“Only In America” (Jay and the Americans/The Drifters)

Continuing our overview of the career of songwriter Cynthia Weil, today’s classic song of the day is “Only in America” by Jay and the Americans. This one has a controversial history.

“Only In America,” written in 1963, was the second collaboration between the teams of Barry Mann/Cynthia Weil and Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller. That’s a good thing; their previous collaboration, “On Broadway,” was a huge smash for the Drifters earlier that year.

This time around, however, things didn’t go quite so smooth. As before, the original version of the song was written for the Drifters by Cynthia and Barry alone; Jerry and Mike only got involved when they ran into issues with Cynthia’s lyrics. The issue was with Cynthia’s original lyrics, which were clearly about racism in the U.S. They went something like this:

Only in America
Land of opportunity
Can they save a seat in the back of the bus just for me

Only in America
Where they preach the Golden Rule
Will they start to march when my kids go to school

When producers Leiber and Stoller saw the lyrics, they realized that they’d never pass muster with the somewhat conservative execs at Atlantic Records, the Drifters’ label. So, just as they’d done with “On Broadway,” Leiber and Stoller sat down with Mann and Weil to revamp the lyrics. They wanted something that seemed patriotic on the surface but was really an ironic comment on what it meant to be a black man in the U.S. in the ’60s. They hoped they could slip that by the label execs.

The new lyrics went like this:

Only in America
Can a guy from anywhere
Go to sleep a pauper and wake up a millionaire

Only in America
Can a kid without a cent
Get a break and maybe grow up to be President

Barry Mann regrets to this day the decision to change the lyrics. “It just makes me cry now,” he told an interviewer. “It would’ve been a more honest song but I wasn’t strong enough to stick to my guns.”

In any case, this new, sunnier version was recorded by the Drifters and presented to Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler. He took one listen and realized that due to racism in the south and elsewhere, a song with a black man singing about growing up to be president, ironic or not, wouldn’t get much airplay. It might even spawn protests. “If I release this, they’ll lynch us,” he told Leiber and Stoller, and ordered the Drifters’ recording shelved.

Leiber and Stoller still believed in the song, however, and bought the master tapes from Atlantic. They stripped off the Drifters’ vocals and decided to shop it around.

Kenny Vance of the white bread group Jay and the Americans had heard the Drifters’ recording and thought it would be a good fit for his group. He figured that since they had the word “Americans” in their name, a song called “Only In America,” apparently about how great America is, would be perfect for them.

Well, Vance was right. The group, with new singer Jay Black, laid down their vocals over the instrumental tracks recorded for the Drifters’ original version, and the result was a chart success. Jay and the Americans’ watered-down version of “Only in America” went all the way to #25 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Which version is best? Well, the public never got to hear a version with the original lyrics because they were never recorded. The Drifters’ version with the new lyrics, however, was finally released in 1996, on Rockin’ and Driftin: The Drifters Box. You can hear it for yourself here. I’ll always take the Drifters over Jay and the Americans (who I do like, by the way), so this is my new favorite version, but you can make up your own mind.