I love YouTube. I love the music videos, especially the black and whites from the Fifties and early Sixties. YouTube is like a time machine, allowing us to peer back into a long gone world. Still alive in that world is Ritchie Valens, the young singer who died, with Buddy Holly and Jiles ”the Big Bopper” Richardson, in a plane crash in 1959. The ghostly trio remains trapped in the Fifties forever, for all time.
Ritchie Valens’s career was short, but it had taken off: records released, television appearances, even a small part in a movie. Ritchie was on the fast track. Everything was going right for this youngster. But Ritchie’s career lasted at most a year, with only five months between the release of his first record and his death. Death cut him short, stole his future.
Looking at the images on the Internet, there are a few in which Ritchie Valens looks mature, much older than he was. But he was only seventeen at the time, just a boy. In many photos he looks so young, even childlike. A seventeen year-old is still more of a child than a grown-up. That youngness was what grabbed my attention, locked onto my mind. One photo in particular made me so sad that I had to get up and walk away from the computer. Ritchie Valens was just too young to die.
But it is not just his youth that holds me. Listening to his young voice, his songs, looking at his happy images, he is just so alive, so full of life, with so much ahead of him. How can that suddenly cease to be? Be utterly gone?
And it was all so long ago, in another world. 1959 is so remote. It is not yesterday. So many years have passed since then. Ritchie Valens should have had all those years, and be 71 today.
Time rolls on, leaving the dead behind, forever, as we move on without them. Trapped in the past for all eternity, the dead recede from us as though on a boat cut adrift from our ship. The Fifties are another world, a long gone world sealed off from the present, sealing off those who lived and died then. The Fifties are a million years ago.
Still being able to hear his ghostly voice, still singing La Bamba, Ritchie Valens still seems so alive. But it is an illusion, an Internet illusion. Ritchie Valens is long dead, long gone. Finished. He does not exist. But not so to his family. They have lovingly kept Ritchie’s memory alive, holding onto him. Being able to hear his voice still must make it so much harder to say goodbye, to let go of their young one, as he slips further and further away, separated from them forever on that little boat. He is so very distant now.
Ritchie Valens was not the only seventeen year-old who ever died, or even died that day. The young die every day. And Holly and Richardson were young too, only in their twenties. So was the pilot, the overlooked and forgotten twenty-one year-old Roger Peterson. I could just as well have written of them. Some young deaths, such as this one, catch my attention, but all are sad. How can something so wonderful as a young life be over, gone, forever? So much is lost, stolen. So much should have been, but never will be.
There is nothing more sad, more unfair, than the death of the young. Nothing. And nothing more wrong. It should not be.
So, goodbye Ritchie Valens – once so alive, so young, and now so long gone.
(3 February, 2012, was the 53rd anniversary of that plane crash.)
