'The Day The Music Died': Watch vocal group Home Free sing 'American Pie' with Don McLean

Longtime "American Pie" listeners can remember "The Day The Music Died" this year with a new vocal rendition of the enduring song from country outfit Home Free and songwriter Don McLean. 

Home Free and McLean ditch traditional instruments for a six-part a capella version of the 50-year-old folk-rock epic. A music video shows McLean kicking into the opening line "a long, long time ago ..." as a backdrop of midcentury Americana unfolds. 

During the eight-and-a-half minute song, an upbeat Home Free and McLean trade off verses with layered vocal backing before collectively delivering the final lines: "... Them good ol' boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye/ Singin' this'll be the day that I die.'"

Watch the "American Pie" music video above. 

Hearing McLean perform in the studio, Home Free tenor Austin Brown said "you could just tell that he’s performed this song for years and that it’s truly grown and changed, even for him, over the decades."

Brown said, "He had an almost narrative quality to his style of singing this now, and to me, even after knowing this song and hearing it my entire life, 'American Pie' felt more like a story than it ever had before.”

And McLean trusted the vocal group to recreate the time-tested story. 

"Any song which has a legitimate melody lends itself to an a cappella rendition," he said. "The guys in Home Free just did their thing and did a tremendous job at it, too." 

'Also the day that music was reborn'

"American Pie" chronicles a "loss of American innocence" ignited by the unexpected death of Buddy Holly on Feb. 3, 1959.

Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson chartered a 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza with hopes of cutting travel time between frigid Midwestern tour stops in Clear Lake, Iowa, and Moorhead, Minnesota.

But the plane wouldn’t make it out of Clear Lake, crashing in a field just miles north of the Surf Ballroom, where the early rock 'n' roll stars wrapped a gig hours earlier. It was one of the first tragedies to strike modern American music and a figurative end to 1950s culture. 

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In the new version, Brown said Home Free wanted to reinvent "American Pie" while still "staying true to the depth" of it. 

"It starts in a way that’s just very introspective, very true to the words and to the moment 'The Day the Music Died,’ and just how powerful that can be," Brown said. "But also the hope that can come from the movement associated with an event like that. ... It really changed so much musically. While it was ‘The Day the Music Died,’ in a lot of ways, it was also the day that music was reborn.”

McLean released "American Pie" in 1971, birthing "The Day The Music Died" moniker for the anniversary of Holly's death. 

In 2018, he told The USA Today Network: "Buddy Holly’s death is what I used to try to write the biggest possible song I could write about America," McLean said. "And not a ‘This Land Is Your Land’ or 'America, the Beautiful' or something like that. I wanted to write a song that was completely brand new in its perspective.”