This Day in Pop Music History (“The Day the Music Died”)

February 3, 1959—In one of the most grievous disasters ever to hit the American pop culture scene, young rock ‘n’ roll pioneers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. (“The Big Bopper”) Richardson perished in a plane crash just hours after performing in Clear Lake, Iowa.

I have been fascinated by this terrible tragedy ever since an elementary school teacher taught my class the use of literary allusion by focusing intently on Don McLean’s 1971 epic pop hit “American Pie,” which took as its jumping-off point “The Day the Music Died.” Today, you can get some idea of the vast lost promise of these musicians—but especially Holly—by taking in the vast number of retrospectives that have appeared in the mass media about the disaster. I’ll focus here on two.

The current issue of Rolling Stone (the one with Bruce Springsteen on the cover) features a terrific article by Jonathan Cott on the circumstances surrounding the tragic day. It reviews:

* the extraordinary conditions that led the three musicians to make their risky flight (a blizzard with minus-30-degrees-below-zero temperatures; the unheated Baptist school bus that left them stranded for hours in the middle of nowhere; the unwashed laundry and lack of sleep that made them desperate for a warm hotel room);

* the camaraderie that developed in the long hours on the bus (Dion, on jamming with the group: “Man, that was heaven, that was family, that was the connection, that was a bit of salvation, that was touching the very center of my heart”); and

* the Bridge of San Luis Rey-type sense of fate as the musicians decided who’d board the plane and who’d stick with the bus (Waylon Jennings gave up his ticket on the plane to the flu-stricken Richardson; Dion balked at the $36 price, which reminded him too much of the rent his parents paid every month for their apartment; and Crickets musician Tommy Allsup losing a coin toss to Valens).

(And now, here, a gripe about how Rolling Stone showcased this piece—or, rather, how they didn’t. Not only is there no link to the article on the magazine’s Web site, but even on the front cover of the magazine, there’s not a mention of it—instead, it has teasers for articles about Franz Ferdinand and Howard Stern’s slob of a sidekick, Artie Lange. One consolation: the Web site does have a link where fans can offer views on the sad anniversary.)

Both this article and Barry Mazor’s article in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Buddy Holly’s Still-Living Legacy,” features poignant memories by the rock ‘n’ roll legend’s widow, Maria Elena Holly, recalling how he would, on the spur of the moment, go down to Washington Square in New York and counsel young musicians on the craft of songwriting.

Mazor’s apt summary of the amazing evolution of Holly in just a five-year span—“from covers of three-chord hits to increasingly sophisticated, memorable songwriting, from garage rock to string sessions orchestrated by himself”—hints at all that was lost with the singer’s death. Think of how young the flight victims were (Holly, 22; Valens, 17; Richardson, 28) and visualize what they might have accomplished if they’d been given even another 10 years of life, let alone a normal human life span of around 70-80 years old.

Here are some alternative ways of thinking about that:

* Holly already had a dozen hits at the time of his death. Give him another dozen years—just short of the lifespan of George Gershwin—and you would have had the first rock ‘n’ roller who would have had musicians performing entire songbooks of his material, as Ella Fitzgerald did with a well-publicized series dedicated to the likes of Gershwin, Porter, etc., and as Jennifer Warnes did with the songs of Leonard Cohen.

To visualize the loss, imagine what would have happened if the Beatles had gone down in a plane in the Atlantic Ocean, just before appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show. Imagine no “Yesterday,” no “Nowhere Man,” no “Day in the Life,” no “Let It Be.” (Push on into their solo careers and imagine no “Imagine.”)

Holly’s last hit was “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” But, as we thrill to his songs 50 years after his death, we realize that his career very much did.