Tommy Allsup was not a gambler, but he owed his life to the toss of a coin. After playing a gig with Buddy Holly one freezing February night in the American Midwest in 1959, he was due to take a flight on a four-seat aircraft that the singer had chartered to get them to their next concert.
As Holly’s lead guitarist, Allsup had a priority seat, while the other acts on the tour — including Ritchie Valens, JP “the Big Bopper” Richardson and Dion and the Belmonts — were expected to make the overnight journey by bus.
Earlier, as they played in the Iowan town of Clear Lake, the musicians had been jockeying backstage for the prized seats on the flight. Richardson was suffering from flu, and so Holly’s bass player, Waylon Jennings, had given up his seat, while Valens — who had just had a million-selling hit with La Bamba — was determinedly lobbying Allsup to let him have his place.
“He asked me half a dozen times and was coming down with a cold or something, but I kept telling him I really needed to go on the plane,” Allsup recalled. As the concert ended Valens made one last plea — and with the car already waiting outside to take Holly and his fellow passengers to the airport, Allsup offered to toss a coin for the seat.
“I pulled out a silver half-dollar, flipped it and said, ‘Call.’ Ritchie said, ‘Heads!’ and it was. So I went out to the car and told Buddy, ‘Hey man, Ritchie’s flying in my place, I’m not going.’ ”
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The aircraft never arrived at its destination. The next morning the bodies of Holly, Richardson, Valens and the pilot were found amid the plane’s wreckage about six miles away from where it had taken off. As Don McLean later sang in his No 1 hit American Pie, it was “the day the music died”.
Allsup did not hear the news until 11am, when the tour bus arrived at their hotel in Fargo, North Dakota. “I went up to the desk clerk and said, ‘Put me in the room next to Buddy Holly.’ The clerk looked at me strange and asked, ‘Haven’t you heard? Those guys all got killed in a plane crash this morning.’ ”
Astonishingly Allsup was on stage only a few hours later, as the show went on with Waylon Jennings singing in Holly’s place. “It was like being in a blue haze,” Allsup remembered. “That Ritchie lost his life and I didn’t — you kind of blame yourself.”
The tour continued for another two weeks, with the guitar Holly had left on the bus a grisly reminder of his absence. Yet Allsup was glad that they carried on: “It kept me from thinking about it so much. A lot of people came to the shows to grieve with us, and a lot probably came out of curiosity.”
Allsup later gave the silver coin that had saved his life to his first wife, who had it made into a horseshoe-shaped belt buckle. After their divorce he married Karen, and is survived by five children, including the singer and guitarist Austin Allsup.
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Tommy Douglas Allsup was born in Owasso, Oklahoma, the twelfth of 13 children, of a Cherokee mother and a fiddle-playing father. They lived on a smallholding where his parents were subsistence farmers. By the age of 13 he was playing with a band called the Oklahoma Swingbillies. After leaving school he formed the Southernaires, which brought him to the attention of Norman Petty, Holly’s producer. His first recording with Holly was the classic It’s So Easy (to Fall in Love).
After Holly’s death, Allsup moved to Los Angeles where he became a session guitarist, playing on hits by the Everly Brothers and others. He later moved to Nashville, where he lived for 30 years and produced or played on recordings by Kenny Rogers and Tammy Wynette. He clocked up about 10,000 recordings before retiring to Texas in 1999.
An amiable southern gentleman with an engaging grin almost as wide as the brim of his cowboy hat, his narrow escape as a young man led him to count his blessings. “It was a huge part of why my dad seemed to enjoy life to the fullest,” his son Austin said.
Tommy Allsup, musician, was born on November 24, 1931. He died on January 11, 2017, aged 85