American Pie

What is an American Pie?

Don McLean suggested that It meant "I never have to work again".

But on reflection he said "You will find many interpretations of my lyrics but none of them by me... sorry to leave you all on your own like this but long ago I realized that songwriters should make their statements and move on, maintaining a dignified silence".

Is there a meaning of this expression, American Pie, beyond Don McLean?

Has Don ever let on about it? (Is it one of those I'll take it to the grave things ??).

Maybe he was just formulating nonsense terms and let it go in whatever direction the public took it....

It's pie which is either of the United States or of the Americas, depending on context. In the context of the song, I imagine it's of the United States.

I like to believe it is apple pie.

I'd prefer cherry pie.

American Pie represents the American dream and the promise of opportunity, and the disappointment of getting to the levee to find it is dry. That's how I interpretted it, anyway.

H. Rap Brown once gave a speech in which he said that violence was as American as cherry pie. That always seemed weird to me. Cherry pie isn't un-American, of course but surely it's apple pie that's the standard of Americanness.

surely it's apple pie that's the standard of Americanness.

Why is this? After all, apple pie is popular in the UK but it isn't associated with Britishness or Englishness.

There have been may attemps at an exegesis of Don Mc Lean's song -- see here.

Bye, Bye Miss American Pie.........I always thought it was a sexual reference. In some places, 'hair pie' refers to a certain part of female anatomy.

Here's an update, courtesy of the Capitol Steps.

Apple pie just is associated with the US - most likely because it's a favorite food. A common expression is "It's as American as apple pie". There used to be a TV commercial that went "what goes together in the good old USA - baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet"

Most of our tastes came from other countries - we just made them ours over time. Personally, when I'm traveling, I think a PB & J sandwich reminds me of home more than apple pie .

Apple Pie without the ice cream.

#5 -- I've seen 19th century British travellers in the US comment on the ubiquity of pie here.

"As American as apple pie" dates from the 1960s. From the Phrase Finder
>[Apple pie,] a dish whose patriotic symbolism is expressed in a 1984 book by Susan Purdy, 'As Easy as Pie': 'This is IT - what our country and flag are as American as. Since the earliest colonial days, apple pies have been enjoyed in America for breakfast, for an entrée, and for dinner. Colonist wrote home about them and foreign visitors noted apple pie as one of our first culinary specialties.' We cannot claim to have invented the apple pie, just to have perfected it." But here's the surprising part. The expression "as American as apple pie," the authors say, is not that old. "Apple pie figures in our figurative language, too, as in the expressions 'simple as pie' (since everyone supposedly knows how to make apple pie) and, though not an Americanism, 'apple-pie order' (1780). But it was only in the twentieth century, apparently in the 1960s, that we began to be 'as American as apple pie.'"

"Mom and apple pie" or "motherhood and apple pie" is
> an often parodied sentiment expressed about allegedly quintessential elements of American home life.

in 1975, Chevrolet ran a very successful series of ads touting "Baseball. hot dogs, Apple pie and Chevrolet" Watch it here

Supposedly

When I first visited Ireland in the 1980s I was surprised by the ubiquity of apple pie in the cafes and teashops there.

But the distinctive thing about American apple pie, from a British/Irish perspective, is that you put some corn starch in it.

you put some corn starch in it.

Or some other thickener. I prefer rice flour. I know people who use tapioca.

From Catch-22+ (1961): +"The hot dog, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Mom's apple pie. That's what everyone's fighting for."

And from Time+ (3/26/1928): +"As American as baseball or apple pie . . . ." (quoting Herbert Hoover's biographer)

And from an ad in Life+ (12/25/1939) +"As American as apple pie!"

http://books.google.com/books?id=4UEEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false (scroll down three pages)

Thanks, 889. It didn't sound like a 1960s coinage to me.

Changing the subject, at #15's link to the 1939 Life, in the letters on the page after the "As American as apple pie!" movie ad, there's a letter by Thomas Mann's daughter Erika headed "Jewish taunt" about a mistranslation by Life of something written on a German mine. I can't make out the word that she describes as a Jewish (=Yiddish) word for bankruptcy, not a German word for distress.

Can anyone make it out clearly? Pfette? Plette? Does anyone know the word? Is she right?

Hit the "zoom in" control and the word becomes very clear, at least on my screen. It's "Pleite."

It says "Pleite." (Tip of the day: Google Books has a "zoom" button in the top left.)

Here is a bit about the word. (It's also used in Dutch, but in a different meaning: something or someone that is pleite is gone/has disappeared.)

Very cool. Thanks both for drawing my attention to the zoom icon and shilgia for the etymology.

I wonder what took her to Omaha. (But don't bother trying to find out. Thanks again.)

'The American Pie' was the name of the aeroplane that crashed and killed Buddy Holly. That's what the first verse is about, 'the day the music died'

The song is certainly about the Buddy Holly/Richie Valens/Big Bopper plane crash, but nobody but nomad91 seems to know that American Pie was the name of the plane.

From snopes, the urban legend debunkers:

Did Buddy Holly really die in a plane called American Pie

The airplane, chartered through Dwyer's Flying Service in Clear Lake, Iowa, had no name. Its only designation was its wing registration number, N3794N. How the rumor that its name was American Pie (thus providing Don McLean the title for his song) started circulating is unknown, but it is undeniably false. As Don McLean himself <A HREF="http://web.archive.org/web/20021201144702/www.don-mclean.com/" TARGET=mclean>said</A> in 1999:
>The growing urban legend that "American Pie" was the name of Buddy Holly’s plane the night it crashed, killing him, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, is equally untrue. I created the term.

My bad, then. Guess I should check things like that first!