The wreckage of a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza was scattered across a small area of snow-covered cornfield outside of Clear Lake, Iowa. The plane crashed into the ground suddenly, so most of the smoldering rubble was concentrated in one area. Three passengers — Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson, a.k.a. “The Big Bopper” — were ejected from the plane and died on impact, as did the pilot, 21-year-old Roger Peterson.
That happened on Feb. 3, 1959, exactly 50 years ago this Tuesday.
It was the most infamous plane crash in rock and roll history, aided somewhat in that distinction by Don McLean’s wistful ballad, “American Pie,” in which he referred to the event as “the day the music died.”
Of course, that is erroneous. The music lived.
Assessing the importance of Buddy Holly is a more difficult task today than gathering up the evidence at the crash site was 50 years ago to determine the causes of the accident. In the intervening years, there have been countless Holly-influenced voices that have taken the music in different directions. His presence in music history has spawned so many tributaries that sometimes the source has been taken for granted.
It is a fool’s errand to seize upon the DNA of one individual and proclaim him the father of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was hugely important as a songwriter, performer and guitarist. Little Richard took rhythm and blues, soul and gospel and wove them all into a flamboyant concoction that began to seep into the mainstream. Elvis Presley took black music and packaged it for white audiences. Well before Elvis, in 1951, Ike Turner recorded “Rocket 88,” considered by many to be the first rock and roll song. Bill Haley & His Comets pushed the genre into a wider audience with “Rock Around the Clock” in 1954.
All of these people came along in a great 1950s tsunami that changed the landscape forever.
Today, Holly is recalled by the general public as somewhere between a footnote and an icon. The footnote status rests only with the uninformed, and primarily because Holly lived such a short life. He was only 22 when he died. If you chart his career as a major force in rock and roll from the time he signed his first record contract with Decca, he had only been working as a serious professional for three years, although his music background dates back to his days as a boy playing bluegrass and singing in the choir in Lubbock, Texas.
In the year 2009, details of Buddy Holly are sketchy. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses, proper jacket and tie, and short wavy hair. Guitar buffs know him for being one of the very first to brandish a Fender Stratocaster, whose strikingly unique design revolutionized the ax business right at the time Holly was climbing the charts.
While Holly is recalled in random images, his importance acknowledged with reverential nods, it was his songwriting that set him apart and influenced scores of major artists, from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan, right down the line. The tradition of the day was to keep with the familiar, which meant covering already successful songs. But Holly stepped in and established himself as one of the first true singer-songwriters who made it big.
The problem with rock and roll these days, the reason it has slipped below hip-hop as the dominant music genre, is because generations have copied generations, and thus the original potency of the music has been diluted. Just like rock of the ‘80s and ‘90s generally paled in comparison to what came out of the ‘60s because the music grew farther and farther away from its blues roots, the rock of today is niche-oriented rather than widespread and powerful.
But if you look back at rock and roll as one giant family tree, Buddy Holly was one of a small handful of founding fathers, someone whose influence remains massive and unshakable today. He excited millions. He brought young people from varied backgrounds into the same congregation. He represented the pure, uninhibited joy that made rock and roll great.
Sorry, Don McLean. You wrote a beautiful song, and your intentions were impeccable and honorable. But it only seemed like the music died on February 3, 1959, and that’s understandable. Because at that moment, there was just no way of predicting how long the music would live on.
Now we know.
Michael Ventre lives in Los Angeles and is a regular contributor to msnbc.com.