As the small caravan of vehicles departed the Iron County maintenance garage in Hurley, the sheriff’s deputies leading the rescue must have wondered if they would find any survivors at all. A trucker had notified the sheriff’s department that a group of men -- without hats, gloves or heavy winter coats -- was standing outside a stranded bus about 15 miles south of town. Any person exposed to Artic cold without proper clothes or shelter would be in serious trouble -- life-threatening trouble. Every minute that passed made it more likely that the people stuck out on Highway 51 were dying or dead of exposure.

It was the dead of night, February 1, 1959.

One mile north of Pine Lake, the sheriff’s deputies found the darkened bus on the roadside. Stepping inside with their flashlights, the deputies were greeted by a group of pale and weak young men, some of whom had been huddled together under blankets. One person couldn’t stand up.

Maybe the only thing that kept the group alive was the fact that they had no idea how close they were to dying. They were musicians – rock-n-rollers – on their way to Appleton after a show in Duluth. A number of the young men hailed from Texas, another was from southern California. None had ever experienced weather like this.

The deputies heard of one of the singers. His name was Buddy Holly.

Winter Dance Party
Buddy Holly had rocketed up the music charts in 1957 with songs that instantly became a part of the American songbook, including “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue” and “Oh Boy.” Second only to Elvis as the voice of the new rock-n-roll phenomenon, Holly was huge overseas, too, directly influencing a generation of young English rockers who would emerge a few years later.

Holly spent 1958 touring non-stop at home and abroad, yet by the end of the year he was virtually penniless thanks to bad management. He was also expecting a baby with his new wife and had begun plans to create his own record company and recording studio. Holly reluctantly agreed to headline the Winter Dance Party of 1959, a tour that was beneath his stature but offered quick cash.

The tour of the upper Midwest was organized by General Artists Corporation (GAC), a shoestring operation headed by a druggist who sold records from his pharmacies and cared little about rock-n-roll. In the coming years, CAG would become notorious for treating rock acts as nothing more than cattle.

“The only reason Buddy went on that tour was because he was broke - flat broke,” said Waylon Jennings, Holly’s bass player on the ill-fated tour, years later. “He didn’t want to go but he had to make some money.”

The schedule for the Winter Dance Party was absurd. The group had to endure daily bus travels back and forth across Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. GAC accepted any offer that came along and filled the dates regardless of the distance involved. Holly was appalled when he received the schedule. He told GAC he wanted out, but it was too late, the deal was done.

Holly reluctantly said goodbye to his wife – both had experienced premonitions in the days leading up to the tour – and headed to Milwaukee where the Winter Dance Party was set to debut January 23.

Crazy, Daddy
Wisconsin was experiencing the deadliest winter in decades. Fourteen weather-related fatalities occurred in January alone. Temperatures had plunged with the start of 1959 and remained below zero for more than three weeks straight when a winter storm dumped 13 inches of snow on the region.

“Snowstorms grip Midwest with Artic cold to follow” declared one newspaper headline as the musicians arrived in Milwaukee. A weather emergency had been declared.

“It was crazy, daddy – the goings-on Friday at George Devine’s Million Dollar Ballroom,” reported the Milwaukee Sentinel. “Nearly 6,000 young people turned out to hear such rock ‘n’ roll stars as Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Big Bopper, Dion and the Belmonts and Richie Valens. If you haven’t heard them, you haven’t lived, man.

“It’s obvious the Big Beat still has a hold on the kids and it takes steady nerves to withstand the sound. Backed by the Crickets – two young guitarists and a drummer – Buddy Holly rocked his beanpole figure on stage, clutched his little guitar against his loud red coat and jerked his way through ‘Peggy Sue.’ His voice was scarcely audible over the raucous guitars, but he itchy-twitched in grand style, and that’s what the kids wanted.

“Electric guitars boomed through two loudspeakers with the force of two symphony orchestras in full sway, and the twitching rock ‘n’ rollers invoked screams that surely melted the snow on the roof of the ballroom."

Far from it. Holly grabbed the wad of cash – he was paid about $500 after every show – stuffed it into the sweaty shirt pocket under his suit jacket and walked outside, where it was 17 degrees below zero.

Making matters worse, GAC had accepted the lowest bid for the bus service. Not surprisingly, there were constant problems with the substandard vehicle. The musicians crammed into the bus, some took to the luggage racks to sleep, when they realized that the heating system was woefully inadequate – if it was working at all.

“Such lousy old buses,” Holly’s guitarist Tommy Allsup would recall bitterly decades years later. “They weren’t really buses. They were jokes.”

Drummer Carl Bunch’s toes began to tingle.

Oh Boy
Traveling on two-lane roads covered with ice and snow drifts, the tour plunged into the initial leg of its schedule: Kenosha’s Eagles Ballroom to Mankato, Minn., 350 miles; Mankato to Eau Claire’s Fournier Ballroom, 170 miles; Eau Claire to Montevideo in western Minnesota, 230 miles. In Eau Claire temperatures dropped to minus 25.

The entourage lived on sardines, potato ships and booze. The group’s clothes -- they carried two suits each -- remained damp with the perspiration of the performances. At first, the musicians endured the uncomfortable bus conditions by singing and placing bets on guitar contests between Holly and Dion. Within days, however, the group’s discomfort began to deteriorate to treacherous levels. Holly almost collapsed backstage at the Montevideo show, and Carl Bunch began losing the feeling his feet.

The tour trudged on to St. Paul, Minn., and Davenport and Fort Dodge, Iowa. The bus heater rarely worked. Bunch began having trouble coordinating his feet. The group resorted to wearing light clothing after the shows and huddling under blankets in small groups, usually with a bottle to help tolerate the cold.

“Holly and I used to climb under a blanket together to keep warm,” Dion wrote in his autobiography. The two would sing “Teenager in Love.” Waylon Jennings and the Big Bopper drank vodka under another blanket and worked on composing country songs.

From Fort Dodge it was 370 miles north to Duluth, Minn. Valens phoned his manager at a stop along the way. After describing the conditions, the young Chicano singer was told to leave the tour and return to Los Angeles. He opted to stay, the thrill of the shows outweighing the misery of the bus.

That night at the Duluth armory a young Robert Zimmerman, later known as Bob Dylan, angled close to the stage and was mesmerized by Holly. (Dylan recounted night when he accepted a Grammy Award in 1998.)

Hurley and Hell
The group started the 340-mile trip from Duluth to Appleton on U.S. Highway 2, a concrete thread winding through the heart of the remote Chequamegon National Forest, an area on the razor’s edge of the cold front slashing down across Lake Superior from Canada. Wind chills were estimated at minus 40 or worse. Turning south on U.S. 51 shortly after midnight, Feb. 1, the bus approached a hill fifteen miles south of Hurley when disaster struck. The bus died.

“We didn’t know enough to be afraid, or what a mid-winter night by the side of the road meant,” Dion said in his autobiography.

Ill-prepared and sickly, members of the tour party were trapped in the worst possible predicament. The temperature inside the bus was roughly the same as outdoors, with pounding winds sending drafts through the windows. Frozen tree limbs were snapping like twigs in the wind, crashing to the ground in the forest surrounding the group, according to Holly aficionado Mark Steuer of Green Bay, who has interviewed the surviving members of the tour.

The group began burning newspapers in the aisle for heat, which provided only a few fleeting moments of relief. Carl Bunch was succumbing, now unable to move his legs at all.

Some of the musicians stepped outside hoping to flag down a vehicle. At that time of night in remote Iron County with conditions being what they were -- not a soul was traveling.

The group was in serious danger. With no other option, the men grabbed their instruments and began a jam session in the bus to stay active. Carl Bunch prayed for deliverance.

After an hour, the group saw the headlights of a semi-truck approaching through the darkness. They hurried off the bus and into the middle of the road. The trucker slowed enough to maneuver around the men but never stopped.

Dejected, the musicians filed back on the bus.

“We just sat there and froze,” Tommy Allsup said. Holly and Dion told their life stories to one another under a blanket, passing time “through the dark hours while we waited for something to happen,” according to Dion.

After two hours on the roadside, the Iron County deputies arrived. The trucker had notified the police when he reached town. The group was taken to Hurley’s Club Carnival Café, a strip joint on notorious Silver Street, where they were fed breakfast as dawn was breaking – except for the group’s black bus driver, who had to eat in the county garage. Carl Bunch was rushed to Grand View Hospital in Ironwood, Michigan.

Last Train
Despite the ordeal, and the fact that the bus was shot, GAC instructed the group to fulfill the Green Bay performance that night. The matinee at Appleton’s Cinderella Ballroom was cancelled.

The group boarded the 11:30 a.m. Chicago Northwestern train out of Hurley and made it to Green Bay’s Riverside Ballroom for the evening show. It was the tenth performance for the Winter Dance Party, Holly’s second-to-last performance ever. Tickets were 90 cents in advance, $1.25 day of show. “No jeans or slacks permitted, and no intoxicating beverages will be served.” Roughly 2,200 young people crowded under the arched ceilings of the Riverside, “where entertainment reigns supreme,” according to the postcards sold at the ticket window.

The group was desperately looking forward to a scheduled day off after the Green Bay show to recuperate from their harrowing experience, but GAC had added a show in Clear Lake, Iowa, 357 miles away. Again the group would have to take a bus immediately following the performance for an all-night and all-day trip to another state without the opportunity to shower or have their clothes cleaned.

To add to the group’s disgust, the same bus that broke down in Hurley had been delivered to Green Bay, supposedly repaired. It sputtered down U.S. 41 and 151 until it finally died, again, somewhere in Iowa the next day. The group abandoned it on the side of the road.

After the evening’s performance at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, the tour was scheduled for another ten-hour ride to Moorhead, Minn. CAG had arranged for a school bus to get them there.

Buddy Holly had enough. He chartered a small plane to reach Moorhead. That would leave time to recuperate in a warm hotel room and get his filthy laundry done. Richie Valens and the Big Bopper, who was sick with the flu, asked to fly along.

Classic Wisconsin is pleased to acknowledge the following sources for this story:

Amburn, Ellis. Buddy Holly: A Biography. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995.

Steuer, Mark. “A Night Before the Music Died,” Voyageur Magazine, Winter/Spring 1993, pp 17-22.