I attended my first rock and folk concert in absentia. It was the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, and I had the quarterdeck watch on my World War II-era destroyer which was tied up at Pier 2 on Narraganset Bay about half a mile from the festival grounds as the sea gulls fly. The amplified music from the sound stage came wafting in over the hill, giving me a free, almost ringside seat to performances of new and traditional folk and blues musicians. I was getting discharged in a few months, after four years on active duty, and I was headed back South to attend college and, hopefully, get my commission as a naval officer.
Unlike the recent “Burning Man” event in the Nevada desert (2023), the Folk Festival had no pagan antecedents, with human sacrifices burning in wicker cages during Celtic times. It was just an opportunity to hear early folk and blues artists such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and John Lee Hooker.
It wasn’t my first free concert. When I was little, I had one at night almost every weekend. Perhaps prescient of the Newport concert, I’d lie in my bed just north of Lumberton, on the outskirts of Love Quarters, and listen to the battle of the bands on blaring Wurlitzer jukeboxes.
In one ear, from a juke joint in the Quarter, I could hear Muddy Waters, aka McKinley Morganfield, from Clarksdale, Mississippi, but after he moved to Chicago and “electrified” the blues on Chess Records, proclaiming that he was a “Hoochie Coochie Man;” and in the other ear, from just up the road on Highway 11, at John Byrant’s dance hall/café/gas station/barber shop, I’d hear Hank Williams singing that he had the “Lovesick Blues.” I didn’t yet know the word, “cacophony,” but it was a cacophony of sound.
Thinking of Mr. Bryant’s various enterprises, it has always intrigued me how southern establishments put disparate businesses in the same building: beauty parlors (“Curl Up and Dye”) and hardware stores, convenience stores and animal hospitals. That reminds me of the old joke about the veterinarian who was also a taxidermist. He had a sign up in the window of his office: “Either way you get your sick cat back.”
Anyway, speaking of concerts, I enjoyed the recent Liverpool Legends Beatle retrospective at the Saenger theater, so I’ve bought my tickets to the upcoming “Your Cheatin' Heart” show, which celebrates the centennial of Hank Williams. The presenting artist, David Church, part of this year’s Festival South, is very popular on RFD-TV, although I’m partial to the “Big Joe Polka Show.” That’s probably because I had my own polka band on my last ship. Our biggest venue was playing in Manila for Ferdinand Marcos, the president of the Republic of the Philippines, before his fall from grace and exile to Hawaii.
Hank Williams, the “Drifting Cowboy,” died in the back of his 1956 Cadillac on a lonely night in Oak Hill, West Virginia, the victim of alcohol, fast living, and a broken heart. I can think of several other famous recording stars who died in cars, including Johnny Horton who, oddly enough, was married to Hank Williams’ second wife at the time. I think about his hit song, “The Battle of New Orleans,” every time I drive through Chalmette. However, what really comes to mind are the number of musicians who have died in airplane crashes over the years. Here’s an incomplete list:
One of the earliest crashes that killed a famous musician was on 16 December, 1944, when the military plane carrying band leader, Glenn Miller, mysteriously disappeared over the English Channel. Miller was arguably the most popular musician in America when he walked away from a $20,000 weekly ($330,000 today) salary to enlist in the Army officer corps and entertain the troops in Europe. His swing recording of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” stands as the first “gold record” in music history.
While Miller’s plane, which was enroute from England to Paris, has never been recovered, conspiracy theories abound. One says that he was never on the plane, having been assassinated while on a secret mission to negotiate the surrender of Nazi Germany. Another says that he made it to France but died in a Paris bordello; however, this has been attributed to German propaganda; and the last theory conjectures that his plane was hit by a bomb jettisoned by allied bombers returning from an aborted mission over Germany. The official investigation, in 1945, which probably found the real reason for the crash, said that the airplane, a single engine Noorduyn Norseman UC-64A, had a history of recalls for defective carburetor heaters, and that the fuel lines probably froze up. Fittingly, Miller has a memorial stone in Arlington National Cemetery, and the back of it features a trombone, the instrument he made famous.
The loss of someone as popular as Glenn Miller was a big blow to the American public; however, about a year earlier, the Japanese had suffered perhaps a heavier blow. On 18 April 1943, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Commander in Chief of the Japanese Navy, was killed when his plane was ambushed and shot down near Bougainville Island in the South Pacific.
Yamamoto, who had planned and executed Japan’s devastating sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, was educated at Harvard, and was aware of the United States’ strengths and weaknesses.
He did not want war, but if it came, he reportedly said he looked forward to “riding a white horse down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House to accept America’s total surrender.”
The attack on the admirals’ life, dubbed “Operation Vengeance,” was personally approved by President Roosevelt. Acting on intelligence gained from breaking Japanese naval codes, 18 long range P-38 Lightning fighter planes were dispatched from an airfield on Guadalcanal, and easily shot down the “Betty” bomber carrying Yamamoto and his staff. The Bettys were known as “Bics” (as in the cigarette lighter) by American pilots because of their tendency to explode when bullets struck their gas tanks. American planes had self-sealing tanks. Many pundits have said his loss was a turning point in the war for Japan.
During one of those significant days that you remember exactly where you were, I was sitting on the back row of English class at Lumberton High School, looking out the window, on 4 February, 1959, when one of my classmates came in and announced that Buddy Holly, J. R. Richardson, aka the “Big Bopper”, and Richie Valens had been killed the night before when their charter plane crashed in a snowy Iowa cornfield. Country “Outlaw” singer, Waylon Jennings, had famously given up his seat on the plane to Richardson (“Chantilly Lace”), who had the flu; and Valens (“La Bamba”) won his seat in a coin toss with the musician Tommy Allsup.
Buddy Holly’s (“Peggy Sue”) death was the inspiration for Don McLean’s tremendously popular but enigmatic song, “American Pie,” which also references everything from religion, (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) politics (Karl Marx), to the Rolling Stones, and Charles Manson. Obviously, a commentary on contemporary culture, the song struck a nerve with the public, capturing the “zeitgeist” or spirit of the times. Those of us who lived in those days can surely recall, as McLean so aptly put it, “the day the music died:”
So, bye, bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the Levee, but the Levee
was dry
And them good old boys were drinkin’ whisky
and rye
Singin’, this’ll be the day that I die
This’ll be the day that I die
Buddy Holly’s plane crash was later attributed to bad weather and pilot error. In an eerie, ironic twist, before the plane took off for their next engagement in Fargo, North Dakota, Holly, aware of the earlier seat switch, reportedly said to Jennings: “Well, I hope your ol’ bus freezes up.” Jennings supposedly replied: “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes.”
Patsy Cline was one of the most influential female singers of the 20th century and one of the first country music artists to successfully “crossover” to the pop music genre. A member of the Grand Ole Opry and remembered for such songs as “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces,” she was killed on 15 March, 1963, in a private plane crash outside Camden, Tennessee.
She died when her plane, owned and piloted by her manager, crashed as they returned from a benefit concert in Kansas City, Kansas, held for a radio disc jockey who had been injured in a car wreck. After bad weather delayed their return flight overnight, a fellow performer, Dottie West, who chose to drive back to Tennessee, warned Cline about attempting the flight. She reportedly replied: “Don’t worry about me, Hoss. When it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go.” Also killed in the crash, in addition to the pilot, were country music stars Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins. The cause of the crash was later blamed on bad weather and the pilot’s inexperience.
When I was in Navy boot camp (1960), my best friend, Kenny, was newly married and having problems after leaving his new bride back in Vinita, Oklahoma. On the rare occasions that our drill instructor turned on the radio, my friend would insist on listening to San Diego’s one country station, KSON-AM, hoping he could hear Jim Reeves singing his favorite song, “He’ll Have to Go.” I never had the courage to ask Kenny who “He” was, or what exactly he suspected was going on back in Oklahoma, but I got the general idea. I did, however, become a Jim Reeves fan. Unfortunately, he, too died in an airplane crash at the height of his fame.
A former University of Texas baseball player, he became famous for his mellow singing style, drawing favorable comparison to “crooners” like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, although he was definitely “country.” About the only song I can remember my daddy ever singing was Reeves’ rendition of “Bimbo” (“Bimbo, Bimbo, where you gonna go-e-oh?) which he popularized when he was a member of Shreveport’s Louisiana Hayride. Soon after that he was a member of the Grand Ole Opry and a consistent chart topper.
Reeves, along with his pianist, were both killed on 31 July, 1964, when Reeves’ private, single-engine Beechcraft Debonair crashed into a Brentwood, Tennessee hillside, with Reeves at the controls. The subsequent investigation showed that he had probably “lost situational awareness” in a heavy rainstorm. In a macabre turn of events, his wife, apparently suffering from dementia, later sold most of his personal effects, including his human remains, to a carnival operator.
In one of the more ironic airplane deaths, the great singer, Otis Redding, the “Crown Prince of Soul,” died along with his band, the “Bar-Keys,” when his recently purchased private plane plunged into an icy Wisconsin lake on 10 December, 1967. His unfortunate death was ironic, at least to me, because his signature song, “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” was about to drop, and it went on to become the most popular posthumously released song in history.
And, of course, there was the crash of “Lynyrd Skynyrd” near Magnolia, Mississippi, on 20 October, 1977, which certainly merits more than a mere paragraph. Six members of the South’s premiere rock and roll band (“Free Bird” . . . “If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me?”) died when their chartered Convair CV-240 tour plane ran out of gas enroute to a concert at LSU in Baton Rouge. The lead vocalist and founding member, Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist and vocalist Steve Gaines, Gaines’ sister, backup singer Cassie Gaines, and three others were killed. Twenty other members of the entourage were injured. The band remained inactive until it was reformed by Ronnie’s brother, Johnny, ten years later. In October 2019, a seven-ton, black marble memorial monument was dedicated to the band at the crash site. You might have visited it?
The popular singer, John Denver, born Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr., died on 12 October, 1997, when his experimental two-seat plane plunged into Monterey Bay in California from an altitude of 500 feet. An experienced pilot, he had apparently run out of gas. An investigation revealed that his plane carried two gas tanks but that he was flying too low to switch to the reserve when the main went dry. I can remember driving north through West Virginia, about 1971, with the top down on my Fiat Spider convertible, when I was stopped by some high school cheerleaders at a fundraising roadblock, and his song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads” came over my radio:
Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a
Breeze…
I later traded that car to a Marine Private First Class (PFC) when I was stationed at the Marine boot camp in San Diego. I warned him that it was unsafe as years on New England’s wintertime rock-salted roads had rusted it out, but he still wanted it. I ended up trading it to him, straight up, for a used AM/FM car radio. When I left to go back to sea two years later, he was still driving it around town, top down, hauling girls, riding in the breeze.
Wrapping up, in our need to impose order and reason on a random, quixotic world, one naturally wants to find some common causes for the above airplane crashes: equipment failure, operator error, bad weather, running out of gas, etc. In the end, however, the best answer is probably just “fate.” In any event, I hope all your favorite bands get back together and that your music never dies. As for me, I’m taking the bus.
Light a candle for me.
—
Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
