Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
FIVE DAYS AFTER THE PLANE CRASH, "THE SHOW MUST GO ON"
Buddy Holly & the Crickets, Ritchie Valens 1959 Historic "Winter Dance Party" Concert Poster (AOR-1.18). An original cardboard window card, printed before the tour to sell tickets, for Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, Dion and the Belmonts and Frankie Sardo playing at the Les Buzz Ballroom in Spring Valley, Illinois on Saturday night, February 7, 1959. Five days earlier, on Monday night February 2, the three top headliners had perished in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa in what is usually referred to as "rock and roll's first tragedy." But regardless... this show in Spring Valley still took place.
So this is nothing less than a fully original, authentic concert poster advertising the 16th stop out of 24 dates on the ill-fated Winter Dance Party tour of January-February 1959. After the 11th concert took place in Clear Lake on February 2, Buddy Holly chartered a four-seat airplane to jump ahead quickly to the next stop in the next state - Moorhead, Minnesota. Skipping past all the intricacies of the story, Valens and the Big Bopper (real name: J.P. Richardson) joined him. The weather was bad, sometime after midnight the plane went down in farmland, and all lives were lost.
To learn more, visit HA.com/7475
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FIVE DAYS AFTER THE PLANE CRASH, "THE SHOW MUST GO ON"
Buddy Holly & the Crickets, Ritchie Valens 1959 Historic "Winter Dance Party" Concert Poster (AOR-1.18). An original cardboard window card, printed before the tour to sell tickets, for Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, Dion and the Belmonts and Frankie Sardo playing at the Les Buzz Ballroom in Spring Valley, Illinois on Saturday night, February 7, 1959. Five days earlier, on Monday night February 2, the three top headliners had perished in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa in what is usually referred to as "rock and roll's first tragedy." But regardless... this show in Spring Valley still took place.
So this is nothing less than a fully original, authentic concert poster advertising the 16th stop out of 24 dates on the ill-fated Winter Dance Party tour of January-February 1959. After the 11th concert took place in Clear Lake on February 2, Buddy Holly chartered a four-seat airplane to jump ahead quickly to the next stop in the next state - Moorhead, Minnesota. Skipping past all the intricacies of the story, Valens and the Big Bopper (real name: J.P. Richardson) joined him. The weather was bad, sometime after midnight the plane went down in farmland, and all lives were lost.
To learn more, visit HA.com/7475
Stay Connected to Heritage Auctions:
facebook.com/HeritageAuctions
twitter.com/HeritageAuction
