Uncommon Buddy Holly poster from “The Day the Music Died” sells for record-breaking $447,000 at public sale

The rarest and solely recognized Buddy Holly poster from “The Day the Music Died,” when an airplane carrying Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Popper (actual title J.P. Richardson) crashed and killed all three, sold at auction for a record-breaking $447,000. 

Holly, Valens and Richardson had simply performed a live performance in Clear Lake, Iowa, and have been headed to Moorehead, Minnesota, for his or her twelfth cease on the ill-fated Winter Dance Party tour, when their single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza crashed in a cornfield throughout unhealthy winter climate on Feb. 3, 1959, killing everybody on board. 

The tragedy, which killed a few of rock and roll’s largest names on the time, would later turn out to be immortalized as “The Day the Music Died,” in Don McLean’s 1971 hit “American Pie.” 

The poster is an unique commercial window card memorializing the present that by no means was, and one of many first tragedies in rock and roll historical past. It had initially been caught to a phone pole, however had fallen to the bottom a day or two after the present and was picked up by a upkeep man who took it house and positioned it in a closet the place it was forgotten about for about 50 years, Howard stated in an online interview. 

The poster has no pin or nail holes, lacking components or fading, however does present a white stain on either side from the sticky substance used to hold it up, which was left intact on the poster as a minor, however necessary element to the story, in accordance with the website. 

Heritage Auctions stated the profitable bid for the poster bought for $447,000 — breaking the earlier report for a rock poster, which was $275,000 for a print from the Beatles’ 1966 show at Shea Stadium. 

“Heritage is thrilled to interrupt the earlier report for a live performance poster by greater than $170,000,” stated Pete Howard, director of live performance posters at Heritage Auctions, “however not in the least stunned, given the significance, the distinctiveness and the gravitas of this wonderful window card, which marketed rock and roll’s first tragedy.”

The auctioneer has had only one different poster from the Winter Dance Party tour — for a present in Mankato, Minnesota — that bought for $125,000 in April 2020.