All gone to look for America: Simon & Garfunkel’s song appears on abandoned Saginaw buildings

By NPR Staff
December 19, 2010 In 1968, Simon & Garfunkel released the bittersweet song “America” — a tune about a couple leaving Saginaw, Mich., to seek their fortunes elsewhere. This past week, a reporter at The Saginaw News noticed lyrics from that song spray-painted on vacant buildings all over town. Some of the paint on the walls of these abandoned factories is the work of Eric Shantz, a mural painter from the area. He told NPR that the paint is an attempt to disguise the fact that his city is boarded up. “A few years ago, me and my friends, being artists and painters, we decided to go around the city and start painting the boarded-up buildings and storefronts,” Shantz says. “That ended up building into kind of an underground, grassroots group called Paint Saginaw.”

Schantz says that he is disheartened by the state of Saginaw, a city that fell apart after General Motors Corp. closed its factories in the area. “In a blighted city like Saginaw, it’s kind of depressing when you drive through and all you see is boarded-up buildings and plywood everywhere,” Shantz says. So the group decided that they would put Paul Simon’s lyrics onto the plywood. “‘America’ has become a homesick song for Saginawians,” Shantz says. “The city was once vastly populated, a couple hundred thousand.  And now it’s below 50,000. People left to go find their America, to pursue their American dream.  And when they left, they never really came back, ’cause there wasn’t really much to come back to.  And the emphasis on ‘hitchhiking’ to get out of here is kinda like people saying that they’ll do just about anything to leave.” …

Finding Simon And Garfunkel’s ‘America’ In Saginaw, Mich.