Buddy Holly & the Crickets 1959 Historic "Winter Dance Party" Concert Poster....

Description

THE LAST CONCERT POSTER THAT BUDDY HOLLY ACTUALLY PLAYED

Buddy Holly & the Crickets 1959 Historic "Winter Dance Party" Concert Poster. An original cardboard window card, printed before the show to sell tickets, for Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, Dion and the Belmonts and Frankie Sardo playing at the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Sunday night, February 1, 1959. About 26 hours later, the three top headliners would perish in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.

This is the last Buddy Holly concert poster for which he played, period. There was no poster, handbill or anything else made for the following night (Clear Lake, Iowa), and then it was over.

One year ago, last November, Heritage sold this poster from Moorhead, Minnesota which was dated February 3, and Mr. Holly was deceased by then. Known as "the day the music died," that poster sold for a world-record $447,000.

The provenance for this February 1 poster is absolutely breathtaking. Our consignor obtained it directly from a man named John Daugherty, who actually attended the show. On the very next day following the concert, Daugherty was at his job at the local Mobile gas station. When a customer came in for a car wash, Daugherty noticed a stack of the Riverside Ballroom posters in the back seat. Daugherty was excited to see them, so the stranger asked him if he wanted one. Daugherty took a couple, with his friend possibly in mind. The show was over now, so what value could they possibly have?

The second copy was lost or thrown out decades ago, so to this day John's copy has remained the only known specimen existing of this poster. It's safe to say that not many, if any at all, would have survived the brutal February winter weather in frigid Wisconsin. Probably the only reason John's copy survived is because it was never posted in the first place.

Mr. Daugherty's handwritten letter of provenance was obtained recently by our consignor and is included in this lot (please see photos). It would make for amazing reading if framed on a wall next to the poster itself. Even 100 years from now.

As if that gas-station story wasn't enough, the amazement doesn't stop there. And we're not hyperbolizing; read on. Now in his 80's, Daugherty's memory is as sharp as a tack, and he recalls that night in Green Bay very well. Get this: sometime during the evening John went into the restroom to relieve himself, and who should be standing at another urinal than... Buddy Holly. Daugherty says that Holly was super personable, in no hurry to get back to the stage, and encouraged him to continue playing guitar. John was just a newbie guitar player, but he quit after Buddy's death. You can still hear the emotion in his voice to this day. "Buddy really made an impression on me," he said on the phone recently. "He was larger than life and so talented. He made guitar playing look so easy. He really wasn't that much older than me, but he was so mature and bigger than life."

So what we have here is the last Buddy Holly concert poster ever, from when he played, and it originated from a man who attended the show and then lucked into the poster the very next day at a filling station. That's right... the poster was obtained between this concert and the fatal plane crash... while Buddy was still alive. If that doesn't send a chill down your spine, then neither will Wisconsin's frigid winters.

For the record: This is a fully original, authentic concert poster from Green Bay, Wisconsin for the 10th stop on the ill-fated Winter Dance Party tour of January-February 1959. After the 11th concert took place in Clear Lake, Iowa on Monday night, February 2, Buddy Holly chartered a four-seat airplane to skip ahead quickly to the next stop in the next state - Moorhead, Minnesota. Skipping past all the intricacies of the story, Ritchie 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. The date given on the death certificates of all three men is February 3, 1959 - two days, or actually just about 26 hours - after the date on this poster.

And this is the only concert poster from the Green Bay show to ever surface. That's no surprise, given the complete rarity of any Winter Dance Party poster. Heritage has been lucky enough to sell two Winter Dance Party posters in our history. The first one, from Mankato, Minnesota a week before the crash, went for $125,000 three & a half years ago. And then, as mentioned, the one from Moorhead, Minnesota - the show the plane was en route to - went for $447,000 one year ago, in November 2022.

Please find two different views of the Riverside in this listing... one from a vintage postcard, and the other of the venue as it stands today. Thanks to Heritage's Chris Nerat for taking these two photos a few weeks ago. (They are just digital images, not included in the lot.)

This poster carries the huge advantage of having a really fun "venue box" up top. There's so much there to like. The ballroom and date are in such huge, bold letters. The showtime is given in such a cool little script. And then... "No Blue Jeans or Slacks Permitted." Are you kidding? How incredibly quaint. Probably aimed at just the girls. And then meant for everybody: "NO (Intoxicating Beverages) will be Sold." Not surprising since it was mostly teenagers attending this tour. We guess that certainly helped keep the parents away. And then of course that admission... NINETY CENTS to see the most infamous tour in rock history? Not just children, but anybody?? To see the group that The Beatles named themselves after? It's completely surreal to think that you'd get a dime back after handing them a dollar bill, and that the dime would probably buy you a nice big Coke inside. (If you dared to come late and miss Frankie Sardo, the price soared to $1.25.)

We even love the fact that the printing in the venue box has its own little printer's union bug. That means that while the color portion below was printed in New York, the venue box was printed in Wisconsin, most likely Green Bay.

In fact, as background, this advertising poster was originally created as a "tour blank" by the Murray Poster Printing Co. in New York (their credit is down in the bottom margin). Poster collectors are familiar with tour blanks; the color portion is printed weeks ahead of time, and then each local promoter can choose to order personalized ones if they like. Usually at a cost, of course. The one we sold from Mankato had that information printed up above; the Moorhead info was handwritten in by what looks like a red grease pencil, a common tool of the day. Who needed the year on any of these? Remember, this advertising placard was designed to have a shelf life of just a few weeks at best. Everyone certainly knew what year it was... just tell us the date and show times, please.

A blank, never-filled-in version of this poster has never been found, by the way. Bootlegs yes, but zero genuine blanks that were printed in December 1958 or January 1959 by Murray. This is such a popular and historic image that naturally, the graphic art has been reproduced and bootlegged endlessly over the last few decades. But this poster was created for one purpose only: to get teenagers into that ballroom on a cold winter's night to have a little fun.

How many did they make back then? Well, as mentioned, first the attractive yellow & black portion was printed up in quantity weeks before the tour started, leaving a blank white box up at the top. Then the local promoter for each stop on the tour, if they even wanted them (many local promoters opted for only newspaper ads or radio spots), would have their own information printed in up top. Sometimes with tour blanks, the home office does the venue printing for individual promoters; in the case of the Winter Dance Party tour, it was up to each individual promoter to enter the information themselves. We can deduce that from the extremely few samples we've seen from other stops on the tour; the type fonts and arrangements are all quite different from each other.

So how many were stamped in for Green Bay, a city of about 125,000 at the time? A few dozen? A hundred? Hard to say, but 50-100 does seem logical. And then many were surely ruined on the spot by the snow, ice and horrible weather conditions in the dead of a Wisconsin winter.

As an aside, it's always amused me how parents would let their teens stay out so late on a school night (and a Sunday night, no less) for an occasion like this. Any guesses as to how many times on that Sunday a Green Bay parent said to their kids attending the show, "You'd better be home by midnight!" Like, every one of them?

We don't need to tell you how incredibly special the music was behind this poster. It is so fortuitous that the national tour promoter, General Artists Corporation/Super Productions, and the poster's graphic designer and printer, Murray (both located in New York), chose to list a big hit single for each artist on the poster. Quite often with old posters, the tour promoter would instead list each musician's current single, which might or might not turn out to be a hit. Now, we don't mean to disparage the legacy of J.P. Richardson or anything, but how less cool would this poster be if, below his name it said, "Big Bopper's Wedding"? Yep, that was the Bopper's current single in January 1959. Instead, wonderfully, we get the timeless classic "Chantilly Lace." Hel-lohhh, baby!!

Likewise for Buddy Holly and the Crickets - how fantastic that it says "Peggy Sue" instead of the very respectable but much less dramatic "Heartbeat," his current single (Billboard magazine peak: #82). "Peggy Sue" is just such an iconic song, it practically carries the poster all by itself. I'll go as far as to say that the hypothetical six-inch square containing Holly's picture, name and "Peggy Sue" might be the most important and compelling half-foot square of cardboard real estate in the entire 100-year history of concert posters.

On the other hand, Ritchie Valens wasn't old enough to have a recording history to draw from. Richard Valenzuela was a crushingly sad 17 years old at the time of the accident, and yet he was the hottest pistol on this poster. "Come On, Let's Go" had been a minor hit the previous fall - and a much bigger hit for Los Lobos decades later - and thankfully gets a mention here. But is there any more compelling single from the 1950's than Ritchie's current disc at the time, "Donna" b/w "La Bamba"? The A-side a remarkably moving, plaintive ballad about love lost (and the #3 record in the country the week of this concert), and the B-side a timeless Spanish-language rock 'n' roll evergreen that we'll continue to hear several times a year for the rest of our lives. I'll take this 45 to a desert island any day over you-know-who's "Don't Be Cruel"/"All Shook Up."

Dion DiMucci was a rocket ship on the launching pad with his backing singers the Belmonts, and is a tremendously strong fourth talent in the rookie position on this poster. "I Wonder Why," given above a snowflake, had been his charting debut the previous summer, peaking at #22. Before you could blink, however, "A Teenager in Love" would come along that spring and catapult Dion into a career that landed him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame... just like Buddy and Ritchie. Sadly, only Dion lived to enjoy it.

Singer Frankie Sardo is truly the low man on the totem pole, squeezed into a little strip scarcely over an inch tall. Adding to the ignominy was the listing of his recent single, "Fake Out"... which was butchered into "Take-Out" on the poster. Perhaps they thought he was just the caterer? (I actually tracked down the song, put it on my iPod and grew to like it, obviously as a novelty tied to this poster. But nobody in 1959 noticed it.)

As for this tour soldiering on after the tragic plane crash, it's absolutely flabbergasting when you consider that in today's big-money rock world, if a key bandmember catches the flu, stadium dates are postponed and schedules moved around. If Bono were to get a bad sore throat, a whole U2 tour could be canceled. But with the Winter Dance Party in 1959, you had the top three headliners killed in the middle of the tour, and the show still went on. Through substitute talents such as Bobby Vee and Frankie Avalon, the mortally wounded Winter Dance caravan chugged its way through its remaining obligations, with all post-accident attendees watching a shell of a show through moist, mournful eyes. In retrospect, it defies belief. This all happened just because the shows, and the whole tour, was aimed entirely at teenagers. Nobody else cared.

We should mention that this poster was actually discovered 20 years ago, and is not a result of the world-record price we realized for one a year ago. In fact, no new Winter Dance Party posters turned up after that world-record auction... surely people would have contacted Heritage if they still had one? From any city. But... no.

The tragic and untimely death of Buddy Holly on this tour was immortalized forever in Don McLean's famous song, "American Pie." McLean's poignant lyrics included the line, "Something touched me deep inside / The day the music died." So touched were music fans around the world that the original manuscript of Don McLean's handwritten lyrics to "American Pie" sold at auction eight years ago for $1.2 million.

Could this poster fetch that much? You might scoff and say, "that'll be the day." To which we say, well, if not today, then... maybe soon. With a Mickey Mantle baseball card recently fetching $13 million at Heritage, what's 1/13th of that for the last-ever concert poster (guaranteed) that Buddy Holly played while still alive? But I say that even knowing that the actual real value of this poster is... priceless.

Pete Howard
Director, Concert Posters
Heritage Auctions

Measures just a shade over 14" x 22" and grades to Very Good condition. COA from Heritage Auctions.

More Information: The poster has printer's hash marks on three of the four sides, which were alignment markers used in the printing process. They are at the top center above "R," on the left edge by Big Bopper's picture, and at the bottom under the "S" of "Productions." These are obviously printer's anomalies and not damage of any kind.

Condition details: Poster received touch-up and reinforcement work from the esteemed Chameleon Restoration, where the poster's surface had been scuffed or otherwise blemished over the years. But there was no cardboard missing or added, it's 100% intact from 1959. The board is strong, possessing what the hobby calls "good bones." The repair work was strictly cosmetic, not structural, such as where there were small flecks of material having landed on the poster's surface.

There was a one-inch edge tear to the lower right of "Let's Go" that has been seamlessly mended, again with no new material added. Typical surface creases on a poster this old are present, viewable when the board is tilted at an angle to the light. They are relegated to the corners and stretches of the black and yellow backgrounds. Moderate toning to the poster throughout.


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