A Day the Music Died

April 17th, 1960

I'm always amazed when reading the Beatles story, about how it seems that every event seems to have happened when it did almost as if preordained.  One of those events, tragic and meaningful only in retrospect, happened just 50 years ago. One of the rock prototypes for the early Beatles, an American, died in a car crash while on tour in England, just a couple of hundred miles south of Liverpool.  It happened just one month after he was a key figure in bringing American rock and roll to the city of Liverpool.  Eddie Cochrane was his name.    His big song was "20 Flight Rock".  If you want to see what a massive influence he had on the early Beatles, just check out this youtube.