A man from the Texas Gulf Coast once sat in a theater lobby in Beaumont and talked on the air for more than five days straight. Then he wrote a hit for George Jones, cut a novelty record that people still sing along to, and was gone at 28.
Jiles Perry Richardson Jr., better known as the Big Bopper, was a disc jockey, songwriter and singer born in Sabine Pass, Texas, on October 24, 1930. He grew up in Beaumont, and he was one of the Texans on the plane with Buddy Holly (a Lubbock native) and Ritchie Valens on February 3, 1959.
A roughneck's son from Sabine Pass
Richardson was born in Sabine Pass, a small town in Jefferson County, to an oilfield roughneck. The family settled in Beaumont, which is where the rest of his Texas story happens. A kid with a big voice and a lot of nerve found a microphone there.
He found one at KTRM, the Beaumont radio station where he started as a young man and where he built his on-air persona. The name Big Bopper stuck.
Five days on the air
In May 1957 he set up in the lobby of the Jefferson Theatre in downtown Beaumont and kept broadcasting for 122 hours and 8 minutes. He played 1,821 records along the way.
That's the stunt part. What I'd argue matters more is what it says about the man: he understood that radio was a show, and that a crowd would gather to watch somebody refuse to quit. Plenty of people could spin records. Few could make a theater lobby into an event.
The song and the plane
In 1958 "Chantilly Lace" came out on Mercury. It's a one-sided phone call, all growl and giggle, and listeners took to it. It reached No. 6 on the pop chart and spent 22 weeks on the national Top 40. Jerry Lee Lewis recorded it again in 1972, which tells you how well it traveled.
His pen mattered too. He wrote "White Lightning," which became George Jones's first No. 1 country hit. A rockabilly novelty man handing the country charts a standard is the kind of thing that gets lost when people only remember the crash.
That winter he joined Holly and Valens on the Winter Dance Party tour across the Midwest. After a show at Clear Lake, Iowa, the three of them boarded a small chartered plane in the early hours of February 3, 1959. It went down minutes after takeoff near Mason City, Iowa. Nobody survived.
Richardson was 28. His son was born in April 1959, a few months after his death.
Why Texas keeps him
Holly and Valens get most of the attention when people tell this story. I'd argue the Big Bopper deserves a longer look, because he was the one from Southeast Texas. He was a radio man first, a songwriter second and a recording star third.
That mix is why he still gets claimed. A DJ who can outlast a theater lobby, write for a country star and land a pop hit is not a footnote to anybody's biography.
Which Big Bopper do you carry around, the Chantilly Lace voice or the guy who wouldn't sign off? And if you grew up near Beaumont or Port Arthur, did you hear his name before you heard the song?
Photo: General Artists Corporation-photo by Van Dyck, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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