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Remarkable vintage autograph album, 6 x 4.75, containing ballpoint signatures of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. Richardson, ‘The Big Bopper,’ all of which date to January 31, 1959, when Holly's 1959 Winter Dance Party Tour performed in Duluth, Minnesota, at the National Guard Armory, three days before all three men, together with pilot Roger Peterson, were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. The three musicians sign on adjacent pages: “Buddy Holly,” “Ritchie Valens,” and “Big Bopper,” with the latter two signing on the same page; singer Frankie Sardo has also signed on the Valens and Richardson page. The album also features signatures of three other musicians related to that tour: country legend Waylon Jennings, who adds “Crickets” below his name; and Carlo Mastrangelo and Fred Milano of vocal group Dion and the Belmonts. Other signatures in the album include period musicians and singers Buddy Knox, Jimmy Bowen, Johnny Paris, Carl Dobkins, Jr., Nicky DeMatteo, and Harold Dorman.
The album also contains a handwritten remembrance of the Holly concert by its original owner, Sandra Salo, a student from Hibbing High School in Hibbing, Minnesota, who writes: “Shirley Kerssen and I had a marvelous time tonight. All the singers are wonderful, especially Richie Valen. He was so nice & though not cute in looks he had his own ways…Buddy Holly was also good. Though his glasses were thick he is real cute.” In fine condition.
Accompanied by full letters of authenticity from REAL and PSA/DNA, postcards of the Duluth Armory, reprinted pages from Hibbing High School yearbook picturing Salo and her friend, Shirley Kerssen, and an extra-large black t-shirt from ‘A Tribute to the Music of Buddy Holly’ benefit event for the Duluth Armory, which features an image of Holly from his famed Duluth performance.
Of further significance, the Duluth stop of the Winter Dance Party Tour was famously attended by a 17-year-old Bob Dylan, who credited Holly and his performance at the Armory as being a defining moment in his young life. Dylan reflected on the Duluth show and Holly’s impact when he gave his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in June 2017: ‘If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about 18 and he was 22. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved, the music I grew up on—country western, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues. Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs, songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great, sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype, everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before he was gone. I had to travel a hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed.
‘He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than 22. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.’ Dylan held on to Holly and his earlier influences—Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, and others—and released his debut, Bob Dylan, in 1962. Throughout his career, Dylan has also covered several of Holly’s songs, including ‘Gotta Travel On,’ ‘Not Fade Away,’ ‘Heartbeat,’ and more.
A month after leaving the Crickets, Holly made plans to move to New York with his pregnant wife to further his fast-rising musical career. Short on funds, he signed on with General Artist Corporation and organized a 24-day tour barnstorming the Midwest during one of the region’s worst winters on record. After opening night on January 23rd in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the caravan zigzagged wearily across state lines before stopping in Clear Lake, Iowa—350 miles from the previous day's concert in Green Bay—where the tour’s 10th show was arranged on the fly.
Fed up with freezing on the tour bus, Holly chartered a plane, a four-seater Beechcraft Bonanza, for his band to leave that night after the Surf Ballroom show and head to Fargo, North Dakota, the closest city to their next stop in Moorhead, Minnesota. With takeoff imminent, the seating plan needed to be set: Holly was in, as was the flu-ridden Richardson (bassist Waylon Jennings offered up his seat); the third seat was taken by Valens, who won it on a coin flip with guitarist Tommy Allsup. Shortly after embarking from the Mason City Municipal Airport just shy of 1 a.m., the Bonanza disappeared, its wreckage and the bodies of its passengers found the next morning less than six miles from the airstrip.
