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Only In America: 50 Years Later, A Drifters Song Has Its Day
Ryan ZumMallen

This past spring’s Smithsonian Week in Long Beach was themed in part around 1950s rock ’n’ roll and doo wop. Had Smithsonian and the city waited one more year to feature this topic, a segment might have been devoted to April of 1963, when a popular R&B group recorded a song containing the lyric “Only in America can a kid without a cent get a break and maybe grow up to be president.” The song, with its gentle Latin rolling beat and percussion thump, could have been the next chart hit for the Drifters if Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler hadn’t pulled the recording. Wexler said that, in the light of race relations of that time, it would be unfeeling, unfair and unfitting to have a black group release a song about America being the land of opportunity and suggest that an African-American could become its president.

According to a representative from the office of songwriting husband-and-wife team Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, “Only in America” began as a biting antiracist composition with the lines “Only in America, land of opportunity, can they save a seat in the back of the bus just for me,” and “Only in America, where they preach the Golden Rule, will they start to march when my kids want to go to school.” Atlantic Records convinced Mann and Weil that in the reality of those times (and most likely in the consideration of record sales and turning profits), the song wouldn’t get much, if any, airplay, and that a rewrite was necessary. Another prolific writing duo, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, worked with Mann and Weil to write a more patriotic version, which the Drifters recorded. When Wexler made his decision, it was given to Jay and the Americans, who had a hit with it; it reached #25 on the charts.

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The Drifters - ”Only In America”

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