Bottom line: Don McLean wrote “American Pie” about the country’s loss of innocence and its cultural and political decline in the 1960s.
Its central theme is the loss of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson in a Feb. 3, 1959, plane crash — also known as “the day the music died.”
The cultural allusions McLean uses are meant to poke fun at his contemporaries. The Beatles were the “quartet that practiced in the park,” Bob Dylan was “the jester,” and “the girl who sang the blues” is said to be Janis Joplin.
McLean said of his songwriting technique, “[It was] just the idea of choosing names that people could identify with: different artists, what they were doing, what they’d done. I was making fun of it all.”
The song was a smash and went to the top of the charts in several different countries. In 2015, McLean sold his handwritten lyrics at auction for $1.2 million. Two years later, the Library of Congress selected the original recording of “American Pie” for preservation in its National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or artistically significant.”
