13 Days the Music Died, Or: A Baker's Dozen Reasons Why Musicians Shouldn't Fly

(For Jean…)


Donkeys kill more people every year than plane crashes.

1.) Glenn Miller (born March 1, 1904) was one of the most successful recording artists as a big band leader, from 1939 to 1942,whose signature tunes included "In the Mood, "Chatanooga Choo-Choo," "Moonlight Serenade," and "Pennsylvania 6-5000." On December 15, 1944, Miller, while a major in the U.S. Army, was to fly from England to France to entertain troops who had liberated Paris. His plane disappeared in bad weather over the English Channel and was never found. It is now believed that the aircraft was shot down by Royal Air Force planes returning from an aborted air raid in Germany. In 1953, James Stewart starred in "The Glenn Miller Story." Miller’s mother noted that the star wasn’t as good-looking as her son.

2.) Buddy Holly (born September 7, 1936), Ritchie Valens (born May 13, 1941), and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson (born October 24, 1930) gave a show at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 2, 1959. Holly had chartered a Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft to take him and his new backup band (Tommy Allsup and future "outlaw" country star Waylon Jennings) to Fargo, North Dakota. Band member Carl Bunch had been hospitalized with frostbite three days earlier. Allsup and Valens flipped a coin for a seat on the plane, and Allsup lost. The Big Bopper was recovering from the flu and asked for Jennings’ spot on the plane. After Jennings gave up his seat, Holly jokingly said, "I hope your ol’ bus freezes up!" to which Waylon snapped back, "I hope your damn plane crashes!"

The plane took off in light snow and gusting winds at 12:55am, February 3, 1959, but crashed after only a few minutes, killing Holly, Valens, Richardson, and pilot Roger Peterson. The bodies of the singers were thrown clear of the wreckage. All had died on impact when the place hit the ground at an estimated 170 mph. The Civil Aeronautics Board determined the crash was caused by pilot error.

Waylon Jennings sang lead in place of Holly for the duration of the tour. In his autobiography, Jennings admitted that for years afterward he felt deep guilt and responsibility for the crash. Jennings is noticeably left out of the 1978 movie "The Buddy Holly Story" (a number of fictitious names had to be used to avoid litigation), as well as the 1987 biopic of Ritchie Valens, "La Bamba."

3.) Regarded as one of the most influential, acclaimed, and revered female vocalists of the 20th century, Patsy Cline (born September 8, 1932) enjoyed a successful pop music crossover during the days of the Nashville Sound in the early 1960s. Noted for her rich tone and emotionally expressive voice, she has been praised by and served as an inspiration for several singers of various music genres.

Dottie West, June Carter Cash, and Loretta Lynn, all friends of Cline’s, recalled her telling them that she felt a sense of impending death and didn’t expect to live much longer in the months before her passing. She started giving away personal items, wrote a will on airline stationery, and asked her close friends to look after her children if anything should happen to her. A week before her death, she told a backup singer, "Honey, I’ve had two bad ones (a head-on collision in 1961 nearly killed her). The third one will either be a charm or it’ll kill me."

Following an early March 1963 show, which Cline performed while ill with the flu, Dottie West begged her to return home in a car. Eager to see her children, Cline said, "Don’t worry about me, Hoss," using her favorite term of endearment, "when it’s my time to go, it’s my time." (West herself died after a 1991automobile accident.) Disregarding advisories of high winds and inclement weather, Cline’s pilot-manager Randy Hughes flew into the severe conditions and crashed at 6:20pm on March 5, 1963, in a forest outside of Camden, Tennessee, 90 miles from their Nashville destination. There were no survivors. Patsy Cline was only 30 years old.

Roger Miller and a friend searched for survivors early the next morning. "As fast as I could, I ran through the woods screaming their names," he recalled, "through the brush and the trees, and I came up over this little rise, oh my God, there they were. It was ghastly."

Patsy Cline was buried in her hometown of Winchester, Virginia, at Shenandoah Memorial Park. With the help of Loretta Lynn and Dottie West, a bell tower was erected in her memory at the cemetery, which plays hymns daily at 6:00pm.

4.) "(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay," recorded three days before his death, became the only #1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 for Otis Redding (born September 9, 1941). On December 10, 1967, Redding, his manager, the pilot, and four members of his backup band, The Bar-Kays, were killed when a chartered plane crashed into Lake Monona in Madison, Wisconsin. Bar-Kay singer Ben Cauley, the sole survivor, said the last thing he remembered was unbuckling his seat belt before finding himself in the icy waters of the lake, clutching a seat cushion to keep afloat. (James Alexander, another member of The Bar-Kays, had taken a commercial flight.) Redding was 26 years old. He was buried on his private ranch in Round Oak, Georgia, 23 miles north of Macon. In 1993, the U.S. Post Office issued a commemorative stamp. He was inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994, and in 1999, he posthumously received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

5.) Jim Croce (born January 10, 1943) is still recalled with affection for such timeless, folksy ballads as "Operator," "I Got a Name," "I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song," "You Don’t Mess Around with Jim," "Time in a Bottle," and "Bad Bad Leroy Brown.." After completing a concert in Natchitoches, Louisiana, on September 20, 1973, one day before his third album was to be released, he and fellow musician Maury Muehleisen (age 24) boarded a small commercial plane for a flight to Sherman, Texas. Upon takeoff, the plane failed to clear a grove of pecan trees at the end of the runway and crashed at 10:45pm. Pilot Robert Elliott and passengers Croce, Muehleisen, and warm-up comedian George Stevens were killed instantly. The official cause of the crash was pilot error. Jim Croce was 30 years old. Not surprisingly, sales soared for his previous albums, as well as for the posthumously released "I Got a Name," resulting in three gold records.

6.) First off, let it be said that, like Jethro Tull and The Marshall Tucker Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd is not the name of the star of the group. The name is a facetious swipe at the name Leonard Skinner, a gym teacher at Jacksonville, Florida’s Robert E. Lee High School, where some of the band members first started playing together. Lynyrd Skynyrd was three dates into their most successful headlining tour when, on October 20, 1977, near the end of a flight from Greenville, South Carolina, to LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, their chartered Convair 240 developed mechanical difficulties. The pilots approached a small airstrip near McComb, Mississippi, for an emergency landing, but the plane crashed in a forest, killing singer-songwriter Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist-vocalist Steve Gaines, his sister, backup vocalist Cassie Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, and pilots Walter McCreary and William Gray. Drummer Artimus Pyle suffered several broken ribs, guitarist Allen Collins had two cracked vertebrae in his neck, and bassist Leon Wilkeson incurred severe internal injuries, including a punctured lung, and had most of his teeth knocked out. Lead guitarist Gary Rossington broke both arms and both legs and took months to recuperate. Backup singer Leslie Hawkins sustained a concussion and broke her neck in three places, and keyboardist Billy Powell’s nose was nearly torn off, while roadie Steve Lawler suffered severe contusions and facial lacerations, and security manager Gene Odom was seriously burned on his arm and face, losing sight in one eye, as a result of an emergency flare that was activated during the crash. The probable cause was officially determined to be fuel exhaustion and total loss of power from both engines due to the crew’s inattention to the fuel supply.

JoJo Billingsley, the third member of the band’s backup vocalists known as The Honkettes that also included Cassie Gaines and Leslie Hawkins, remained at home caring for an ill family member. She claimed to have had a dream of the plane crash and pleaded with Allen Collins by phone to not use the Convair.

The album "Street Survivors," released three days after the horrific accident, became the band’s second platinum record and reached #5 on the U.S. album chart. MCA Records promptly withdrew the album’s original cover art, which depicted the band standing amid flames, replacing it with a similar image of the musicians against a black background, out of respect for the deceased. It would be 30 years before the original fiery cover was restored.

7.) Keith Green (born October 21, 1953), was a gospel singer-songwriter and contemporary Christian recording artist who founded Last Days Ministries. He died on July 28, 1982, when a leased Cessna 414 crashed after taking off from a private airstrip on Last Days Ministries property in Garden Valley, Texas. The small, two-engine plane, piloted by Don Burmeister, was carrying 11 passengers, among them Green and two of his children, three-year-old Josiah and two-year-old Bethany, and visiting missionaries John and Dede Smalley with their six children. All aboard were killed. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the crash was largely due to aircraft gross weight overload.

8.) In 1985, Ricky Nelson (born May 8, 1940) joined a nostalgia rock tour of England, which ultimately revived interest in his career. He hoped to duplicate the success in the U.S. when he began a tour of southern states. On his way to a December 31st New Year’s Eve concert in Dallas, he perished in a plane crash in De Kalb, Texas. After smoke from a malfunctioning heater filled the cabin of the DC-3 aircraft, the pilots attempted to land in a field. The passengers were killed when the plane struck several obstacles. The pilots managed to escape through cockpit windows. The last song Ricky Nelson performed onstage before his death was Buddy Holly’s "Rave On."

9.) Dean Martin’s son, Dean Paul Martin (born November 7, 1951), was only 13 years old when he, Desi Arnaz Jr., and William Hinsche formed the pop trio Dino, Desi & Billy, recording a handful of minor, teen-targeted hits between 1965 and 1968, landing twice in the Top 30. Later, under his given name, he became a successful tennis player and fledgling actor (including the TV series "Misfits of Science"). He had obtained his pilot’s license at the age of 16 and earned his wings with the California Air National Guard in 1981. Martin, the former husband of both actress Olivia Hussey ("Romeo and Juliet") and Olympic skating gold medalist Dorothy Hamill, met an untimely death in 1987, at the age of 35, when his National Guard F-4 Phantom fighter jet crashed in California’s San Bernardino Mountains during a snowstorm. Also killed was Weapons Systems Officer Ramon Ortiz. It is said that dad Dean Martin never recovered from the loss, retiring from show business a few years afterward. A ballyhooed tour reuniting him with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. was short-lived after a heartbroken Martin muttered, "Frank, what the hell are we doing up here?"

10.) On August 6 and August 27, 1990, Stevie Ray Vaughan (born October 3, 1954) and his band Double Trouble wrapped up the summer leg of their In Step Tour with performances at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre, outside of East Troy, Wisconsin. The concerts also featured Eric Clapton and Robert Cray. At the end of the show, as fog descended over the audience, Vaughan, Clapton, Cray, Buddy Guy, and Jimmie Vaughan did a 20-minute jam of the Robert Johnson blues classic "Sweet Home Chicago." Backstage, Vaughan and Clapton talked about future dates in London in a tribute to Jimi Hendrix.

The performers had expected a long bus ride to Chicago when Vaughan was informed that three seats were available on one of the helicopters for Clapton’s crew, room enough for Vaughan, his brother Jimmie, and Jimmie’s wife, Connie. It turned out that only one seat was open, and Steve requested it from Jimmie, who obliged. At 12:44am, pilot Jeffrey Browne lifted off. Moments later, the chopper crashed into a ski slope and all five on board were killed. The main cause was believed to be pilot error. The 35-year-old Vaughan’s body was the only one found outside the wreckage, suggesting he might have survived the initial impact. According to the coroner, the cause of death was loss of blood from a severed aorta.

Jimmie Vaughan later co-wrote and recorded a tribute to his brother, entitled "Six Strings Down." Several other blues artists created songs in remembrance of Stevie, including Buddy Guy, Eric Johnson, and Steve Vai.

11.) In 1991, Reba McEntire was riding at the top of her success when, on March 16, a plane carrying seven of her band members and her road manager crashed, killing all aboard. There was concern over McEntire’s decision to perform at the Academy Awards a week after the crash. She dedicated the nominated song, "I’m Checking Out" from the film "Postcards from the Edge," to her fallen friends, whom she referred to as her "Crazy Eight." She dedicated her next album, "For My Broken Heart," to them.

12.) John Denver (born December 31, 1943) died on October 12, 1997, when the Long-EZ experimental aircraft he was piloting crashed just off the California coast at Pacific Grove shortly after takeoff from the Monterey Peninsula Airport. Despite logging over 2700 hours as an experienced pilot, Denver’s unfamiliarity with the particular plane and his failure to refuel contributed to the tragic accident.

13.) During her too-brief career, Aaliyah Dana Haughton (born January 16, 1979), best known simply as Aaliyah, was a multiple Grammy-nominated singer, dancer, model, actress ("Romeo Must Die," "The Queen of the Damned"), and teen idol, introduced to the public by R&B singer-producer R. Kelly. On August 25, 2001, at 6:50pm, after shooting a music video, Aaliyah and members of her record company boarded a twin-engine Cessna 4020 on Abaco Island in the Bahamas for a flight to Opa-locka Airport near Miami, Florida. The plane crashed after takeoff about 200 feet from the runway. Pilot Luis Morales III and all eight passengers were killed. According to an inquest from the coroner’s office in the Bahamas, Aaliyah suffered from "severe burns and a blow to the head," in addition to severe shock. Investigators determined that the aircraft was over its total gross weight by several hundred pounds, while on autopsy on pilot Morales revealed traces of cocaine and alcohol.

For all the falling stars modestly paid tribute here, a concluding sentiment can be found at Patsy Cline’s resting place in Shenandoah Memorial Park, which is marked with a simple bronze plaque reading, "Death Cannot Kill What Never Dies: Love."