The writers discuss Buddy Holly and the Beatles.

Viewpoint 1: John Berlau

Although February is the shortest calendar month of the year, it has served as one of the most significant months for momentous musical events — happy and sad.

On Feb. 3, 1959, a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, took the lives of promising young rock musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (known as the “Big Bopper”). In his 1972 classic ode “American Pie,” singer-songwriter Don Mclean memorialized the tragic event as “the day the music died.”

Yet five years and just a few short days later — Feb. 9, 1964 — the music experienced a rebirth. This was when the Beatles, just after flying in from their native United Kingdom, performed live for the first time in the United States on the popular TV program “The Ed Sullivan Show.” The Beatles’ phenomenal success on the U.S. pop charts led to a great burst of creativity in performing and songwriting that continues — in fits and starts — to today.

The two events are connected through the innovations of Holly in his musicianship. Though Holly’s life was cut short when he was just 22 and he had been recording professionally for less than three years, he had made music that greatly influenced the Beatles and many others. When they first started performing together as teens in Liverpool, John Lennon and Paul Mccartney were enthralled not just by Holly’s songs but by his entrepreneurial involvement in every aspect of the music that he performed.

While musicians writing their songs is common today, it was a new phenomenon when Holly began composing his hits such as “Peggy Sue” and “That’ll Be the Day.” When Lennon and Mccartney formed the band that would become the Beatles, they recorded “That’ll Be the Day” as their first single and included many of Holly’s songs in their early live performances. But Holly also inspired them to write their material. As Mccartney would recall (in the book “The Beatles Anthology,” as documented by music blogger Aaron Krerowicz), “John and I started to write because of Buddy Holly.”

In tribute to Holly’s band, the Crickets, Lennon and Mccartney would also name their band after a type of insect, albeit with a spelling that alluded to their music. Hence, the name the Beatles.

Holly would also influence the Beatles and others — directly and indirectly — with his budding entrepreneurship in the music industry. In 1958, he formed a song publishing company named Maria Music, after his wife, Maria Elena Holly. And he began producing other artists, including a young singer from his hometown of Lubbock, Texas, named Waylon Jennings, who would become one of the biggest stars of country music.

Jennings, who died in 2002, talked to me about his memories of Holly for an Investor’s Business Daily article I wrote on Holly’s legacy in 1999. “He had faith in me; he was one of the first people who ever did,” Jennings recalled.

Above all, Jennings remembered Holly’s zest to make the most out of every day.

“You’d have to know him to know how happy he was, how excited he was about music, how excited he was about living,” Jennings recalled. Far from Holly’s innovations in music dying with the Feb. 3 plane crash, his legacy lives on in those he influenced, such as the Beatles and Jennings, and those in turn influenced by them.

Viewpoint 2: Paul Gallagher

For many people, the most notable date in February is Valentine’s Day. But for those familiar with the history of rock music, two others stand out: Feb. 3, 1959 — “the day the music died,” as Don Mclean described it in his 1971 hit “American Pie” — and Feb. 9, 1964, when the Beatles made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

The urge to debate runs deep in human nature, so it’s only natural that some rock fans like to argue about which date is more significant. For many who treasure the music of the late 1950s, it’s no contest: That dark day in 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper were killed when their plane crashed in a snow-covered field in Iowa, casts the longest shadow in rock music history.

No one can deny the magnitude of the loss. All three musicians were no strangers to the pop charts. Holly, in particular, was the very definition of a rising talent: a guitar-playing vocalist who co-wrote some of that era’s most memorable hits, including “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue.”

So it’s easy to see why Feb. 3, 1959, represented a stark dividing line for Mclean and his contemporaries. For the grieving teenagers who had danced to 45s by Holly, Valens and the Big Bopper at sock hops, the music had indeed died.

Except, of course, it hadn’t.

Yes, sadly, Holly’s voice had been stilled all too soon. At least his physical voice had. In a larger sense, though, it continued — and grew. Because for many musicians who would go on to create hits in the ’60s, Holly’s work wasn’t just an influence; it was a playbook. They learned his songs and began weaving his sound into their own.

Exhibit A: The Beatles. Voracious record collectors at a time when British youth found rock ’n’ roll vinyl hard to come by, they snapped up Holly’s singles and dropped them into their sets long before becoming hitmakers in their own right.

When the group’s “Anthology 1” double-cd set came out in 1994, it led off with the earliest recording that Paul Mccartney, John Lennon and George Harrison made: a warbly but committed rendition of “That’ll Be the Day.”

They continued to cover Holly tunes regularly in those early days. “Peggy Sue,” “Everyday,” “Reminiscing” and others dotted their sets as their reputation grew.

“Buddy Holly was the first one that we were really aware of in England who could play and sing at the same time,” John Lennon said. “Not just strum, but actually play the licks.” Added Paul: “John and I started to write because of Buddy Holly. It was like, ‘ Wow! He writes and is a musician.’”

So when Beatle fans claim their record-setting first Ed Sullivan appearance as the most significant event in rock history, it’s not an implicit criticism of Holly, who had died almost five years earlier. It’s a compliment. Along with Berry, Richards — and, of course, the game-changing Elvis Presley — Holly helped launch the group that would redefine rock for generations.

No, the music didn’t die that day. The Beatles picked up the mantle left by the pioneers like Holly and took rock to unimaginable heights.