'American Pie' Song

'American Pie' isn't a song about Buddy Holly, Don McLean says: 'It's about America'

Matthew Leimkuehler, Des Moines Register 

Sixty years ago this Sunday, just after 1 a.m., a plane carrying three rock 'n' roll stars and an Iowa pilot crashed into a frozen field north of Clear Lake, Iowa.

The impact killed all four immediately, changing the course of music for decades to come.


Across the country, a 13-year-old paperboy unfolded the next morning’s headlines to read words that’d leave him devastated.

Buddy Holly, J.P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson and Ritchie Valens died hours after striking a final note at the Surf Ballroom.

The news crushed Don McLean.


Elwin Musser's photo of the plane crash site north of Clear Lake, taken Feb. 3, 1959. Rock 'n' roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson were killed along with pilot Roger Peterson. (Photo: Elwin Musser/Mason City Globe Gazette)

“I was crazy about Buddy Holly,” McLean, age 73, told the Register. “I was way into Buddy Holly. Something about him, really … he was my favorite. I listened to his records all the time.”

Twelve years later, McLean took pen to paper and delivered “American Pie,” an eight-and-a-half minute acoustic epic that’d become one of the most celebrated and debated songs in popular music.

The song opens by transporting listeners back to McLean’s 1959, to an America before the Beatles invaded Ed Sullivan and Vietnam War protests took over city blocks. “A long, long time ago,” he described it.

It’s in the first verse that he coined the Iowa crash with a name that would stick for decades to come.

“Something touched me deep inside the day the music died …”


Don McLean (Photo: Jack Corn)

Leading into the 60th anniversary of “the day the music died,” the Register spoke with McLean about Buddy Holly, the song’s legacy and if he’ll one day return to the Surf Ballroom. Read below for excerpts from the interview.

Buddy Holly offers a jumping off point for the song, but “American Pie” isn’t about Holly, McLean said. He wrote the first verse in one sitting, later expanding the track into a rock 'n' roll epic capturing the loss of American innocence.

The first verse appeared like a “genie out of the bottle.”

"The song is not about Buddy Holly," he said. "It’s about America."

“Buddy Holly’s death is what I used to try to write the biggest possible song I could write about America. And not a ‘This Land Is Your Land’ or America, the Beautiful” or something like that. I wanted to write a song that was completely brand new in its perspective.”

He added: “(It was) this idea of being a rock 'n' roll dream, or a fantasy, of some sort. But it's a dream where things morph into other things.”