean later referred to the day as "the day the music died" in his song American Pie, which is primarily associated with the death of Buddy Holly, who was just beginning a promising music career.
Buddy Holly was born into a musical family in Lubbock, Texas in 1936. He learned to play the guitar at an early age and wrote his first songs as a teenager. Together with a friend he appeared in the local music scene. In 1955 the duo was allowed to open for rising rock 'n' roll star Elvis Presley, whom Holly greatly admired. However, the friends eventually went their separate ways and Holly landed his first record deal on his own at the end of the year. This first chapter of his professional music career was unsuccessful, however. Holly didn't land a hit and was also disappointed at how little say he was given.
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After a label change and the formation of the backing band The Crickets, made up of musicians from Holly's hometown, in the summer of 1957, the songs That'll Be the Day and Peggy Sue were successfully released. An appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show finally sealed the breakthrough. More hits (like Oh, Boy!) followed, and in the spring of 1958, Buddy Holly and The Crickets toured Australia and the UK.
1958 was also the year Buddy Holly's personal life changed as he fell in love with María Elena Santiago and proposed to her on their very first date. She said "yes," and two months later, on August 15, the couple walked down the aisle in Lubbock. Soon after, he parted ways with his manager, with whom there had been financial disagreements, and The Crickets.
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The young couple settled in New York's Greenwich Village, where Holly continued as a musician on his own. He planned to take acting classes and wrote songs such as Rave On, It Doesn't Matter Anymore, and Peggy Sue Got Married. However, with his former manager owning the rights to his old hits, Holly soon found himself broke and was forced to get back on the road. María was expecting their first child together at that time.
The Winter Dance Party tour toured 24 Midwestern cities in January and February 1959, primarily in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa. In addition to Buddy Holly was a newly formed backing band and Ritchie Valens (La Bamba), "The Big Bopper" JP Richardson (Chantilly Lace), Dion and the Belmonts and Frankie Sardo. It quickly turned out that the tour was very badly organized: on each of the 24 planned concert evenings there was to be a concert in a different city. However, they were sometimes hundreds of miles apart. The tour bus was barely heated, to the point that Buddy Holly's drummer Carl Bunch even had to be hospitalized for frostbite.
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Finally, Buddy Holly had had enough and chartered a small plane for himself and his two remaining band members Tommy Allsup and Waylon Jennings, which was to take them to Moorhead, Minnesota, after the concert on February 2nd in Clear Lake, Iowa. Since JP Richardson had now caught a bad cold, Jennings gave him his place. Ritchie Valens defeated Allsup at the coin toss and then took his place.
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At 1 a.m. the plane took off from Mason City Municipal Airport near Clear Lake. The flight ended after just five minutes. A pilot error led to the crash, which none of the four occupants survived. Buddy Holly was 22, JP Richardson was 28 and Ritchie Valens was 17. The Winter Dance Party tour continued without them. María Elena Holly learned of her husband's death on the TV and suffered a shock that caused her to lose their child.
The untimely death of Buddy Holly snatched from the world a rising star who had already left an indelible mark on music history. While Elvis Presley became a legend as a rock n roll icon, it was Buddy Holly who put his stamp on the music and gave it substance. Buddy Holly was exceptional in every way, whether it was his clean-cut look that seemed so out of step with a rock 'n roll star, or his talent as a songwriter, which he combined with great experimentation (e.g. Everyday) and knowledge of how to deal with studio technology (“overdubbing”).
Buddy Holly's influence on later generations of musicians has been immense. His admirers also included the Beatles, who took their band name as inspiration from Buddy Holly and the Crickets They also copied his band line-up with guitar, bass and drums. And so it seems only natural that it was a concert poster commemorating Buddy Holly that ousted The Beatles from the top spot of most expensive concert posters in auction history.
