The Musician Died, The Music Lived

It's not officially a national day of remembrance, but maybe it should be. Buddy Holly died in a plane crash 50 years ago today. Fans still like to call it The Day the Music Died.

As poetic as that sentiment is, I can't quite agree. The music hasn't died. Not so long as we're still listening to it, and musicians are still finding inspiration in his simple but affecting melodies and lyrics. Very few of us leave such large footprints or cast such long shadows by age 22.

He left us with a lot. Imagine if you can What Might Have Been if Holly had lived to leave us more. I'd like to think he would have continued writing good songs on into the early 60s, perhaps single-handedly keeping that era's music from becoming as hopelessly lame and bloodless as it was. The mid to late 60s would have presented a problem; in those years rock started branching out into complex orchestration, social commentary, and of course drugs. Not exactly his milieu. He probably would have been viewed as a bit passe, behind the times, not relevant anymore. His star would have gone into eclipse.

And then rebounded in the 1970s. (Which it did in fact, though in this alternative universe version Don McLean has no reason to write "The Day The Music Died" and thus doesn't have a hit. No matter. That's not a big sacrifice.) After the Holly revival died down in, let's say in the early 1980s, he'd have settled onto the nostalgia circuit and earned a comfortable living there. And then, who knows, the late career resurgence of his contemporaries Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison might have inspired one or even two more albums worth of brilliant material.

We can never know. But we've got what we've got, and that will have to be enough.