"Bye-bye, Miss American Pie/Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry."
"The jester sang for the king and queen/In a coat he borrowed from James Dean" and "while Lennon read a book on Marx/The quartet practiced in the park".
The lyrics of the 1972 song American Pie for years have provoked listeners into conjecture.
Now Don McLean said that when the original manuscript is auctioned in April in New York he will enlighten us by revealing the meaning behind the lyrics.
The manuscript runs to 16 pages with many drafts, deletions and handwritten notes. It could reach $1.5m (£919,000) at auction. Bob Dylan’s handwritten manuscript for Like a Rolling Stone sold last year at auction for $2m (£1.2m)
"The writing and the lyrics will divulge everything there is to divulge," he told Reuters.
In the past, McLean, 69, has said that the song’s beginning is about the death of Buddy Holly. Nothing else is known, but many believe the cryptic lyrics concern the social upheavals in society in the 1960s and ‘70s.
The song was number one in the US in 1972 and is McLean’s best-known although he has more than 40 gold and platinum records.
He said he had decided on a whim to auction the manuscript.
Francis Wahlgren of Christie's auctioneers said: "The fact that the drafts, the working process of it, are all being offered as this lot makes it a remarkable insight into the mind of Don McLean and into this incredible song that has touched so many people.
"There is something about this song that captures the era of that period and there is a kind of innocence to it, a loss of innocence in America."
