This week marks the 50th anniver­sary of “the day the music died.” That’s Don McLean’s way of talk­ing about the 1959 air­plane crash that cut short the bud­ding lives and careers of Bud­dy Hol­ly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bop­per” Richard­son. In ’59, Bud­dy Hol­ly’s musi­cal career was just get­ting start­ed, but his influ­ence was already being felt far and wide. Case in point, The Bea­t­les, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys all cov­ered Hol­ly songs dur­ing their ear­ly careers. Here you can watch the Stones sing Not Fade Away in 1964. And, above, you can watch rare footage of John Lennon mov­ing from a Lead Bel­ly tune (“Rock Island Line”) to a lit­tle Bud­dy Hol­ly med­ley that includes “Maybe Baby” and “Peg­gy Sue.” (The Bea­t­les’ take on “Words of Love” can be lis­tened to here as well.) Enjoy.

Here’s a nice vin­tage clip that comes out of a YouTube Chan­nel called The Great Per­form­ers, which we’ve added to our page: Best YouTube Col­lec­tions. The video fea­tures Arturo Toscani­ni con­duct­ing Beethoven’s 5th at Carnegie Hall in 1952. You can find the sec­ond move­ment here.

For more clas­si­cal music see:

Free Beethoven and Mozart Record­ings via Pod­cast

Beethoven’s Sym­pho­ny No. 9 — Kara­jan or Mup­pet Style

The Ten Best Clas­si­cal Music Record­ings of 2008

What hap­pens when you take Ben King’s 1961 hit, Stand By Me, and then trav­el around the world, hav­ing dif­fer­ent inter­na­tion­al artists offer their own inter­pre­ta­tions, and final­ly you stitch them all togeth­er in one seam­less tune?  The clip below starts in Cal­i­for­nia, moves to New Orleans, then heads off to Ams­ter­dam, France, Brazil, Moscow, Venezuala, South Africa and beyond. And I’m will­ing to bet that you’ll like how it turns out.  The clip comes from the doc­u­men­tary, “Play­ing For Change: Peace Through Music.” Thanks Jil­lian for the heads up on this one, and, you guessed it, this one’s added to our YouTube Favorites.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

A cou­ple of big blogs recent­ly high­light­ed a clip of the Mup­pets doing Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth. It’s cute, and I was hard­ly sur­prised that the video logged 3.6 mil­lion views on YouTube.

Not far behind, at 3.2 mil­lion views, is a long video show­ing Her­bert Von Kara­jan lead­ing a live per­for­mance of Beethoven’s Ninth. The fact that Kara­jan, one of the world’s best-known con­duc­tors, lags behind a bunch of pup­pets is unfor­tu­nate, no doubt. But it’s also heart­en­ing in some ways. It tells me that high cul­ture is still com­pet­ing for an audi­ence. So here it goes. Kara­jan in action:

(You can get Part 2 here, and we’ve added both clips to our YouTube Favorites. Also you can find more vin­tage Beethoven/Karajan footage in this guy’s video col­lec­tion.)

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