Totally off-topic, but R&R music fans will recognize today as the 46th anniversary of the plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa that took the lives of three young musicians whose careers were short, but leaving a big influence. This from the Beaumont Enterprise:

Long after 'day the music died,' the Big Bopper's legend lives on
Rock 'n' roll's 1st tragedy claimed the star from Beaumont 46 years
ago today
By RON FRANSCELL
Beaumont Enterprise


CLEAR LAKE, IOWA - The plane crash that took the lives of J.P. "Big
Bopper" Richardson, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens is one of rock
music's pivotal moments, more significant than an electrified Dylan
or that little show at Woodstock.

Why?

After the crash in Clear Lake on Feb. 3, 1959, rock 'n' roll changed.
Singer Don McLean immortalized the moment as "the day the music died"
in his pop-dirge American Pie. But it was Holly, Valens, the Bopper
and their pilot who died. The music (and the audience) merely changed
forever.

By 1959, the little world of rock 'n' roll had shrunk even further.
Elvis was in the Army, Chuck Berry was still on the rise (and soon
headed for jail), Little Richard was in seminary, and Jerry Lee Lewis
was effectively blacklisted.

Holly's career had slumped, and at 22, he needed money. Valens, a 17-
year-old Latino kid from Pacoima, Calif., had just hit the charts
with his ballad, Donna, (its flip-side was Valens' version of a
traditional Mexican song, La Bamba.)

And J.P. Richardson, a 28-year-old disc jockey at Beaumont's KTRM
radio station, was still enjoying the popularity of his hit single,
Chantilly Lace, released only six months earlier.

Richardson had already become a local radio legend in Beaumont. He
was born in nearby Sabine Pass and grew up in Beaumont's Multimax
Village, a World War II housing development. He'd been hanging around
the KTRM studio since his days at Beaumont High School, where he
graduated in 1947, and somebody finally gave him a job.

The pudgy, shy, crew-cut, chain-smoking "Jape," as he was known to
friends, hosted an easy-listening show for years, but when station
owner Jack Neil wanted to capitalize on teenagers' growing demand for
rhythm-and-blues music, Jape created a jive-talking alter ego he
called "The Big Bopper."

The character was so distinct from the real-life Jape, most listeners
thought he was an altogether different guy - probably a black hipster
who spun the hottest new tunes that were slightly racy in the mid-
1950s.


Tenacious 'Jape'
Jape was thoughtful and reserved, but the Bopper was bold,
charismatic and flamboyant. Later, after becoming a star, most photos
showed him mugging, goofy, pop-eyed and theatrical.

After a stint in the Army, Jape came home to Beaumont and KTRM with
big dreams. In May 1957, 27-year-old Jape set the world record for
continuous broadcasting - 122 hours and 8 minutes - at the Jefferson
Theater. In the last hours of the marathon, after he began to
hallucinate, he leaned on his friend and fellow DJ Gordon Baxter.

"Bax, I've died," Jape said. "Honest to God, I've died, been across
and back. They talked to me. It's OK, Bax, don't be afraid to die. It
was light over there, and warm. I didn't want to come back ... "

Jape wrote songs in his spare time at KTRM. In June 1958, he recorded
his first song, The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor. But
every record had two sides, and Jape didn't have a second song. On
the road between Beaumont and the Houston recording studio, he wrote
a B-side ditty he called Chantilly Lace, a two-minute novelty song
that is both innocent and suggestive, arguably the world's
introduction to phone sex.

Chantilly Lace exploded onto the charts. Less than a month after it
came out, The Big Bopper appeared on Dick Clark's Saturday Night
Beechnut TV show. He peddled some other songs he'd written, like
White Lightnin' and Running Bear, which would be No. 1 hits for two
other Beaumont singers, Johnny Preston and George Jones.

By year's end, Chantilly Lace had sold more than 1 million records.
He earned a gold record, which was to be delivered to him Feb. 8,
five days after the Clear Lake show.

That fall, Jape also told a British magazine about another idea he
had: He called them "music videos." He imagined a jukebox that played
both music and a short film of the artist singing it. He'd filmed
three of his own songs and had proposed the idea to his producers.

"It will ultimately become standard practice for every record artist
to make a film of himself performing his record," he told DISC
magazine, which published its story under the headline "Records will
Be Filmed!" in January 1959.

"We owe J.P. Richardson, The Big Bopper, much more credit than just
for Chantilly Lace," says rock expert Bill Griggs of Rockin' 50s
magazine.

The singers had never met before they embarked on the Winter Dance
Party tour. The Bopper and Valens would earn a princely wage of up to
$800 a week for the three-week bus tour across the upper Midwest.

But it was a nightmare. The tour scribbled illogical lines across the
snowy back roads of the Heartland in ramshackle, unheated buses,
often back-tracking to make poorly planned gigs. The musicians grew
tired and sick.

Then the bad weather turned worse. By the time they reached Clear
Lake, Iowa - the 11th concert in 11 days - the temperatures had been
below freezing for 12 days.


Fateful decisions
Buddy Holly didn't want to spend another freezing night on the bus,
so he chartered a plane to carry him and his two bandmates, the
Crickets, after the Surf Ballroom concert to Fargo, N.D., for the
next show.

But the Big Bopper was sick with the flu. He asked if there was any
room on the four-seater plane. Holly's bass player, a skinny Lubbock
kid named Waylon Jennings, took pity on the Bopper and traded his
seat for Richardson's warm, new sleeping bag.

Later, in the Surf dressing room, Valens flipped a coin with the
other Cricket, Tommy Allsup. He called heads, and heads won. He got a
seat on the plane, and Allsup got to live.

The plane took off at 1 a.m. in sub-freezing winds, lowering
visibility and light snow. Five miles northwest of the little airport
at Mason City, Iowa, the plane plowed into a farmer's field, killing
all four on board. The three singers' bodies and some of their
possessions were thrown from the wreckage into the frozen black night.

It was rock 'n' roll's first great tragedy.

The next morning, searchers found the debris and the frozen corpses.
In the pocket of the Bopper's light-blue cotton pants, they
discovered some dice, his wedding ring, a guitar pick and $202.53 in
cash. They also found the Bopper's briefcase, which contained a half-
empty pint of whiskey, some aspirin, a hairbrush and mirror, some
ties and a guitar strap - and fragments of song lyrics he hadn't yet
set to music.

For all his vision about the future of pop music and songs he had yet
to sing, The Big Bopper couldn't have foreseen his most significant,
albeit dubious, achievement: He was among the first of a long line of
rock stars made mythic by dying young.

Jay Richardson, now 45, has clearly already grappled with his grief.
He was born almost three months after his father died, so he has only
secondhand memories of his dad.

Except one.

He once dreamed his father stood behind him at a family dinner.
Placing his hand on Jay's shoulder, the Bopper said, "Don't worry,
son. Everything will be OK."

It was only a dream, but it doesn't matter to Jay. He considers it
the only true contact they ever had.

For five years, Jay has toured in a musical tribute to his father,
Holly and Valens. He's sung his father's songs more often than his
father sang them.

Other perfomers are imitating Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, but Jay
has the Bopper's DNA.

When he dons his leopard-skin jacket and answers a prop phone with
his father's signature "Hellooooo, baaaaby!" he's as close to his
father as he'll ever be.

Sometimes after the show, fans who saw his father during his six
meteoric months of fame approach Jay with tears in their eyes. They
want to shake his hand or hug his neck. They want to be close to The
Big Bopper again.

He signs autographs as "Big Bopper Jr."

Jay's oldest son is the fourth J.P. Richardson, and his three
children all know more now about their famous grandfather than Jay
knew growing up in a home where the Bopper wasn't discussed much.

That's all changed now.

"We still have those 23 lyrics," Jay says. "Those are what we call
the 'lost songs of The Big Bopper.' They've all got music now."

Richardson was buried in Beaumont. From Germany, U.S. Army Pvt. Elvis
Presley sent a wreath of yellow roses encircling a guitar. As Jape's
funeral cortege slowly rolled toward Forest Lawn Cemetery, his friend
Gordon Baxter played Dixieland jazz on the radio, and many radios
along the funeral route were tuned in.

A granite monument to his father has been erected at the Surf
Ballroom. A steel one stands in the sad cornfield in Clear Lake. But
Beaumont, Jape's hometown, hasn't shown the same adulation. In the
mid-1960s, the City of Beaumont's Parks Department renamed a leftover
Multimax building the "J.P. Richardson Community Center," but today
the structure is mostly used for storage.

Jape's headstone at Forest Lawn Cemetery is simple and unremarkable.
The clock he watched at KTRM hangs on a back wall of the Quality Cafe.

No streets are named for him. No festivals celebrate his life. No
park recalls the Bopper's memory.


Musical legacy
Jay, who lives in Katy, would love for Beaumont to pay a higher
tribute to his father but considers it unseemly to lobby for it.

"Some years on Feb. 3, the newspaper only has one line that
says, 'Today in history, a 1959 plane crash killed Buddy Holly,
Ritchie Valens and some other guy in Clear Lake, Iowa,' " he says.

Richardson's accomplishments surpass being "some other guy" who died
there. Chantilly Lace is ranked by Broadcast Music Inc. among
America's 800 most-played songs. With 2.7 million radio plays, that's
more than 12 years of continuous airtime if it were played over and
over again.

After Hollywood's Buddy Holly Story and La Bamba lionized the other
two singers who died in the crash, interest in Richardson's life
story simmered. Screenplays exist, but no film is yet in the pipeline.

His idea for music videos was way ahead of its time. When MTV figured
out a way to do it more than 20 years later, it transformed the music
world.

Today, the Bopper's songs earn up to an estimated $100,000 for his
heirs, who still haven't settled how the money should be divided.

Ironically, the Bopper never made much money for himself on his
music. When he died, his estate was valued at $11,111.50 (about
$72,000 in 2004 dollars) but $10,000 was unpaid royalties on
Chantilly Lace.

For Jay, the frozen Iowa cornfield where The Big Bopper drew his last
breath is more hallowed ground than the gravesite in Beaumont.

Beyond the marker, about 40 feet on the other side of a barbed-wire
fence, searchers found The Big Bopper's body. Jay has seen the news
photos from the crash site, which clearly show the corpses scattered
amid the debris.

He walks out to the spot alone.

Leaving the cornfield on a frigid late-January day much like the
morning the crash was found, Jay shares a secret.

"There was something I didn't tell you back there at the Surf," he
says. "Something inside. I didn't want to say that the granite (of
the monument) feels probably as cold and hard and frozen as my dad
was when they found him in that field. I think about that, and it
makes me sad."

The day was doubly significant to me, as it was the last time for many years that I would get to ride in the cab of a steam locomotive, shown at the link below. Truly, it was the "day the music died". By the time a year had passed, steam would be gone and all the true innovators of rock and roll music had been usurped with talentless teeny boppers and electronics.

C&S 807, the last USRA heavy 2-8-2 to operate anywhere:
http://photoswest.org/cgi-bin/imager?00007025+OP-7025

You are quite right - it is off topic and has nothing to do with railway preservation.

Not quite folks,

In the McLean piece, did not the Father, Son and Holy Ghost take the last TRAIN to the "coast"?

Besides, Bob, Bennett and myself are all of a sufficient vintage to appreciate that era of music. And remember that 1959 was also the year that saw the end of steam on the UP, and the last revenue runs of the N&W J class.

...as well as the last year of revenue runs on the GTW for the U-4-b's/ #6400's.

Oh, and Kevin, one does not have to be defined as a "Boomer" to appreciate good music. ;- )

TJ

Most of Holly's hits were recorded at Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico. Correct me if I'm wrong, (me being a northeasterner), but wasn't Clovis a major point on the ATSF?

You are correct A friend of mine's grandad was a bigshot in the shops there...................................................Wooly

http://www.fiftiesweb.com/cab.htm

low time pilot...he augered in.

Wow, while it isn't on topic must we be so critical. Sometimes things like this are even interesting to the high and mighty rail foamer.

I was only ine years old, but I clearly remember the repeated memorial announcements and mourning on New York's WMGM. with "Murray the K". I don't wish to diminunize the loss of four human lives, but like the end of steam, it was a pivotal moment for some of us older fellows. I'm glad you brought it up, Bob.

Bringing the two things together, you might take a look at Art Huneke's LIRR site, "Arrt's Archives". Once on the site, look at his section called "The Day the Music Died". It has nothing to do with Buddy, J.P., and Ritchie, but evokes a similar pang for some of us.