Guitarist Who Won Music's Most Famous Coin Flip Is Dead

Tommy Allsup, a guitarist best known for losing a coin toss that kept him off a plane that crashed and killed rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and JP "Big Bopper" Richardson, has died at age 85, reports AP. Allsup died Wednesday at a hospital in Springfield, Missouri, after complications from a hernia operation, said his son. Tommy Allsup was part of Holly's band when the Lubbock, Texas, singer died in the Feb. 3, 1959, plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. Allsup flipped a coin to see who between him and Valens would get a seat on the plane and who would have to take the bus to the next stop on the tour.

Holly, Valens, and Richardson died with 21-year-old pilot Roger Peterson when the plane crashed in the Iowa countryside in snowy conditions. The three rockers' deaths were immortalized in Don McLean's 1971 song "American Pie," and became known as "the day the music died." In a 1987 interview, Tommy Allsup, who was born in Owasso, Oklahoma, recalled flipping the coin backstage after playing a concert. "A couple of people were standing there," he said. "I flipped it. (Valens) called 'heads.' He got his stuff off the bus." Another entertainer who was left off the plane was country music star Waylon Jennings, who was also playing with Holly's band at the time. Jennings died in 2002. (More Buddy Holly stories.)