It’s a hard question to answer in some ways, because it relies on the counterfactual: what if, for example, the Big Bopper was about to record a tune that would have propelled him to the top of the charts, transforming his career? It might seem the least likely of the three, but in fact JP Richardson had some songwriting success outside of his Big Bopper persona.

For context, Don McLean’s American Pie talks about the day the music died as February 3rd, 1959, when a plane carrying Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens crashed in Iowa, killing all three (who were travelling together while playing on a package tour). Buddy Holly had had the biggest of the three acts, with genuine US top 10 hits in ‘That’ll Be The Day’ (a #1), ‘Peggy Sue’ (a #3) and ‘Oh Boy’ (a #10) plus a few (now seen as classic, and much covered) singles that didn’t quite get as high in the charts - ‘Rave On’ mysteriously only hit #37. Ritchie Valens was an up and coming star who had a #2 hit with ‘Donna’ (its b-side ‘La Bamba’ got some notice but ‘Donna’ was the hit). The Big Bopper had a #6 hit with ‘Chantilly Lace’. That’s all the top 10 hits these artists had in their lifetimes - 5 between the 3 of them. And of course, there’s a regular refreshing of the charts; by February 1959, Buddy Holly surely must have wondered if he was yesterday’s news, as his last big hit had been a year or two back.

It’s probably fair to say that Buddy Holly dying would have felt to some like the last death knell of the 1950s version of rock’n’roll at a commercial level. This was a musical form that was very popular for a brief period, starting with the 1955 success of ‘Rock Around The Clock’ by Bill Haley and the Comets, and then the 1956 mania over Elvis. By the end of 1959, however, the most successful proponents of the form seemed to be out of action.

Little Richard had found God in October 1957 and quit rock & roll, Elvis had joined the army in March 1958, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s career died in May 1958 when he was found to have a 13 year old wife who was his first cousin once removed. Buddy Holly died in February 1959, and Chuck Berry was arrested later in 1959 for transporting a minor over state lines.

…but in fairness, the commercial appeal of rock & roll as a genre was seemingly done by 1959 or so, anyway. Chuck Berry’s last big hits before he went to prison were in earlyish 1958 (apart from a 1958 Christmas single), with ‘Johnny B. Goode being released in March 1958. The Everly Brothers’ run of hits did last into 1962, and Elvis continued to have hits after he returned from the army (those these had largely dried up by the mid 1960s). But the Everly Brothers were never really on the harder side of rock & roll, and Elvis’ 1960s music became increasingly anodyne.

Of course, it depends on how you define rock & roll. Teen-oriented pop music - girl groups singing songs written by Brill Building songwriters such as The Shirelles doing the Carole King and Gerry Goffin song ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’ for example - still flourished in the charts, but this was often not to the taste of the rock & rollers, being too sweet.

After February 1959, rock & roll fans could still find music with the requisite crunch if they so desired, and were willing to look. In particular, the R&B charts definitely seemed to be flourishing in the 1959-1962 period commonly held to be fallow ground. Chess Records in Chicago continued to pump out exciting electric blues singles by the likes of Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf. Motown Records in Detroit was developing quickly, with hits with Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’ and the beginning of successful careers for The Miracles and Mary Wells in particular. Stax in Memphis were also gathering steam and by 1962 had break out stars in Booker T and the MGs and Otis Redding. Ray Charles seemed to go from strength to strength, signing to ABC-Paramount in 1960 and promptly having some of his biggest hits (‘Georgia On My Mind’ and ‘Hit The Road Jack’). Sam Cooke released several iconic singles in the time period. By 1962 when he released the Live at the Apollo album, James Brown was already Mr. Excitement, largely playing songs that had been hits on the R&B charts for a year or two. The Isley Brothers had a big hit with ‘Shout’ in 1959.

At that point, the lines between R&B and rock & roll was still unclear; it had not turned into the soul vs rock divide of the late 1960s. Much of the music listed above would have been characterised by quite a few as rock & roll, or thereabouts (it’s funny seeing press articles about the Supremes from 1963 calling them rock & roll - but at that point ‘soul’ hadn’t quite emerged as a widely known genre label). So if you were the Beatles in Liverpool, trying to find new songs for your rock & roll covers act, you had to look a little harder, perhaps, than you would have in 1957, but the Beatles were still finding new post-1959 songs to cover that would appeal to their audiences, like the Isleys’ ‘Twist And Shout’, Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’, Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’, etc.

But if you wanted harder-edged rock & roll sounds than the likes of Bobby Darin or Fabian were inclined to do, and weren’t actively looking for such sounds the way the Beatles were, pop music would have seemed a bit boring. Of course, many young people weren’t that bothered - rock & roll was just dance music that was now a little passé as far as most were concerned.

However, the people who did see it as a fallow period were over-represented in the 1960s ecosystem of rock, after the massive success of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, etc. These musicians and writers and DJs etc saw more in the music than just good dancing - the rock of the 1960s becoming a progressive countercultural force and all that (which is of course what most of ‘American Pie’ is about - the success of that song is because it poetically chronicled how it felt to be watching rock become a cultural force). So we see the rock & roll music of the 1950s, in a lot of ways, through their biased (usually white heterosexual baby boomer male) eyes as important fore runners to the symbol of their cultural force. Whereas most of it was just good ephemeral dance music and didn’t really try to be much else.