Talk:American Pie

Does anyone know why we do this, though? Why is it played? And why the "Die, Die, Die, Die..." chant?

I don't know about the origins of playing the song. I have heard one explanation of the Die, Die... callback. I warn you, I have NO PROOF, which is why I didn't add it to the article. The story goes like this: there was someone connected to CTY (either a formemr camper or RA, I don't know which) who killed themselves. In their journal was written, as the last entry, "Die, die, live, live, sex, sex, more, more." I don't know that any reliability should be given to it, I just thought I'd put it out there. Lordoflight

-- This is not true. The original chant was "die die die". In... 1994 or 95, someone at the Saratoga site killed themselves during the first week of camp, and the announcement went out everywhere. At Lancaster we were all shook up by it, and didn't want "die die die" to be a message anyone was internalizing, so a bunch of us added "live live live". The other two showed up over the course of the next year or two, as far as I know just because they were funny. Ariels I don't know whether someone wants that in the main page, but that's testimony from direct experience.

wikipedia says this "The United States Air Force 36th Fighter Squadron based at Osan Air Base, Republic of Korea adopted American Pie as its squadron song. Squadron tradition is to sing along with the original Don McLean recording but substitute "Soju" (a Korean gin) for "Whiskey", and shout, "No shit!" after the first "This'll be the day that I die" of each chorus." Even the freakin' air force has call backs

I read in a book that "the day the music died" was supposed to stand for the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly. I'm not sure, i think the book was a BBC ultimate biography or something... does anyone else know something about this?

-- That's what I've always heard. I think there are bits that refer back to that throughout the lyrics, along with other things. --Emma 19:06, 26 April 2008 (PDT)

What I've heard is that is was very popular in the dances in the early 80s at St. Mary's and Lancaster, and then spread to other sites as well as Duke University's TIP program. I have no idea what the origin of the chant or the choreography is. --austinszat (talk) 11:04, 8 August 2016 (EDT)

Move to American Pie

Since more people will just search for American Pie they should move it to that. Marlith 19:19, 18 July 2007 (MST)

San Francisco State University

This site is a CTY Civic Leadership Institute site, which is supposedly a part of CTY. They refused to play American Pie as the last song at the dances.... until Teresa Frame and Allison Carniglia decided to change this. For the first dance, we met with the site director, Katrina, and she told us that "this isn't CTY". Sure, it's not as CTY-ish as regular CTY, but it could at least observe the primary tradition of all CTY-affiliated sites around the country. So we finally got Kat to change it for the first dance, but not for the last one... (it took several meetings, a petition, and much arguing)

Allison here- please, anyone who goes to CLI in the future, persevere and get Kat to change her mind... she doesn't understand what CTY means to all of us...

Dirges in the Dark

At Lancaster, Session 1, the line "and we sang dirges in the dark" is sung differently by the CTYers. Is anyone familiar with this, and if so, shouldn't it go in the callbacks? --sanchez

Los Angeles

Like half of the LOS callbacks listed here are dead. I don't want to delete them, because they're historical, but can we put a line through (or something of the sort) the ones that haven't been relevant for several years so people know which ones are actually still in use?