“American Pie” by Don McLean

Don McLean's "American Pie", the title track of his album of the same name, is less a song than a whole evening's argument: eight and a half minutes of sing-along parable that hangs on the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, then wanders through the years that followed as America lost its innocence and its early rock and roll along with it.

McLean wrote every word and note, and he packed the verses with characters and events so cryptic that listeners spent decades arguing over who was who. He wouldn't say. Only when the original manuscript was sold in 2015 did he release his songwriting notes, and in a 2022 documentary marking the song's 50th anniversary he called it impressionistic and knocked down some of the favorite theories.

It ran so long it had to be split across both sides of a 7-inch single, and it still spent four weeks at number one in the US in 1972, setting a record for length at the top that stood for nearly 50 years. It went to number one in Canada, Australia and New Zealand too, and in 2017 the Library of Congress added McLean's recording to the National Recording Registry.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.