From PRX.

This is Studio 360.

I'm Kurti Anderson.

On this Studio 360 podcast Extra, we're talking about a song that came along in 1971.

But 1971 was actually still peak 60s. The Vietnam War

raging, Richard Nixon, still in his first term, the hippie counterculture, bigger than ever.

I'm talking about singer-songwriter Don McLean's song, American Pie. Today, everybody still seems to know all the words. I think I probably do. But nobody seems to know what those words mean. Who is the jester who sang for the king and queen in a code he borrowed from James Dean.

And what was it that touched the singer deep inside the day the music died?

To tell the story of that incredibly well-known song and uncover some of its mysteries,

our story begins by going right to the source.

I did not want to have a job where I had a boss. That was my main goal in life.

I just wanted to be free of anyone telling me what to do.

My name is Don McLean. I'm a singer and a songwriter.

And I've never had any job but as a paperboard in 1959.

When I opened those papers and saw that my man, Buddy Holly, had been killed.

I was very sensitive, and I carried this burden with me for a long, long time.

A long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.

Three young singers who soared to the heights of show business on the current rock and roll craze

were killed today in the crash of a light plane in an Iowa snow flurry.

The singers were identified as Richie Valleon 17, Buddy Holly 22 and J.P. Richardson, known professionally as the Big Bopper.

But February made me shiver, with every paper I deliver. The aircraft charted from the Dwyer flying service crashed near

Mason City ironically the setting for the prominent musical the music man their small charted

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