April 20th, 2023 Newsletter: Bring Back Mr. Rogers’ Normalcy

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. Upon the willows in the midst of it, we hung our harps. For there our captors demanded of us songs, and our tormentors’ (laughter) mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’” (Psalm 137:1-3 NASB)
A popular song in the ’70s, American Pie, included the phrase “the day the music died.” (1) It has always reminded me of this Psalm. Though Don McLean’s song was about a different time, place, and reason, it too was about “the nostalgia that comes with closing a chapter in time” (Ethan Reese). Reese says the song describes the end of “A chapter that was good, youthful, and innocent.…For McLean, it was lost when he discovered that his favorite musicians, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. ‘The Big Bopper’ Richardson, had died in a plane crash—the day the music died. And for America, it came when the utopia of the 1950s was exposed as a veneer, giving way to the more socially conscious, but turbulent 1960s.” (2)