American Pie

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American Pie
Written by Don McLean, 1971

On a cold February morning in 1959, a 13-year-old paperboy in New Rochelle, New York, cut open his bundle of newspapers and found terrible news on the front page. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson had been killed when their small plane went down in Iowa after a concert. Young Don McLean loved Buddy Holly’s music, and the loss stayed with him as a deeply personal grief. More than a decade later, that memory became the opening of “American Pie,” and February 3, 1959, has been known as “the day the music died” ever since.

McLean wrote the song slowly, in different notebooks, over 1970 and 1971. He had the line “bye, bye Miss American Pie” for a long time before the rest of the chorus arrived. It finally came to him while he was shopping in a pharmacy in Cold Spring, New York, and he hurried home to get it down. He has said the song was written in Cold Spring and in Philadelphia, and he first sang it in public at Philadelphia’s Temple University in March 1971, as the opening act for Laura Nyro.

Not everyone accepts that account. A bar in Saratoga Springs, New York, long displayed a plaque claiming McLean wrote the song there in the summer of 1970, jotting lyrics on napkins between his shows at the nearby Caffè Lena coffeehouse. McLean has flatly denied it. Another popular legend held that “American Pie” was the name of Buddy Holly’s plane. It wasn’t. The plane had no name at all, and McLean made up the phrase himself.

He recorded the song in New York in the spring of 1971 with producer Ed Freeman, and it became the title track of his second album, released that October with a dedication to Buddy Holly. At eight and a half minutes, it was far too long for one side of a 45 record. The single was simply cut in half, and listeners had to flip the record over to hear how it ended.

Almost from the start, people tried to decode its puzzling verses, full of jesters, kings, and marching bands. For decades McLean refused to explain, joking that the song meant he’d never have to work again if he didn’t want to. Then in 2015, he sold his original handwritten manuscript at Christie’s in New York for $1.2 million. In the notes that came with it, he described the song as a portrait of America heading in the wrong direction, “a morality song in a sense.” The auction catalogue also settled a few old debates, identifying the King as Elvis Presley and the Jester as Bob Dylan. The pages even included a more hopeful verse that never made the final recording.

“American Pie” entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 69 and climbed to number one on January 15, 1972, where it stayed for four weeks. It reached number 2 in Britain. For almost fifty years it held the record as the longest song ever to top the American charts, until Taylor Swift’s ten-minute “All Too Well” passed it in 2021. McLean took the news graciously, and Swift sent him flowers. The song has since been named one of the RIAA’s Songs of the Century, inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and preserved by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry. It has found new audiences along the way, too, from Weird Al Yankovic’s 1999 Star Wars parody to Madonna’s hit version in 2000.

Whatever each verse may mean, the chorus belongs to everyone. Around a campfire or in a sunny community room, it’s one of those songs where nearly every voice joins in by the second time through.