T S Eliot was once asked to explain the ‘meaning’ of the phrase ‘Three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’, to which he replied ‘it means, ‘Three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’.
That’s the best way to enjoy the nonsense.Įxactly so. Songs like this aren’t supposed to be looked at. Look at I am the Walrus… But no, I don’t mean that. Lots of songs around at that time were nonsense. Isn’t the reverse supposed to be true? As for those fatuous lines The three men I admire the most, the Father Son and the Holy Ghost, they caught the last train to the coast…Ĭome on. I don’t know what a mortal soul would be. For example, Can music save your mortal soul? But the point about souls is that, unlike bodies, they are supposed to be immortal. Analysis of some of the phrases reveals that they are next-door to gibberish. It’s just a string of images, some evocative, some not, containing some fairly random cultural references which sounded hip in 1971, and it rhymes quite cleverly, and it has a melancholy feel, and it sounds really good when sung by Don McLean. I’m going to make the bold claim that the song’s true meaning will never be discovered because it doesn’t have one. McLean himself has always been coy about what it actually means, famously quipping that “it means I’ll never have to work again”. Apparently the manuscript contains clues to the song’s real meaning.
I read a few days ago that the original manuscript of Don McLean’s song America Pie was auctioned for $1.2 million dollars.
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