The last sound on American Pie is not the famous title song. After eight and a half minutes of “American Pie” and the nine songs that follow it — among them “Vincent”, “The Grave” and “Winterwood” — Don McLean’s masterpiece fades out with a track barely a hundred seconds long: a lone voice over a banjo, singing, in a round, words that were already ancient when they were first written down. “Babylon” runs one minute and forty seconds, carries no songwriting credit for McLean in the usual sense, and yet it may be the most revealing recording on the album. It is a psalm, a folk-club round and a signature all at once, and its route onto the record runs from an Oxford professor’s songbook of 1786, through the Weavers’ bass singer, to the closing groove of the defining singer-songwriter album of the 1970s.
The Oldest Song on the Album
The text of “Babylon” is a close paraphrase of the first verse of Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” It is the lament of a captive people remembering home, and it has been sung for as long as the psalm has existed. The particular setting McLean used, however, has a precise and surprising author. The tune is a canon — a round, designed to be sung by voices entering one after another — composed by Philip Hayes, a professor of music at Oxford, and published in 1786 in his collection The Muses Delight: Catches, Glees, Canzonets and Canons. Hayes’s little round travelled through two centuries of communal singing, in churches, parlours and folk clubs, shedding its author’s name along the way, as rounds do.
So thoroughly was it anonymised that the liner notes of American Pie attributed the tune to William Billings, the American shape-note composer — a plausible guess, and a wrong one. The correction is documented by David W. Stowe in his study of the psalm’s extraordinary musical afterlife, Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (2016), which traces the setting to Hayes and uses McLean’s “Babylon” as one of its key exhibits. On the album itself, the track is credited “traditional”, arranged by Lee Hays and Don McLean — the folk process doing in 1971 exactly what it had done since 1786.
Lee Hays and the Folk Inheritance
The other arranger’s name opens the second door into the song. Lee Hays was the bass singer and resident wit of the Weavers, the group that carried folk music into the American charts in the early 1950s before being blacklisted, and that served as a living bridge between McLean’s generation and the world of Woody Guthrie. McLean had entered that world as a teenager: a protégé of the Weavers’ Pete Seeger, he sang on the Hudson River sloop Clearwater project in 1969 and moved through the same Greenwich Village folk clubs where rounds like Hayes’s “By the Waters of Babylon” were warm-up staples — songs a roomful of people could sing together within minutes of hearing them.
The lineage is even more direct than the arrangement credit suggests. As a teenage folksinger in the mid-1960s, McLean had been taken up by Erik Darling — himself a Weaver, Seeger’s replacement in the group — who mentored the young singer and performed alongside him. Hays’s and Seeger’s world was not background reading for McLean; it was his apprenticeship. When he and Hays arranged Hayes’s round for the close of American Pie, three generations of the folk revival were, in effect, singing on the same track: the Oxford professor’s tune, the Weavers’ keeper of rounds, and the 25-year-old who would shortly be more famous than either.
That inheritance matters because American Pie is so often read as a solitary work, one man’s encrypted diary of a decade. “Babylon” is the counter-argument built into the album’s own track listing. Alongside it sits “Empty Chairs” and the scathing anti-war song “The Grave”, but the closing track belongs not to McLean the auteur but to McLean the folk singer — the tradition-bearer who learned his craft in rooms where the highest achievement was not originality but communion. His instrument on the track underlines the point: the album’s personnel lists McLean on banjo as well as guitar and vocals, and “Babylon” is carried by that banjo, the emblematic instrument of the folk revival, played without any studio sweetening at all.
There is a further quiet joke in the credits. Philip Hayes was no anonymous folk — he was one of the most credentialed musicians in eighteenth-century England, holder of Oxford’s chair of music, a composer of catches and glees for London’s convivial singing clubs. His round survived precisely because it was designed for amateurs: three short phrases, endlessly interlocking, impossible to sing wrong for long. That it washed up, two centuries later, misattributed to an American hymn-writer in the liner notes of a rock album is not an embarrassment so much as the folk process working exactly as intended. Hayes wrote for rooms of singers, not for posterity, and posterity obliged by forgetting his name while keeping his tune.
Ninety Seconds at the End of American Pie
American Pie was recorded in May and June 1971 at the Record Plant in New York, produced by Ed Freeman, and released by United Artists on 24 October 1971. McLean had reportedly been turned down by thirty-four labels before United Artists signed him, and the album vindicated the believers completely: it reached number one on the Billboard 200, produced two signature singles in the title track and “Vincent”, and eventually sold more than two million copies in the United States alone. Critics have long treated it as a unified work — the New York Times called it the folk equivalent of a novel — and sequencing is a large part of that unity. Freeman and McLean close it with “The Grave”, a harrowing first-person account of a soldier dying in the First World War, and then, after that devastation, with “Babylon”.
The contrast with the album’s other communal moment is instructive. For the final chorus of “American Pie”, Freeman assembled what he called the “West Forty Fourth Street Rhythm and Noise Choir” — by his account it included Pete Seeger, James Taylor, Livingston Taylor and Carly Simon — a roomful of the era’s stars piling their voices onto the decade’s epitaph. “Babylon” answers that with a single voice and a banjo. The album thus ends as it began, in argument with itself: fame’s choir on one side, the folk club’s round on the other.
McLean was working a seam of the culture that surfaced everywhere that year. In 1971 Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell reached the stage with “On the Willows”, built from the same psalm’s image of harps hung on willow trees by exiles who could not bring themselves to play. Babylon was in the air — the symbol of a generation that felt itself exiled from the country it had expected to inherit.
The placement is the meaning. The exiles by the waters of Babylon weep because they cannot sing in a strange land; McLean ends his account of a battered decade — assassinations, war, the death of the music itself — with the sound of singing anyway: one voice, then, in the round’s turning, the implication of many. As the voices circle over each other, the lament becomes a kind of benediction. It lasts one minute and forty seconds, the shortest track on the album by a wide margin, and then the record is over.
The Afterlife of a Round
Few album closers so slight have travelled so far. The round refused to stay in 1786, or in 1971. A cover of “Babylon” was placed in a folk-club scene in the television series Mad Men, that other great autopsy of post-war America, and Stowe’s Oxford University Press study gave the little canon a scholarly monument of its own. Psalm 137 has inspired hundreds of settings — Byrd, Verdi’s chorus of the Hebrew slaves in spirit, the Melodians’ and Boney M.’s reggae “Rivers of Babylon”, which turned different verses of the same psalm into one of the best-selling singles in British chart history in 1978. McLean’s “Babylon” is the quietest of them all, and in some ways the most radical: no choir, no strings, no arrangement to speak of, just a banjo and a tune old enough to have outlived everyone who ever claimed to own it.
That is finally why “Babylon” belongs where it is. The album that made Don McLean famous opens with a song about the day the music died, and closes with music that demonstrably cannot die — a round that belongs to whoever is singing it, passed hand to hand from an Oxford professor to the Weavers’ circle to a young folk singer from New Rochelle, and on to anyone who has ever sat by strange waters and remembered home. One minute and forty seconds was all it needed.