About a year ago this weekend, I received a letter.
It bore a Baltimore postmark of Jan. 30, and the handwriting on the envelope was small and neat and looked a little shaky, like an older person had written it. "Personal" was written in the bottom right corner.
I glanced at the return address, but it was not a name I recognized. Inside was a newspaper clipping, from The Sun, on which the sender had initialed "F.Y.I."
The clipping was a brief obituary of James "Pookie" Hudson, lead singer and songwriter of The Spaniels, a doo-wop and rhythm and blues group that had a string of hits in the early and middle ’50s when radio was still segregated, but successful black groups were having their hits cross over, first by white groups covering their songs and later by white DJs playing the real McCoy, as their listeners demanded it.
I was already aware Hudson had died. He was from the Midwest, and the Spaniels were originally formed by Hudson and a group of classmates at a high s chool in Indiana. They had a stylish, smooth sound, with nice harmonies, thanks to Hudson's tenor and bass singer, Gerald "Bounce" Gregory, who died a few years earlier. Their biggest hit was "Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight," also a hit in a white cover version by the McGuire sisters.
Although most major recording opportunities had dried up decades ago, the Spaniels continued to perform, with Hudson and Gregory, until his death, as the constants. I probably knew more about them from listening to "Big Jim" Staton's "Turnin' Back the Hands of Time" oldies show on WEAA Radio in Baltimore, where their records were often featured and Hudson, who spent his last years living in Prince George's County, was an occasional guest.
OK, so why send me this clipping?
The next part may be hard to believe, but I actually sat down at the computer and began to write back to the sender — Roger Peterson as listed on the return address. It was something like, "Mr. Peterson, thanks for the clipping, but I'm not sure why you sent it, blah, blah, or where I know you from." I'm a curious person by nature, obviously, or I wouldn't be in the business I'm in.
My note completed, I started to hand address an envelope: Roger Peterson, 1947 Beechcraft Way, Apt. N3794N, Clear Lake, Iowa, 50428 — Wait just a minute here, something's fishy.
The Clear Lake, Iowa, and "N's" the apartment number were the giveaways. A quick check on the Internet confirmed it. The plane was a 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza, ID N3794N, piloted by Roger Peterson with three passengers on board. It crashed at 0100 Feb. 3, 1959, five miles after taking off from the Mason City, Iowa, airport en route to Fargo, N.D. It had been snowing. There were no survivors.
There's been numerous songs, articles, books and movies about the event singer/songwriter Don McLean 11 years later would memorialize as "The Day the Music Died."
So, was this letter some kind of sign, or just somebody playing me?
I've certainly kept the memory of that day alive, as people who know me well are aware. I was 10 when it happened. It was one of my grandfather's birthdays. A few weeks afterward, my other grandfather, with whom I was very, very close, went into the hospital and never came out, dying a week before his 63rd birthday.
We liked Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and Jiles Perry Richardson, aka The Big Bopper. While they weren't the first or the last musical personalities to die in plane crashes, there's certainly a mystique which has grown up around this one over the years. It's kind of like the end of innocence for a lot of people who were coming of age in the early rock 'n' roll era.
I owned many original Holly 45s, several of which have since disappeared. I made a special CD a couple of years ago that contains a cover of "Chantilly Lace" (Richardson's work wasn't available on I-Tunes), Valens' original "Come on Let's Go," Los Lobos' cover of "La Bamba" done for the movie of the same name, "Tell Me How" by Holly and The Crickets and "Buddy's Song" by Fleetwood Mac, lyrics about Holly's life done to the tune of his "Peggy Sue Got Married." Every year at this time I dutifully get it out and play it for several days before and after the anniversary. My screen savers on my computer contain a photo of Richardson's grave monument, downloaded from find-a-grave.com.
I'd get fired for doing this today, but back on the 25th anniversary in 1984, when we still pasted up page flats by hand, I made a little ad box down at the bottom of one of the news story legs. Inside I typed: "Feb. 3, 1959: 25 years ago, the Day the Music Died." One other person, with whom I was close then but who no longer works here, knows what I did.
I never did figure out who wrote the letter. I asked around among my colleagues, as music is always a favorite newsroom topic. Most thought I was making much ado about nothing and, of course, none of them wrote it, anyway. They thought I was basically pretty foolish to be so fixated on it.
It was too late to write a column then, but I saved the letter, figuring I might write something next year. When I pulled it out at a staff meeting the other day, eyes started rolling.
Oh well, another year has passed. There's been no follow up letter, yet. When this column posts Sunday, it will have been 49 years. Next year is the 50th anniversary. The irony in all this of course is the music itself never did die; just some of the people who helped give birth to it. And my memories of them, in the words of one Charles Hardin Holley himself, "a not fade away."
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