Pop Song 203 'America' Simon & Garfunkel 1968

Pop Song 203 'America' Simon & Garfunkel 1968

The song was written and composed by Paul Simon, and concerns young lovers hitchhiking their way across the United States, in search of "America", in both a literal and figurative sense. It was inspired by a 1964 road trip that Simon took with his then-girlfriend Kathy Chitty. The song has been regarded as one of Simon's strongest songwriting efforts and one of the duo's best songs. A 2014 Rolling Stone reader's poll ranked it the group's fourth-best song

"America" was inspired by a five-day road excursion Simon undertook in September 1964 with Chitty. Producer Tom Wilson had called Simon, living in London at the time, back to the United States to finalize mixes and artwork for their debut studio album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.[3] Simon, reluctant to leave Chitty, invited her to come with him; they spent five days driving the country together.[3] Several years later, "America" was among the last songs recorded for Bookends, when production assistant John Simon left Columbia Records, forcing Simon, Garfunkel, and producer Roy Halee to complete the record themselves.[1] In 2004, Bob Dyer, a former disc jockey from Saginaw, Michigan, explained the song's genesis in an interview with The Saginaw News. According to Dyer, Simon wrote the song while visiting the town in 1966 after Dyer had booked him for Y-A-Go-Go, a concert series hosted by the Saginaw YMCA.[4]

I asked Paul Simon if they were still charging the $1,250 we paid them to play and he said they were getting about four times that much then. Then I asked him why he hadn't pulled out, and he said he had to see what a city named Saginaw looked like. Apparently, he liked it; he wrote 'America' while he was here, including that line about taking four days to hitchhike from Saginaw.

America" is a song that "creates a cinematic vista that tells of the singer's search for a literal and physical America that seems to have disappeared, along with the country's beauty and ideals."[5] Art Garfunkel once described the song as "young lovers with their adventure and optimism". The song has been described as a "folk song with a lilting soprano saxophone in its refrain as a small pipe organ paints acoustic guitars, framed by the ghostly traces of classic American Songbook pop structures

The narrator spends four days hitchhiking from Saginaw to join Kathy in Pittsburgh, where together they board a Greyhound bus to continue the journey.[9] The narrator begins with a lighthearted and optimistic outlook ("Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together") that fades over the course of the song. To pass time, he and Kathy play games and try to guess the backgrounds of their fellow passengers. Over the course of their journey, they smoke all their cigarettes. Kathy reads a magazine before falling asleep, leaving the narrator awake to reflect on the meaning of the journey alone.[9] In the final verse, the narrator is able to speak his true emotions to Kathy, now that she is sleeping and cannot hear or answer. "I'm empty and aching and I don't know why" captures the longing and angst of the 1960s in nine simple words. The narrator then stares out the window "counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike". Many other empty, aching, and lost souls are on the highway, each on their own journey alone even if someone is traveling with them. The soaring harmony lines and crashing cymbals create a powerful and poignant end to the song's final verse: "They've all come to look for America." [10] Pete Fornatale interprets this lyric as a "metaphor to remind us all of the lost souls wandering the highways and byways of mid-sixties America, struggling to navigate the rapids of despair and hope, optimism and disillusionment