Saved by the toss of a coin

Guitarist Tommy Allsup had a plane seat booked beside Buddy Holly on the day the music died. Fifty years later, having cheated death, he's still playing on, hears Tim Cornwell ahead of a gig in Scotland next month

IF it had been tails, it would have been a very different story. A century after the Day the Music Died, guitarist Tommy Allsup still plays out a career built on the toss of a coin which saved him from one of the defining tragedies of rock'n'roll.

On 3 February 1959, in Clear Lake, Iowa, bandmember Allsup should have been travelling on the single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza taking Buddy Holly on the next leg of a gruelling tour of the wintry American north-west. The tour bus had been freezing and Holly, who'd had enough, had chartered a plane to take his own band members – Allsup and bass player Waylon Jennings – to the next gig in Fargo, North Dakota.

Also on tour was The Big Bopper, Jiles Perry Richardson, who was coming down with the flu and had persuaded the laid-back Jennings to give him his place on the plane. When another of the show's performers, Richie Valens – the California teenager who was riding a wave with the song La Bamba – heard this, he pestered Allsup for his seat. Eventually, the guitarist agreed to toss a coin. Valens called heads – and won the toss.

As a resigned Allsup and Jennings made their way back to the tour bus, the plane carrying some of the finest popular musicians of the era took off. Just a few miles later it fell from the sky, ploughing into a soybean field and killing all on board. The then little-known Allsup and Jennings, meanwhile, continued their freezing bus to Fargo, North Dakota, unaware that American music would never be the same again.

Now aged 76, Allsup has four grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and a Texas twang that sends chills down your spine. He's still on the road, from Nashville to St Andrews, where he plays next week. "That's quite an age to be touring," he admitted. "I'm not ready to die yet, got 20 more years to play."

Of course, Holly, Richardson and Valens weren't ready to die either, nor was the burgeoning US pop music industry ready to lose them. When Allsup eventually arrived in Fargo, he walked into the hotel to find the Big Bopper's face all over the television, and asked for the room next to Buddy. "They said, 'Haven't you heard, those guys got killed,'" he recalls.

The shockwaves caused by the crash were still going strong 12 years later, when Don McLean penned his 1971 ballad, American Pie in commemoration, a song which is sung with as much drunken nostalgia and what-might-have-beens now as it was then. A minor industry of musicians, tribute acts, musicals and memorials still surrounds the death of Buddy Holly, and Allsup is definitely part of it. "People like coffee, people like beer, they like Buddy Holly music. People like Cadillacs, people like Fords, they keep buying, they keep selling, I keep playing it, it's good for me," he says.

Next February Allsup goes back to Clear Lake. He'll play with a Buddy Holly tribute act, Johnny Rodgers, who will then recreate the flight to Fargo, with the same plane flown by the same company that rented Holly's aircraft. Allsup's not planning to be on board. "This cowboy isn't going to be on the plane," he insists. "I will be driving my car up."

He's recorded with more than 300 artists on 6,500 sessions in his career, including Willie Nelson and Julie London. He has produced records for western music legends such as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. But at The Inn at Lathones in St Andrews on 4 June, he's billed as "ex-Buddy Holly". His book, Toss of the Coin, comes out next year. "I've got a lot of Buddy Holly to spread around with the people, though he wasn't here very long," he says.

It was in 1958, doing sessions in a New Mexico studio, that Allsup was asked to record and then tour with Holly. At the time the man who had shot to fame with the likes of That'll be the Day and Peggy Sue was struggling in the charts. Some accounts call Allsup a "substitute Cricket". "I've been called the Fourth Cricket, the other Cricket, a non-Cricket, it doesn't matter a s*** what they call me as long as they call me to come and play," he says. "I know more about Buddy Holly than the two Crickets they started with."

Age seems of little concern to him, either. His sister is 96, his girlfriend in her forties. "My home is in my Ford Expedition," he says, talking of a huge American truck. "I own a home in Azle, Texas, but I'm never there, I'm on the road all the time. I've got too much music in my soul to let it die. I'm not ready to settle down and wash my car and mow my lawn every day."

And what of the fateful coin toss that saved life? How often does he think about that now? "Every day. Just about every day. I'm just thankful to be alive, you know."