The The Guess Who‘s Randy Bachman, Burton Cummings, Gary Peterson and Jim Kale are credited as co-writers on the classic song “American Woman,” trademarked by Cummings’ gravely voice. The song came in the midst of a hot streak for the Canadian rock band, sandwiched between such hits as “These Eyes,” “Laughing,” “No Time” and “No Sugar Tonight.”
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Meaning Behind the Song
There are differing perspectives on the meaning of the lyrics. However, Bachman and Cummings both have a pretty clear vision of how the song originated. “American Woman” actually started off by accident. The band was playing a gig at a curling arena in Canada in the late 1960s. Guitarist Bachman had a broken guitar string that led to a delay in the set, the band members dispersing around the venue. While fixing and tuning the guitar, Bachman started to play the riff that would ultimately become the famous one that opens “American Woman.”
“I started to play that riff on stage, and I look at the audience, who are now milling about and talking amongst themselves, and all their heads snapped back,” Bachman recalls to Songfacts. “Suddenly I realize I’m playing a riff I don’t want to forget, and I have to keep playing it. So I stand up and I’m playing this riff.”
One by one, his bandmates returned to the stage, resulting in an impromptu jam session. “I yell out, ‘Sing something!'” Bachman recalled of what he said to lead singer Cummings and how they wrote “the song right there on stage.” “And he goes, ‘What?’ And I say, ‘Sing anything!’ And the first words out of his mouth were, American woman, stay away from me.”
At this point, The Guess Who had been touring in the U.S. where men were actively being drafted for the Vietnam War, and many people in the audience that night were draft dodgers from the States. “It’s basically an antiwar protest song saying, ‘We don’t want your war machines, we don’t want your ghetto scenes, stay away from me,'” Bachman describes of the lyrics.
“‘American Woman’ is not the woman on the street. It’s the Statue of Liberty and that poster of Uncle Sam with the stars and stripes top hat where he has a finger pointing to you, ‘Uncle Sam Wants You.’ That basically was our thought at the moment onstage when that song was written,” he adds.
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But Cummings remembers the lyrical process differently, rebuking Bachman’s claims that the song was politically charged. Instead, the former frontman says that the lyrics came to him as naturally as the riff did for Bachman. “I just raced onto the stage and sang whatever came into my head. I jammed words along with the music. It was all stream of consciousness. Let me make it clear. It was never a song. It was a riff from Randy and then I laid some words on it,” Cummings explained to Toronto Star in 2013.
“It had nothing to do with politics. What was on my mind was that girls in the States seemed to get older quicker than our girls and that made them, well, dangerous,” he continues. “When I said American woman / Stay away from me, I really meant ‘Canadian woman, I prefer you.’ It was all a happy accident.”
“A lot of people thought it was political. It was never political,” Cummings emphasized in a 2020 interview with CBC Radio.” I’ve heard Jim Kale explain the lyrics; he didn’t have anything to do with the lyrics. Neither did Bachman, really. But for some reason, these guys have started to say the ‘American Woman’ was the Statue of Liberty. That’s just not true.”
“American Woman” was the title track of The Guess Who’s 1970 album. It spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is one of the band’s signature hits. The song was revived in 1999 when Lenny Kravitz released a cover as one of the singles off his album, 5. Kravitz’s version reached No. 3 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart and No. 7 on the Alternative Airplay chart. It won Best Male Rock Vocal Performance at the 2000 Grammy Awards.
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