The Music Hasn't Died Yet

In 1971 a musician named Don McLean released one of the enigmatic songs in the history of music. In notes that accompany the sale of his original manuscript at auction in New York on Tuesday, he describes it as a morality song that charts the decline of the USA and its loss of innocence. This is what makes this song so popular. People can relate to the lyrics, McLean is describing a reality through the beauty of music. People have searched for different tragic events that caused McLean to sing lyrics like “the day the music dies” and there have been some pretty good theories. However, the most widely accepted one was in 1959 when Buddy Holly died in a plane crash with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper.

“Basically in American Pie things are heading in the wrong direction,” he said in an interview published in the auction catalogue. “It is becoming less idyllic. I don't know whether you consider that wrong or right but it is a morality song in a sense.” McLean says the lyrics reflected the way the world had declined in the years since it was written.

“I was around in 1970 and now I am around in 2015... There is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of American Pie,” he said. The final verse of the recorded version describes a bleak America: the music has gone and even the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are heading for the coast. Maybe one day in the future things will turn around and America might be revived by the music once again. Not to say that there isn’t great music being produced today, it just can’t be compared to the 60’s and 70’s.