Everybody knows the phrase "the day the music died." Almost nobody knows where it came from. It was a thirteen-year-old on a paper route in Westchester, and it took him twelve years to put it into a song.
He Was Thirteen and Delivering Papers
Don McLean was born in New Rochelle on October 2, 1945. By February 3, 1959, he was an eighth grader with his own paper route.
He was folding the stack he was about to deliver when he found out what had happened overnight.
A Plane Went Down in Iowa That Morning
Buddy Holly was dead. He was twenty-two. Ritchie Valens and J. P. Richardson, who performed as the Big Bopper, went down with him outside Clear Lake, Iowa. The pilot, Roger Peterson, died too.
All three musicians were already stars. Holly, a Texan, had hits like "That'll Be the Day" and "Peggy Sue." Valens had just broken through with "La Bamba," and the Big Bopper was known across the Midwest for "Chantilly Lace." They were touring together on the Winter Dance Party, a string of one-night shows in the dead of winter, with a tour bus that kept breaking down. Holly chartered a small four-seat plane after their show at the Surf Ballroom so the band could get some rest and do laundry before the next stop. It went down in a snowy field not long after takeoff. A stone marker sits at the crash site today.
McLean has said he learned the news standing over that stack of papers, still folding, about to head out on his route. He wouldn't write a word about that morning for another twelve years.
Twelve Years Later He Wrote American Pie
"American Pie" came out in October 1971 and went to number one on the Billboard chart. The second line is the one that started it all: February made me shiver, with every paper I'd deliver. McLean dedicated the whole album to Buddy Holly.
The song itself runs past eight minutes, so long that the original single had to be split across both sides of the record. Somewhere in the middle of it, McLean calls February 3, 1959, the day the music died. He stayed cagey for years about what the rest of the lyrics meant, and let fans and critics argue over every line for decades. He wasn't rushing to explain a song that was still climbing the charts on its own mystery.
That changed in 2015, when McLean sold his original handwritten lyrics at auction for more than a million dollars. For the first time, he talked publicly about what some of the verses meant, and confirmed the plane crash was where the song began. He would also go on to write "Vincent," the tribute to Van Gogh that's nearly as famous as this one. Even before that auction, the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts had already ranked "American Pie" the fifth greatest song of the twentieth century, back in 2001.
Nobody had called that morning "the day the music died" before the record came out. Everybody has called it that since. It's now the normal way an entire country talks about one date in 1959. And it started with a kid folding newspapers in New Rochelle, New York, thirteen years before anyone but him knew it.
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