America (Simon & Garfunkel song)

Did You Know?

• The song was inspired by a five-day road trip Simon took in September 1964 with Kathy Chitty after producer Tom Wilson called him back to the United States to finalize mixes for Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.
• In 2004, former Saginaw disc jockey Bob Dyer claimed Simon wrote the song while visiting the town in 1966 after Dyer booked him for a concert series hosted by the Saginaw YMCA.
• The song was among the last recorded for Bookends, completed after production assistant John Simon left Columbia Records.

Composition

The song is described as creating a cinematic vista of a search for a literal and metaphorical America that appears to have vanished, along with the country's beauty and ideals. Art Garfunkel called it "young lovers with their adventure and optimism." It is a folk song with a lilting soprano saxophone in its refrain, a small pipe organ painting acoustic guitars, and ghostly traces of classic American Songbook pop structures. Composed in D major and set in 4/4 time, it has a moderately fast groove of 172 beats per minute. The duo's vocals range from A2 to E4. Drummer Hal Blaine, keyboardist Larry Knechtel, and bassist Joe Osborn provide additional instrumentation, with an uncredited soprano saxophone part. The lyrics are written in blank verse. On Bookends, the song opens with a crossfade from "Save the Life of My Child," but single versions begin with a clean open. The song follows two young lovers in an apparently impromptu romantic traveling alliance who set out to look for America. The lyrics mention Saginaw, Michigan, with the narrator having left the town to seek his fortunes elsewhere. The narrator's companion, Kathy, references Kathy Chitty, linking the song autobiographically to "Homeward Bound" and "Kathy's Song." The narrator hitchhikes for four days from Saginaw to join Kathy in Pittsburgh, where they board a Greyhound bus, purchasing cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner's Pies. The narrator begins with a lighthearted, optimistic outlook that fades over the song. They play games and guess fellow passengers' backgrounds, smoke all their cigarettes, and Kathy falls asleep reading a magazine, leaving the narrator awake to reflect alone. In the final verse, the narrator speaks his true emotions to the sleeping Kathy: "I'm empty and aching and I don't know why," capturing the longing and angst of the 1960s.

Reception

Stephen Holden, reviewing Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits in 1972, called the song three and a half minutes of sheer brilliance, with an unforced narrative alternating precise detail and sweeping observation to evoke the panorama of restless, paved America and illuminate a drama of shared loneliness on a bus trip with cosmic implications. Record World described the single version from Greatest Hits as a more commercial, elaborate production than the Bookends album version. Thom Jurek of Allmusic characterized the song's central question as an ellipsis, a cipher, an unanswerable question, where sophisticated harmonic invention is toppled by its message. David Nichols, in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, called it a splendid vignette of a road trip by young lovers, both intimate and epic, tracing an inner journey from naive optimism to mature understanding. American Songwriter deemed it essentially a road-trip song that reveals as much about the participants as about the lands traversed. Disc jockey and author Pete Fornatale described it as one of Paul Simon's greatest writing achievements in that phase of his career.

Legacy

The song gained renewed popularity and was introduced to a new generation after being featured in Cameron Crowe's film Almost Famous in 2000, where the character Anita plays it for her mother to explain why she is leaving home to become a stewardess. American Express used the song in television advertisements in the late 2010s. In 2010, lyrics from the song began appearing spray-painted on vacant buildings and abandoned factories in Saginaw, Michigan, by the group Paint Saginaw, after the population had dwindled vastly, noting the song became rather homesick for the town's residents. The entire lyrics are painted on 28 buildings in the city, including railroad tracks and bridge supports. The song was featured in a television advertisement for Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign, with permission from Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, both of whom agreed; Garfunkel stated he was a supporter of Sanders and that the usage did not take away from the song's original premise. The song appears in a 2017 TV commercial for the Volkswagen Atlas and is referenced in the novel The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. In June 2026, CBS News included the song in its list of the 250 essential American songs of the past 250 years.

Cover versions

The earliest known performances of "America" came from the band Clouds. In their earlier incarnation as 1-2-3, they performed a rewritten version that included elements later used by Yes: changes in time signature, classical interludes, and newly written segments. A live tape exists of this performance at the Marquee in April 1967, prior to the release of any known recording by any artist, including Paul Simon. Simon had recorded demos at Levy studios in London in 1965, and tapes were passed to the band by a studio engineer, Stu Francis of Radio Luxembourg. In 1966, 1-2-3 also performed "Sounds of Silence" from the same tape. The progressive rock band Yes rearranged the song in 1970, performing it in concert on their first tour after Steve Howe replaced Peter Banks. Yes added elements typical to progressive rock, such as changes in time signature and long instrumental segments, dropping the original repeat and fade ending. Bassist Chris Squire quotes "America" from West Side Story in the intro. The Yes studio version clocks in at ten and a half minutes, with live versions on the 1970–1971 tour extended to more than fifteen minutes. The studio recording first appeared in 1972 on the sampler album The New Age of Atlantic and was later included on the compilation album Yesterdays in 1975, the box set In a Word: Yes (1969–) in 2002, and on the 2003 re-issue of their album Fragile. An edited four-minute version was released as a single, hitting No. 46 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and No. 20 in New Zealand. It also appeared on the Yesyears boxed set, Yesstory, and The Ultimate Yes: 35th Anniversary Collection. The edited version was included as a bonus track on the 2003 re-issue of Close to the Edge, while the unedited studio version appears on Steven Wilson's 2013 remix of the same album. A live version was included on 1996's Keys to Ascension and a performance from the final show of the 1970–1971 tour on 2005's The Word Is Live. Record World called the single "An ironic choice of material, but an excellent one."