Claim: The Tom Petty song "American Girl" was based on a student's suicide at the University of Florida.
FALSE
Examples:
[Popkin, 2006]
As the legend goes, Petty wrote ["American Girl"] about a University of Florida coed who jumped to her death from the Beatty Towers dorm. One variation has the unnamed girl tripping on hallucinogens and attempting to fly.
[Collected on the Internet, 2005]
While attending my brother-in-law's graduation at UF this weekend, he gave us a quick tour around campus. He pointed to a building, saying "Some girl committed suicide off that building, Tom Petty wrote 'American Girl' about it."
Origins: For
whatever
of both — some popular songs (such as Phil Collins' "
According to legend, "American Girl" was inspired by a student's suicide at the University of Florida (UF), one committed by a female student who jumped to her death from the balcony of her Beaty Towers dormitory room. It's not hard to see why this story is so prevalent, as the reference to a suicide from a balcony is an obvious interpretation of the lyrics; Tom Petty himself is from Gainesville (where UF is located); and the words mention "441," a highway that runs past the school (and Beaty Towers):
It was kind of cold that night
Well, she was an American girl,
raised on promises.
She couldn't help thinkin' that there
was a little more to life
somewhere else.
After all it was a great big world
with lots of places to run to.
Yeah, and if she had to die
tryin' she had one little promise
she was gonna keep.
she stood alone on her balcony.
She could hear the cars roll by
out on 441
like waves crashin' in the beach,
and for one desperate moment there
he crept back in her memory.
God it's so painful,
something that's so close
and still so far out of reach.
Of course, the lyrics don't specifically mention Gainesville or the University of Florida or Beaty Towers, and
A: Urban legend. It's become a huge urban myth down in Florida. That's just not at all true. The song has nothing to do with that. But that story really gets
Q: There's the story that ['American Girl'] was based on the suicide of a girl at the University of Florida. Any truth to that?
Additionally, Petty indicated that the lyrics were inspired not by anything associated with Florida, but rather by a freeway just outside the southern California apartment building where he was living when he wrote the song, several years after he moved away from Florida:
A: I don't remember exactly. I was living in an apartment where I was right by the freeway. And the cars would go by. In Encino, near Leon [Russell]'s house. And I remember thinking that that sounded like the ocean to me. That was my ocean. My Malibu. Where I heard the waves crash, but it was just the cars going by. I think that must have inspired the lyric.
Q: Do you remember writing ['American Girl']?
An offshoot of the legend has UF students throwing Halloween parties at Tom Petty's former residence in Gainesville every year, another assumption Petty has disclosed as being based upon a fiction:
I'll meet students from Gainesville. And they'll say, 'Yeah, we party in your old house on Halloween.' There's this tradition that they go to my house, whoever's renting it at the time, and have this big party. But I never lived in a house in Gainesville. I lived in apartments. I lived in my mom's house, where I know they're not throwing a party. So that's also a myth. Someone got a house and said, 'This is where he lived.' That tradition has gone on and on. And every time I tell them it's not true, they go,
Last updated: 14 March 2013
Sources: |
Popkin, Helen A.S. "Workin' on a Mystery." MSNBC.com. 21 June 2006. Zollo, Paul. Conversations with Tom Petty. London: Omnibus Press, 2005. ISBN 1-844-49815-8 (pp. 195-196).