DALLAS — A rare piece of memorabilia from a 1959 rock 'n' roll tour made famous by the tragedy that inspired Don McLean's lyrics to "American Pie" is now up for auction.
The poster for the "Winter Dance Party" headlined by Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper — who were killed in a Feb. 3, 1959, plane crash — is for one of the stops on the Midwest tour: Fort Dodge, Iowa.
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The stop was just three days before the fateful crash that was immortalized in the 1971 hit "American Pie" as "the day the music died," a term that has become synonymous with the tragedy.
The 14-by-22-inch poster for the Fort Dodge show is being offered at auction by Heritage Auctions in Dallas. It has been displayed in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The auction that includes the poster will close Dec. 2-4.
"This poster is nothing less than a key jewel in the crown of the world's most valuable concert posters... those from the very brief, ill-fated 1959 Winter Dance Party tour," Pete Howard, concert posters director for Heritage Auctions, wrote in the poster's listing.
Howard estimated only 50-100 of the posters would have originally been made for the Fort Dodge show, with many discarded or damaged by weather and time.
The poster is one of four known to exist for the Winter Dance Party tour, including one from the fateful Moorhead performance, to which Holly and the others were heading when the plane crashed into a cornfield near Mason City, Iowa.
That poster was picked up off the ground by a maintenance man and placed in a closet, where his son found it decades later. It sold at auction for $447,000 in November 2022 — the most expensive concert poster to date.
The others sold were from the Mankato, Minnesota, show for $125,000 in 2021 and Green Bay, Wisconsin, which sold at auction for $250,000 last year.
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The posters were fashioned from "tour blanks" — posters that listed the performers but left space open at the top for printing the location and additional show details, a space known as a "venue box." The Fort Dodge poster lists the Laramar Ballroom as the location, includes 7-Up soft drink logos, and tickets at $1 and $1.50.
"Dancing for teen-agers only ... Balcony reserved for adult spectators," it reads.
"This is such a popular and historic image that naturally, the graphic art has been reproduced and poster-bootlegged endlessly over the last few decades," Howard wrote. "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. (Parents and chaperones, up to the balcony please.)"
The Trust Project
