The Day the Music Died

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy
by Andrew Yang
Published 15 Nov 2021

For me, the Wing Ding was the first time I was getting the chance to address such a large group of people—a thousand—and in front of dozens of reporters. The venue, the Surf Ballroom, is most famous as the place where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper played right before their plane crashed six miles away in 1959, which was later christened “the day the music died” by Don McLean in “American Pie.” I tried not to dwell on that ominous history, though I absolutely love that song. It was my first major political speech. It’s not my custom to make emotional appeals, but I also knew, from the numbers, that a knockout performance would get me 2.5 percent of the way to forty thousand if I somehow converted everyone in the room.

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers
by Simon Winchester
Published 27 Oct 2015

And the date selected—of what is now known as the start of the standard reference year, or the Index Year—was January 1, 1950. Before January 1950 the atmosphere was radiochemically pure. After January 1950 it was sullied, fouled by bomb-created isotopes. So this date, this otherwise unexceptional Sunday when Ho Chi Minh began his campaign in Vietnam, when the Japanese started recalculating how old they were, the day the music died in Grand Central Terminal, would become for scientists a new Year Zero. The choice of the date was scientifically elegant, logical, and precise. And it would soon spread beyond the world of science alone. For it would have an impact on the entire question of what was meant by the use of the simple word ago.