An uncharitable suspicion is that your teacher confused "levy" with "marquee". The next "ten years", of course, were the '60s, and the less said about that the better.įinally, I draw a complete blank on any connection between "levy" and movie theaters. The song’s cryptic lyrics have long fascinated fans and sparked endless debates about their meaning and symbolism. An entirely reasonable interpretation (hampered by the fact that McLean grew up entirely in the Northeast) is that the local teenagers would get together out on some levee to party and get drunk, although that's such universal behavior that McLean should have had no trouble visualizing it. American Pie is a song written and performed by Don McLean in 1971, which quickly became a cultural phenomenon and one of the most celebrated works of American music. It's not actually clear what "the levee was dry" means, but part of American Pie's charm is its ability to mash up phrases and keep going.
As Wikipedia points out, US use of "levee" is pretty much restricted to the Midwest and Deep South, and "good ole boys" refines the location. He knows a bunch of "good ole boys" and drives to a levee. (This despite the fact that McLean himself went to prep school in New York.) He has a paper route, he drives a pickup, he goes to dances in the high school gym. He wrote the first verse in one sitting, later expanding the track into a rock ‘n. The first verses of "American Pie", that is, the verses preceding the second chorus, place the singer as a high-school student in the US south. Buddy Holly offers a jumping off point for the song, but American Pie isn’t about Holly, McLean said.
Except, perhaps, what he'd read in the magazines. Speaking as an American who is roughly contemporaneous with Don McLean, I'm afraid you were the victim of a British teacher who had no concept of 1950's US culture.
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