This Day in Music

Born Today In Music

September 18th

1945 - Don McLean
Don McLean, US singer, songwriter, 1971 US & 1972 UK No.1 single 'American Pie', a song inspired by the death of Buddy Holly.

Don McLean


McLean performing at Sage Gateshead in May 2018

Background information
Birth name: Donald McLean III
Born: October 2, 1945 (age 79); New Rochelle, New York, U.S.
Website: don-mclean.com

Donald McLean III /məˈkleɪn/ (born October 2, 1945)[1] is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, known to fans as the "American Troubadour" or "King of the Trail". He is best known for his 1971 hit "American Pie", an eight-and-a-half-minute folk rock song that has been referred to as a "cultural touchstone". His other hit singles include "Vincent", "Dreidel", "Castles in the Air", and "Wonderful Baby", as well as renditions of Roy Orbison's "Crying" and the Skyliners' "Since I Don't Have You".

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Recording career

Early breakthrough

McLean recorded Tapestry in 1969 in Berkeley, California, during the student riots. After being rejected 72 times by labels, the album was released by Mediarts, a label that had not existed when he first started to look for one. He worked on the album for a couple of years before putting it out. It attracted good reviews but little notice outside the folk community, though on the Easy Listening chart "Castles in the Air" was a success, and in 1973 "And I Love You So" became a number 1 Adult Contemporary hit for Perry Como.

McLean's major break came when Mediarts was taken over by United Artists Records, thus securing the promotion of a major label for his second album, American Pie. The album launched two number one hits in the title song and "Vincent". American Pie's success made McLean an international star and piqued interest in his first album, which charted more than two years after its initial release.

"American Pie"
Main article: American Pie (song)

McLean's "American Pie" is a song inspired partly by the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (The Big Bopper) in a plane crash in 1959, and developments in American youth culture in the subsequent decade. The song popularized the expression "The Day the Music Died" in reference to the crash.

The song was recorded on May 26, 1971, and a month later received its first radio airplay on New York's WNEW-FM and WPLJ-FM to mark the closing of Fillmore East, the famous New York concert hall. "American Pie" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 from January 15 to February 5, 1972, and remains McLean's most successful single release. The single also topped the Billboard Easy Listening chart. With a total running time of 8:36 encompassing both sides of the single, it was also the longest song to reach number one until Taylor Swift's "All Too Well" broke the record in 2021. Some stations played only part one of the original split-sided single release.

WCFL DJ Bob Dearborn unraveled the lyrics and first published his interpretation on January 7, 1972, four days after the song reached number 1 on rival station WLS, six days before it reached number 1 on WCFL, and eight days before it reached number 1 nationally {see "Further reading" under "American Pie"}. Numerous other interpretations, which together largely converged on Dearborn's interpretation, quickly followed. McLean declined to say anything definitive about the lyrics until 1978. Since then McLean has stated that the lyrics are also somewhat autobiographical and present an abstract story of his life from the mid-1950s until the time he wrote the song in the late 1960s.

The original United Artists Records inner sleeve featured a free verse poem written by McLean about William Boyd, also known as Hopalong Cassidy, along with a picture of Boyd in full Hopalong regalia. This sleeve was removed within a year of the album's release. The words to this poem appear on a plaque at the hospital where Boyd died. The Boyd poem and picture tribute do appear on a special remastered 2003 CD.

In 2001, "American Pie" was voted number 5 in a poll of the 365 Songs of the Century compiled by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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