The Day the Music Died

Tuesday's going to be the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. I actually only know this because I couldn't sleep on Friday night and was up listening to Coast to Coast AM, and they were talking about it. Coast to Coast is actually a pretty entertaining show when they aren't talking about Roswell, or any other conspiracy theory where there is incontrovertible evidence to prove that it is false, many times over.

On Friday night's show they had some music expert I'd never heard of, but then, (I thought this was the most interesting part) they talked to two women named Donna and Peggy Sue, who knew Holly and Valens in real life, and for whom two of their biggest respective hits were written.

What was interesting about what these women had to say was that both said they were very young at the time of the accident, that these men were their boyfriends, and that while they remembered the events surrounding the crash and finding out about it very well, they were also able to talk about it all very matter-of-factly. This was something that had happened a very long time ago, both women had had very full lives in the time since, and both hinted at the fact that when it came down to it, they didn't really know either of these men all that well. As if to say, how much can someone really be the love of your life when you're only 17, 18 years old? If both women had been 30 at the time I suspect the event would have been much harder to get over. I thought it was interesting anyway.

Incidentally, my own mom was a 13 year-old in West Covina, California when the crash happened. She said the only one she knew of at the time was Valens, who was kind of a local hero. My stepfather was 21 at the time and said he had only heard of the Big Bopper at the time.

My impression was that Valens was fairly well known at the time, because of the three hits he'd had, that Holly's star was rising in the U.S. but that he'd more of a name for himself in Europe up to that point. The Big Bopper had had a big hit with "Chantilly Lace" but that he was hardly a superstar or on his way to being one.

I think, had they lived, Valens and Holly probably would have had careers along the lines of someone like Jerry Lee Lewis or Roy Orbison, not so sure about The Big Bopper though.