Music Myth: Is “American Girl” by Tom Petty About a Tragic Death?

While America was busy celebrating its bicentennial on July 4, 1976, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were in the studio, recording what would become one of their best and most beloved songs—”American Girl.”

“American Girl” is about a young woman’s determination to create a better life for herself.

“In my mind, the girl was looking for the strength to move on, and she found it,” Petty once said of the song. “It’s one of my favorites.”

But one interpretation of the lyrics, combined with a real-life tragedy, led to a longstanding myth about the song’s subject matter.

The Urban Legend

An infamous urban legend surrounds “American Girl” and claims Petty wrote it about a young woman who died by suicide at the University of Florida’s Beaty Towers dorm in his hometown of Gainesville. In one version of the story, she took her own life intentionally. In another, she was trying to fly after taking hallucinogenic drugs.

Some of the song’s lyrics seem to support this theory.

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.

Petty also sings of how ”she could hear the cars roll by out on 441, like waves crashing on the beach.” That’s a reference to Route 441, which goes past the university. The lyrics also mention the girl in the song standing alone on her balcony.

The rumor is just that, however—a rumor. A spokesperson for the university has said no such death ever occurred. The dorm in question does not have balconies. Petty and Campbell also disputed it.

“That story really gets around,” Petty said in an interview for the book Conversations with Tom Petty. They’ve really got the whole story. I’ve even seen magazine articles about that story. ‘Is it true, or isn’t it true?’ They could have just called me and found out it wasn’t true.”

In reality, the “American Girl” described was “a composite, a character who yearned for more than had life had dealt her,” according to Petty himself.

He also explained he wrote “American Girl” in California.

“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 [the traffic] 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.”

Campbell pointed to the lyrics to dispel the rumor.

“We used to have people come up to us and tell us they thought it was about suicide because of the one line about ‘if she had to die,’ but what they didn’t get was, the whole line is ‘if she had to die trying.’ Some people take it literally and out of context,” Campbell said. “To me it’s just a really beautiful love song.”

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