First of all, I have to confess my (former) utter ignorance about who Don McLean is. I was of course familiar with the song “American Pie,” but for some reason had never actually noticed who its original performer was. (And I’m much more taken with the parody version of it from Weird Al Yankovic.) So when I got the music for a 2017 concert with my own choir and I saw McLean’s name as the author of “Vincent,” I just assumed he was some sort of obscure artsy-jazzy guy who was interested in art and liked Vincent van Gogh. Well, au contraire! One YouTube version of McLean’s performance has had almost ten million views. (“American Pie” has had over 71 million views from one video; I didn’t go through and add up the numbers from them all but would guess it’s close to 100 million.) McLean is still alive and still performing, although none of his songs has ever approached the popularity of these two, both of which were on his second album, also titled American Pie, released in 1971.