The lyric from Don McLean’s “American Pie” is “Drove my Chevy to the levee.”
McLean recorded “American Pie” in 1971 for the album of the same name. The folk-rock epic became a cultural touchstone because its long, densely symbolic lyrics reflect on American music and society during the 1950s and 1960s. The “levee” line appears in the famous chorus, followed by the image of the levee being dry.
A levee is an embankment built to control or redirect water, so the word is not “levy,” which means a tax or an act of imposing something. That spelling and pronunciation mix-up is one of the most common mistakes associated with the lyric. The line’s exact real-world location has also been debated, but McLean’s song does not identify a single confirmed levee.
The song was released as a single in October 1971 and reached number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in January 1972. Its opening references the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, later remembered as “the day the music died.”