America

America is a Paul Simon song, produced by Simon, Garfunkel and Roy Halee. Simon sings lead on acoustic guitars with Garfunkel in harmony, and the arrangement starts from an acoustic guitar and builds with cymbal crashes and tom fills. It was one of the last songs finished for Bookends, after John Simon had left. The song is in D major and 6/8 time, and its lyric is blank verse.

One account ties it to a five-day road trip Simon took in September 1964 with his girlfriend Kathy Chitty, the woman behind Kathy's Song. Another account, by Bob Dyer, has Simon writing it in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1966. Garfunkel described the song as young lovers with their adventure and optimism. Gerry Beckley of the band America told Songfacts that the whole song is prose. Garfunkel told Paul Zollo in 1993 that the unison vocal had an earnest quality because both singers had the same soul at that moment.

The story

The narrator hitchhikes for four days from Saginaw to meet Kathy in Pittsburgh, and the two board a Greyhound bus. They buy cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner's Pies, and by the end of the song they have smoked all the cigarettes. Kathy reads a magazine and falls asleep, which leaves the narrator awake counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. The song is set at about 172 beats per minute, and the vocals range from A2 to E4, with an uncredited soprano saxophone in the refrain. Pete Fornatale reads the closing line as a metaphor for the lost souls wandering the highways of the mid-sixties.

On the album the song opens by crossfading from Save the Life of My Child. The single versions begin cleanly, and so does the version on the Greatest Hits compilation. In Rolling Stone in 1968, Arthur Schmidt praised the horn arrangement on the song and its lyrics.

After the album

A single was issued in 1972 to promote the Greatest Hits compilation, first as the B-side of a live version of For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her. It charted in July 1972, then was switched to the A-side and charted again in November. It reached number 97 in the United States and 25 in Britain. Stephen Holden, writing in Rolling Stone in 1972, called the song sheer brilliance, and in a 2014 readers' poll the magazine ranked it fourth among the duo's best songs.

The duo are logged with 133 performances on setlist.fm. It was played at Forest Hills on 18 July 1970, in Central Park in 1981 and on the Old Friends tour. At Central Park they repeated the New Jersey Turnpike line because the hometown crowd related to it. Almost Famous used it in 2000, and Bernie Sanders's 2016 campaign ad used it with permission. In 2010 the Paint Saginaw project painted its lyrics on 28 vacant buildings in Saginaw. It was also in a Volkswagen Atlas commercial in 2017, and CBS News included it in June 2026 in a list of 250 essential American songs. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official studio recording.

Covers

Yes began playing the song in 1970, on the first tour after Steve Howe replaced Peter Banks, adding changes of time signature and long instrumental passages. Their studio version runs about ten and a half minutes and live versions ran past fifteen. It first appeared in 1972 on the sampler The New Age of Atlantic, and an edited single reached number 46 on the Hot 100 and number 20 in New Zealand. Howe called it a kind of lost recording among the band's work, and when he met Simon in 1992 Simon told him he liked it.

The band Clouds, then called 1-2-3, played a rewritten version at the Marquee in April 1967, working from tapes of Simon's 1965 London demos. David Bowie opened The Concert for New York City in October 2001 with a minimalist version, seated on the floor with an Omnichord. Josh Groban recorded it on Live at the Greek in 2003, Renaissance recorded it in 1981 with Annie Haslam singing the male narrator's lines, though it stayed unreleased until 1997, and First Aid Kit performed it for Simon at the 2012 Polar Music Prize to a standing ovation from Simon himself.