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Fri 17 October 2025 13:30, UK
On February 2nd, 1959, in what would be a good nominee for the worst Groundhog Day of all-time, Buddy Holly played the final gig of his life, strumming the last chord on his 1958 Fender Stratocaster before boarding an ill-fated chartered plane out of Clear Lake, Iowa.
Despite some occasional rumours to the contrary, however, Buddy’s guitar did not come with him, and thus, was not found among the wreckage of the crash that killed him along with fellow rising rock stars Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper. Instead, due to the tiny size of the aircraft, almost all of the musicians’ gear was left down below with the ground-bound members of the touring party.
Dion DiMucci, the 19-year-old frontman of Dion and the Belmonts, was originally supposed to join Buddy and the Bopper on the plane, but opted out when he realised that the cost of the ticket, $36, was about the same as what his father was paying for a whole month’s rent back in the Bronx.
“My primary reason for not going was that $36!” Dion told Forbes magazine in 2019, “So I said to Ritchie, ‘Please, you go on the plane. Take your coat. Stay warm. I’ll watch your guitars’. Buddy then said to me, ‘Watch my guitar, too. Take care of it like you would take care of your testicles!’ I said OK. Later on, when I saw Peter Townshend break a Fender guitar on stage, I thought it was a sacrilege. Guitars were like gold to us.”
Dion, much like Buddy’s bass player, a young Waylon Jennings, would be left with decades of difficult what-if thoughts about all the tiny decisions that determined a lot of young men’s fates that night. One thing he didn’t have to feel guilty about, however, was Buddy Holly’s guitar. He had kept his word, and Holly’s final guitar, the ‘58 Strat, was preserved, ultimately ending up in the Buddy Holly Museum many years later.
The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens (L-R). (Credit: Brunswick Records / Van Dyck / Wikimedia)
Nonetheless, as the ‘Day the Music Died’ has continued to fascinate people over the ensuing 70 years, misconceptions have popped up over Holly’s guitars, including the mystery surrounding one of his early 1954 Stratocasters, in particular. According to his own bandmates in The Crickets, Holly had a ‘54 Strat stolen while the band were on tour in Michigan in 1957. That guitar was never recovered and could, indeed, still be out there somewhere, although proving its authenticity at this point would be a massive undertaking.
In 1958, Holly’s replacement ‘57 Stratocaster was also stolen while the band were stopped at a cafe near St Louis, and according to some reports, he might have had yet another Strat ripped off that same year in Canada. All the confusion has led to some wondering if Buddy might have had another guitar among his gear that final night in Clear Lake, one that vanished into folklore immediately thereafter.
In 2019, Melbourne-based musician and Fender collector Gil Matthews participated in a short documentary called The ’54, in which he discussed the possibility that a 1954 Strat he’d purchased from a dealer about 20 years after Holly’s death, in Lubbock, Texas, might have been one of the musician’s long-lost axes.
Analyses conducted by some Holly experts and Strat experts have lent at least some level of credence to the theory, but even Matthews himself, to his credit, wasn’t 100% convinced. The big problem is that nobody involved seems to know for sure when or where Holly’s fabled ‘54 Strat actually was seen for the last time. Was it somewhere in Michigan, as his bandmates seemed to recall, or was it still floating around until people lost track of it sometime after his death?
In the end, despite being a really cool example of a 1954 Stratocaster, Gil Matthews’ instrument couldn’t be substantiated as the Holy Grail, or ‘Holly Grail’, as the case may be. Outside of photo analysis, though, we also don’t know enough about Holly’s original Strat to say for sure that it didn’t end up in Australia.
It’s just as likely that some thief pawned off the legendary guitar somewhere in Michigan in 1957, where it eventually found its way to a Detroit garage rock band who smashed it to pieces emulating Pete Townshend a decade later. We’ll probably never know.
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