Winter Dance Party

It was late January, 1959, when the tragic Winter Dance Party began; a gruelling twenty-four day tour of the mid-west by a rock 'n' roll revue which included Buddy Holly and his group, J P "Big Bopper" Richardson and Ritchie Valens. Poorly funded and inefficiently organized, the tour began a disaster and steadily got worse, with a motley successionof clapped-out coaches being the only transportation provided to the artists by the booking agency. Eleven days into the tour and facing another tortuous 400 mile road trip to the next venue on a freezing bus, Holly decided to charter a plane after their unscheduled appearance at ClearLake, Iowa. He and the two other headliners took off for Fargo, NorthDakota, in the teeth of a blizzard during the early hours of 3rd February1959... it was a date that would come to be known as one of the darkest in the whole history of rock 'n' roll...