I honestly would never have known that American Woman was an accidental song until now. Seriously, the track sounded so purposeful and managed to become an instant hit despite the fact that it might never have come along if not for one big mistake. The Guess Who were on their way across the border when they stopped for gas apparently and were told by a border guard that they would have to sign up for the draft. Thinking this wasn’t the best idea for them the group then made their way back into Canada, but without a gig to go as they’d been on their way to a paying job.
With some quick thinking they managed to get a concert together in a curling rink of all places and were playing their music when one of Randy Bachman’s strings broke. After informing the crowd that he’d have to replace the string he set to work replacing it and then tuning the guitar as he normally would. However as he was doing this he came across the opening riff for the song that sounded just too good to pass up. So thinking he did what he could to develop it quickly and motioned for the band’s leader singer to just go with it and make up whatever he could on the spot. The singer then launched into what sounded like a tirade against American women but was in actuality just what was on the top of his mind.
The simple explanation for the song’s lyrics came from the fact that Canadian women seemed to develop and mature just a little slower than American women. To the band this made American women a bit dangerous since it meant they would be more likely to be out looking for a husband or trying to settle down quicker. This meant of course that a lot of them might be willing to latch onto a guy just for security and a possibility of enjoying the life of being married to rock and roll star. A lot of folks thought this was an anti-American statement made by the band and even went so far as to think that the song was against the war somehow, which in fact it wasn’t. It was a spur of the moment song that the band came up with that happened to be an instant hit that people loved.
Songs don’t often have the same meaning that people impart to them when they’re first created. This song in particular was a knee-jerk reaction to a riff that Bachman had come up with entirely on accident and a reflection of something that the band felt but didn’t necessarily preach on a daily basis. Just because they felt American women were a little more dangerous didn’t mean they would avoid them on purpose. More or less the song was meant to be something that was there and available for them to perform so as to entertain the people that had come out to see their act.
Music means a lot of things, but it’s only when it’s given certain meanings that it becomes something else entirely.
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