by Jerry Cayford
“America,” by Paul Simon, from Simon and Garfunkel’s 1968 album, Bookends, speaks to our moment. What it says to me is a bit different from what I am reading about it from other people, but I don’t think I’m idiosyncratic. The key, as I see it, is to realize that the song is about America, not about Paul and his girlfriend Kathy taking a bus trip. For those who don’t know this song or haven’t heard it in decades, here is the studio recording. Spend three worthwhile minutes.
“America” opens with deceptive gentleness:
Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together.
The gentleness primes us for the impact of the song’s climax. But the opening is also odd, the phrasing archaic. Nobody says, “Let us be lovers.” The verb “marry” is intransitive now; we don’t even say, “We’ll marry our children together.” And we don’t speak of our “fortunes” except as money. Since the rest of the song is completely naturalistic—anachronism is not its style—the oddness makes the phrases memorable, and marks them for study.
We hear a pop song many times on the radio (or wherever), then buy it and listen to it repeatedly. Soon, we know the lyrics by heart. We force our parents to listen to it. The whole song is present to us as a single concept, more than as a narrative arc. In this way, a three-minute pop song is more like a three-second slogan than like a thirty-minute show or a short story. I see “America” as answering a slogan like “Make America Great Again.” If we think Make America Great Again is the wrong concept, but don’t know how to counter it, perhaps we didn’t listen well enough when Simon and Garfunkel sang of America fifty years before.
“There’s something happening here.”
1968 was one of the angriest years in American history. Of course, that’s hard to prove. What anger could compete with the Civil War? Then, the years following Reconstruction; the violent labor strikes of the 1890s and after; the Great Depression and all it meant; 9/11; today. America has had so many, many angry years. Still, 1968 has always stood out. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Then Bobby Kennedy. It was the year of maximum casualties in Vietnam. (American deaths in Vietnam in 1968 alone were more than double all twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan put together, including 9/11.) The Chicago police rioted at the Democratic National Convention protests. We forced a sitting president not to run, then elected an unconvicted crook who was worse. Simon wrote “America” before 1968 started—though plenty was already happening, for civil rights (and against them) and against the Vietnam War (and for it)—and “America” only became a single in 1972, after Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits came out (three days before the Watergate break-in). The era vibrated with tension. The My Lai massacre in 1968 was covered up, then uncovered in 1969. The Manson murders were that August. In May of 1970, National Guard members killed four students and wounded nine at Kent State antiwar protests. People were angry at the war; other people were angry at them for being angry. The country was divided.
The lyrics of “America” continue gentle, and odd.
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag.
It seems like a whimsical joke, but what is real estate in a bag? I take it to mean America is a lot of real estate, and America is a lot of people, too; so I am a piece of America, a piece I bring with me to our search. Like it’s in my bag. The joke tells us this song is about people, not real estate, that the song’s America is not the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. Other than one moment, its landscape is entirely human built.
So we bought a pack of cigarettes, and Mrs. Wagner’s pies,
And walked off to look for America.
Our narrator here is not a scholar or a crusader, not an explorer or a detective. The two of them may be on a quest, but it is the most ordinary quest in the world, and their provisions are the indulgences of ordinary life. Their conveyance, too, is the most ordinary.
“Kathy,” I said, as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
“It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw.”
I’ve come to look for America.
The song maintains its gentleness and whimsy throughout, even at its climax, as though studiously avoiding the anger of its time. But there is a hint of anger in the subtext here. Four days to hitchhike a short trip is the song telling us that people are growing hostile and wary. America was a powder keg, and we should not let our own distance from 1968 blind us to that context.
Simon’s is not the only use of hitchhiking as a measure of America’s temperature. Ken Kesey wrote a eulogy on the death of John Lennon in 1980. He tells the story of hearing about Lennon’s murder on television, in the company of a scruffy and unwelcome visitor to his farm. The next morning, he drops his guest at the freeway to hitchhike (hitchhiking is far out of fashion by 1980): “He said not to worry, he’d get a ride easy, today. And I saw somebody stop for him before I’d got back over the overpass. On the way home, I heard a report on Switchboard, our local community access program: there was no need to call in to try to scam rides today, that everybody was picking up everybody today, everywhere.” For a day, anyway, America is, as Kesey says of himself and his formerly-unwelcome guest, “united in sudden hurt by the news of a mutual hero’s death.”
In both pieces, hitchhiking is used as a telltale of the state of America, and that state is not good when it takes four days to hitchhike from Saginaw to Pittsburgh.
“I’ve been everywhere, man.”
I don’t invest much meaning in the song’s progression from Saginaw, Michigan to Pittsburgh to New Jersey. These choices matter more for what they are not than for what they are: they are not strongly identified with specific cultural meanings. Michigan is the American heartland. If it is a “dream” to the narrator, perhaps he dreams of a childhood before America concerned him, an idyll in which everybody picked up everybody hitchhiking. But the important thing is the present, the road trip through America. Saginaw could be any town; Pittsburgh is just a city. I believe this theme of anonymity continues into the next verse.
Laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces,
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy.
I said, “Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera.”
What strikes me most about these bus games is how generic they are. Their sense of humor is not distinctive. They give us no insight into the characters. And I think that’s the point: the narrator is Everyman; these are any two people taking a road trip anywhere in America. (If I had to read meaning into these lines, it would be that a gabardine suit is somewhat expensive, so placing such a man on a Greyhound bus is a deliberate expansion of the song’s cast of characters to different economic classes, continuing the inclusiveness of its message.) The story in “America” is of Everyman and Everygirlfriend on every road trip.
In the early 1980s, I had a work friend who had traveled the country at the time Paul Simon did. She married young, and she and her husband had three children while living in a VW bus. One day, she told me a story of her youngest daughter coming to her saying, “Mom! Mom! You’ve got to hear this song!” She remembered once saying exactly the same thing, then playing Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” for her mother, who was shocked. My friend told me, “I thought to myself, ‘Nice try, missy, but I’ve played that game. You won’t shock me!’ My fresh-faced, virginal, 15-year-old, darling daughter then played me ‘Too Drunk to Fuck’ by The Dead Kennedys. And I was shocked!”
“Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat.”
“We smoked the last one an hour ago.”
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine,
And the moon rose over an open field.
The provisions they’ve brought are casually used up, not even tracked. This quest for America, whatever it may be, is hardly a precision campaign. Rather, it is pursued the way we live our lives, all of us amateurs, even when everything is on the line. And when the fleeting fun with faces ends, each one is alone again. We see the characters heart-breakingly vulnerable and ill-prepared for what is coming in the next lines. But the song does not reproach them. Our abilities and preparations are just the facts of life, and the song is for everyone.
The last line of the stanza, the last thought before the song’s crisis, creates a moment of stillness. The rising moon is the only appearance of nature anywhere in the song, and it is pointedly non-American. There is a larger universe, this moment seems to say, larger than the narrator’s troubles or even than the America he is searching for. Take comfort before we plunge ahead. The moonrise is an image of universal endurance, of faithfulness that will never fail, even if the very, very worst that threatens our characters and our country should befall them and us. Even if what comes to America is today’s threatened climate-change hellscape or violent 1968’s threatened nuclear apocalypse, the moon will rise over an open field, and it will be beautiful.
“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”
And so we come to the awakening, the narrator’s recognition of his own alienation, immediately broadened to the America for which he was searching.
“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike,
They’ve all come to look for America.
It is a striking image: America on the move; America stuck in place; all of us together in our common pain and puzzlement. The narrator’s search, begun so casually, has turned out deeply serious. He is disconnected from himself and from his girlfriend, and the America he finds cannot help him. This final image of the failure of community is so apt, all of us isolated in our cars, looking at each other through windows. And so the song ends. Could this ending—and the prospects for America—be more bleak?
With this image in your head of countless cars on the turnpike, filled with people from all walks of America, all empty, all aching, all searching for the answer, you lift the needle and set it back to the beginning of the track, or you click the Replay icon, or call down the stairs, “Mom! Mom! You’ve got to hear this song!” and the song starts over again:
Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together.
From downbeat closing to upbeat opening we now begin to hear the song whole. Our narrator’s quest will not end with warm and fuzzy belonging in a dream America but alienated on the New Jersey Turnpike. And that turnpike image, like a perverse bit of black humor, echoes the opening: stuck in traffic, you experience the cold, hard fact of life that our fortunes are truly married together! That sobering hint fits a revision of the narrator’s search. The song’s real quest for America does not move from jaunty confidence armed with snacks and cigarettes to empty and aching despair. No, it moves from an individual search to a universal one: we’ve all come to look for America; angry and divided but dependent on each other, we share the same problem and the same quest for community in an America that works. The hanging question of how to make that happen brings us back around to the opening words: Let us be lovers. These words are not a fact of life but an exhortation, to us, the listeners, to America in 1968, and still in 2025.
The exhortation “Let us be lovers” says that the marriage of our fortunes may be inescapable, but what we do about it is very much a choice. And love is what it takes to make peace with bonds we did not choose. Love is the way our interdependence becomes strength. Obviously, this is not an original thesis. Simon’s thesis here is very old, and has been dramatized many times, though seldom as well as it is in “America.” Ten years earlier, The Defiant Ones told the story of an angry black man (played by Sidney Poitier) and a white racist (played by Tony Curtis) who escape from a prison chain gang chained to one another. Their fortunes are literally chained together, so they must overcome anger and hatred toward each other to cooperate for survival and freedom. It’s a familiar theme. If the lesson of “America,” though, is a familiar truism and literary trope, that does not make it any less profound; it remains a lesson as difficult to grasp and to accept as it always was, a fact demonstrated over and over again in American politics.
In 2016, Democrats suffered a shocking defeat. We might have been lovers and seen the election of Trump as a cry for help from empty and aching fellow Americans who don’t know why their lives aren’t working. But we didn’t. There was little love in our calling their votes racist and ignorant, our dismissing their anger as baseless. The subtext of our obsession with Russian interference was that you Republican voters had no right to listen to the wrong people (or bots); your bad choices invalidate your right to be heard. Our response was no more loving than the loopy Republican claim that Democrats hate America and want to destroy it. But the working class has had genuine grievances since “America” was first written. And our fortunes are married together.
2024 brought a replay defeat. How we respond is again up to us. So far, many have been saying, Let us be warriors! But the gentleness of “America” calls out our anger as cover for a deeper ache, and a trap that keeps us from a better response. Paul Simon will turn 84 this year. As recently as a few years ago, he was still singing “America” in concert. This song from angry and violent 1968 is so gentle with its characters and with us because anger does not come first. Love comes first, and then the anger goes. Let us be lovers.