The Complete True Story Behind “American Pie” by Don McLean

The Death of Buddy Holly

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The Daily Tribune newspaper reports the deaths of Buddy Holly, J. P. ‘The Big Bopper’ Richardson and Ritchie Valens (Photo by GAB Archive/Redferns)

Almost immediately, he turns his attention to a seminal event that cast a shadow over his joy: the death of Buddy Holly in a plane crash in February 1959. McLean himself was a paperboy at the time of the event, and heard about the death of the music star by reading the front page of the newspapers he delivered:

“But February made me shiver

With every paper, I’d deliver

Bad news on the doorstep

I couldn’t take one more step

I can’t remember if I cried

When I read about his widowed bride

Something touched me deep inside

The day the music died.”

Identifying Buddy Holly by the time of year he died, as well as the widow he left behind, McLean made the first verse the easiest to decipher. As it will become more evident in the next verses, Holly’s death had a profound impact on McLean, as he associated it with the disappearance of the optimism and innocence of the 1950s. As such, the day the music died is not only the day one of its most essential representatives passed away, but also when the old days, and the optimism that came with them, died as well.

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