Remembering Buddy Holly 50 years after his death

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

It’s ancient history now, but it defined a generation. There are still millions of Americans over the age of 50 out there who can remember exactly where they were The Day the Music Died.

On Feb. 3, 1959, a small chartered Beechcraft Bonanza B35 airplane carrying three of the brightest youngsters in the emerging wonder world of rock music crashed. Buddy Holly, one of the greatest pioneers of rock ’n’ roll, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (aka “the Big Bopper“) all perished that day, later to be immortalized by Don McLean in his classic 1971 single “American Pie” as “The Day The Music Died.”

Before John F. Kennedy rode to his fate at high noon in Dallas, before Martin Luther King and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were mortally wounded, before the Vietnam War spun out of control and the college campuses and inner cities of America went up in flames, those deaths served notice to a generation of American children and adults that golden ages of peace and security do not last forever, that human life and history are ongoing, imperfect, full of surprises and shocks, and that human existence is about coping with loss and renewal far more than it is about riding the smooth, surfless, friction-free waves of perfection.

There was much to mourn in the early deaths of the talented, much-loved Valens and the Bopper. But it was boyish Buddy Holly’s loss that still haunts the most.

He came before the Beatles, who adored his music and who openly acknowledged they owed him so much. He was almost as big as Elvis and by far the greater musical innovator. No great American musician or popular artist has ever died in a commercial airliner crash, but smaller chartered propeller aircraft have claimed the lives of all too many of them. Patsy Cline, Otis Redding and Stevie Ray Vaughan all died that way.

As his Wikipedia entry points out, “Buddy Holly recorded so prolifically that his record label was able to release brand-new Buddy Holly albums and singles for 10 years after his death.”

Over the past decade and more, it has become fashionable for aging Generation X-ers to sneer at the older baby boomers who preceded them in America’s generational cohorts. There is a rough justice in this: No American generation was ever as hate-filled, sneering and contemptuous of their parents, nor as self-indulgent and self-righteous as they themselves aged, as the boomers have been. But like any kind of age, race or religious prejudice painted with a broad brush, the Generation X whines and sneers at their predecessors are as simplistic as the boomers’ rants in their day were, and it gets old and ridiculous just as fast.

Besides, Buddy Holly and his colleagues, while they entertained the young boomers - and many others besides - were not of that generation. They belonged to the previous generation, which sociologists William Strauss and Neil Howe in their classic book “Generations” called the “Silents.” But in terms of cultural contributions, especially in superb quality popular music, the Silents weren’t silent at all.

Still, the deaths of not just Holly, but Valens and the Bopper as well, seemed in retrospect like an expulsion from the Garden of Eden for a privileged generation raised in an era of peace and prosperity with the illusion that it would and could last forever.

Such horrific awakenings have been all too common in history. The idealistic young Americans on all sides who marched out to slaughter each other in the Civil War of 1861-65 and the young Europeans who eagerly volunteered to do the same thing in the suicide of European civilization that began with the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914 would have understood that all too well.

Therefore, at a time when an idealistic young new president has taken power in Washington to grapple with the worst economic crisis in 75 years, the memory of that one small plane crash half a century ago assumes a new, poignant relevance. It teaches us that joy and talent are fleeting gifts not to be taken for granted, and that the workings of history are never simplistic and sweet. Indeed, fate is most pregnant with venomous shock when it appears to be most idealistic and uplifting.

Still, Buddy Holly deserves to be remembered for his life far more than for his tragic death. A quick visit to YouTube will introduce his joyous, unpretentious, perfectly harmonized masterpieces to a new, 21st-century generation of listeners.

Like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Felix Mendelssohn, Bix Beiderbecke and Patsy Cline, Otis Redding and Tammi Terrell, those other musical geniuses who died forever young, Buddy Holly is for the ages. And he deserves to be celebrated for what he achieved in his life, rather than what we all lost in his death.