It's Been 66 Years Since The Day the Music Died. Ritchie Valens' Sister Is Grateful to Don McLean for Singing About It (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Wreckage of the plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper in Iowa in 1959.Photo:Hulton Archive/Getty

Hulton Archive/Getty

Feb. 3, 1959, has become commonly referred to in pop culture as “The Day the Music Died” — but for “American Pie” creatorDon McLeanand Connie Valens, the younger sister of late hitmaker Ritchie Valens, it was also the day their lives changed forever.

In their respective ways, the incident impacted each individual at face value similarly, but also drastically differently as time went on. Connie, who was only 8 years old when news broke that her older brother perished in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, alongside fellow generational talents Buddy Holly and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, tells PEOPLE “our entire family was in shock” to hear the news.

“I was in my 30s before I could even look at a picture or listen to his music, that’s how much it affected me,” Connie adds. “I just refused to believe that he was gone. I just kept telling myself he’s lost. He had amnesia. A farmer found him, he can’t be gone.”

Connie Valens in 2023; Don McLean in 2022.Terry Wyatt/Getty; Vivien Killilea/Getty

Terry Wyatt/Getty; Vivien Killilea/Getty

“It really took its toll on our family, our losing Ritchie,” Connie notes.

For McLean, a 14-year-old paper boy at the time of the plane crash (as he commemorated in the lyrics of “American Pie”), the pain he felt after the loss of three of pop music’s biggest figureheads could not be understated.

“Then about nine months later, my father would die almost right in front of me,” McLean recalls to PEOPLE. “So those two things really had an effect on me as a kid. These kinds of deaths really alter a person. I heard it said someplace ‘There’s pain that hurts, and then there’s pain that alters’ … This pain altered me. I was never the same afterward, there was no getting over this … and Buddy was part of that.”

Buddy Holly on March 25, 1958.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Ultimately, after a decade of influence, the core of the iconic track, which is broken down in the 2022 Paramount+ documentaryThe Day The Music Died, came about in roughly “two hours,” McLean tells PEOPLE.

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“I wanted a rock and roll song, and I wanted a great crazy chorus, and I wanted to tell this story of the turmoil in America and moving forward,” he remembers of writing “American Pie.” “It also had mystical and moral. We must remember morality, the morality of our country and the things that have happened. This was all in the song, and I was so excited about it. I wrote the bulk of the song in about two hours, but I thought about it for several months, and it took me 10 years to get to the point where that first little bit came out.”

Connie says she is thankful to McLean for penning such a classic folk-rock anthem that continues to transcend time and educate listeners to this day about the legacy of her brother and his fellow musicians of the time.

Don McLean and Paris Dylan on Aug. 16, 2021.Emma McIntyre/Getty

Emma McIntyre/Getty

“The first time I heard the song, I had to listen to it over and over because I thought, ‘Is he talking about my brother?’ And it was like, such a shock. This is about my brother, it’s about Buddy, it’s about The Big Bopper,” Connie shares. “Thank you for writing the song because it just helped me to realize that although they’re gone, we can be healthy and in that love and understanding of what they truly meant to us, we don’t have to be sad or down. We can be productive and share and bring hope to others.”

As she grew older, Connie says she was able to process the loss of Ritchie in more depth, recognizing that it was “almost unbelievable that [Ritchie’s] music was able to outlast the times.”

“I mean the world, the universe knows ‘La Bamba,’ " she adds. “No matter where you go, people know ‘La Bamba,’ children sing ‘La Bamba.’ And all of a sudden, it was like he was not here, but he is. His music survived all of these many decades. And then in 1971, here comes Don with ‘The day the music died’ and it brought it all back.”

Through writing “American Pie,” McLean cemented his legacy as a folk-rock icon, the staying power of which still strikes him.

“I assumed people would write better songs and they didn’t,” he jokes, later adding, “Great music commands you. It’s not something you follow.”

source: people.com