The Girl Who Sang the Blues
“American Pie” comes to an epilogue as McLean mourns his loss over the ruins of his generation, looking for signs of the old world. He believes he had met a return to the age of innocence in “ a girl who sang the blues ,” but his relief is short-lived.
” I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away.”
Janis Joplin sings with her band Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. (Photo by © Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
The girl who sang the blues is most likely Janis Joplin, the rock, and roll icon whose death of a heroin overdose in 1970 marked yet another loss for the musical movement. McLean hopes that her music would be the “happy news” that everybody has been waiting for, but the girl “just smiled and turned away,” just like rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix and The Doors’ Jim Morrison did the same year.