This week in history: ‘Something touched me deep inside the day the music died’

Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson were killed in a plane crash in 1959, almost 61 years before a crash killed Kobe Bryant on Jan. 26, 2020. | Sun-Times File photo

As reported by the Chicago Daily News, sister paper of the Chicago Sun-Times:

The news of Kobe Bryant’s death in a California helicopter crash rocked the sports world this week. It left many feeling as if they’d lost someone close, as Sun-Times columnist Rick Morrissey wrote, even though many never met Bryant.

Sixty-one years ago, Chicagoans grappled with a similar feeling when three rock ‘n’ roll icons — Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson — and their pilot were killed in an Iowa plane crash on Feb. 3, 1959.

The musicians were flying to Fargo, N.D., when their plane crashed in a “snowy field in Iowa,” according to a Feb. 3, 1959 Chicago Daily News report. Their manager told a reporter the trio was “weary of bus travel” and “wanted to get time to get their clothes laundered.”

“When other artists heard of the deaths, they volunteered their services to keep the tour going,” The Daily News reported. The Chicago booking agency, General Artists, said volunteers included Bill Haley and the Comets, Bill Parsons and Frankie Avalon.

Over a decade later, Don McLean captured this feeling of loss felt by the singers’ fans and later Bryant’s fans in the 1971 song “American Pie”: “Something touched me deep inside the day the music died.”

The Feb. 3, 1959 headline for the story on the crash in the Chicago Daily News read “End of Their Song.”