Hey Buddy: In Pursuit of Buddy Holly, My New Buddy John, and My Lost Decade of Music, published January 20, 2011, arrives exactly two weeks before the 52nd anniversary of what singer-songwriter Don McLean, in his own rock anthem American Pie, so movingly called "The Day the Music Died."

Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper Also Killed in Plane Crash

That day was Feb. 3, 1959. A middle-of-the-winter-night plane crash in an Iowa cornfield took the lives of 22-year-old Texan Buddy Holly and fellow rockers Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson.

(Valens was a genuinely important figure in fifties rock whose life was celebrated in the 1987 film biography La Bamba. The deep-voiced Richardson, a mere blip on rock's radar screen, was a songwriter and former DJ remembered chiefly for the novelty hit Chantilly Lace, featuring the sniggering catch phrase, "You knowwww what I like." It wasn't hard to figure out what the Bopper liked.)

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