The irony of this being a Canadian song with the recent news!

The Guess Who are fantastic!!
1. These Eyes
2. No Sugar Tonight
3.Laughing
4.Share The Land
5.Undun
6.Hand Me Down World
7. No Time

This was written as a Canadian group protesting America and Vietnam. Also one of my favorite groups of all time. Love their music.

One of the GREATEST Canadian bands of all time

The Guess who was asked to perform at the white house for President Nixon and his family and were told specifically NOT to play this song. They did anyway.

This is 💯 the original and Lenny actually covered it for the movie Austin Powers : The spy who shagged me! Randy Bachman is the lead guitarist who would later form Bachman Turner Overdrive with his two brothers! U should definitely check them out! You ain't seen nothing yet, Let it ride, Takin care of business, & Roll on down the highway are just a few of their bigger hits!

Time for Canada to sing it from every rooftop.

The woman Burt Cummings is talking about is the statue of liberty. A lot of American guys went to Canada to keep from being drafted and having to fight in Vietnam. Guess Who being a Canadian band was sending a message to the USA that they didn’t want any part of the war. It is a great song!!

The “American Woman” in this song is “Lady Liberty”.  A Canadian protest song against the USA involvement in Vietnam.

They were a Canadian band! Their popularity in the USA was amazingly huge.

I am 75 years old and this is and was my generation. I was at a large rock concert with the guess who. At this time in the 60's and 70's the Vietnam war was going on. There was big protest going on and the hippie and yippie movement. I was drafted into the army. Thousands of Americans "RAN" to Canada, to keep from being drafted and going to the Vietnam war. The guess who were Canadian, the gest was keep your war in America and we do not need any king of Americans flooding here (AMERICAN WOMAN) was cover, and code, for Americans fleeing to Canada.

This song isn’t even about women. It’s a statement about the
U. S. and the Vietnam war. ✌🏼😎🇺🇸

I would recommend listening to The Guess Who "No Sugar Tonight"/"New Mother Nature"

This was a song by a Canadian rock band talking about not wanting the negative stuff associated with American society- war machines, ghetto scenes , the glitz and superficial glamour - ‘colored lights can hypnotize, sparkle someone else’s eyes “.  The Guess Who have a great catalogue of songs - iconic Canadian band. Check out These Eyes, Undone, No Time

these eyes. are. one of their best hits

This is also the short version of the song. The long version starts with a very slow intro where he spells out American Woman

“What is the meaning behind the song American Woman?
“It's basically an antiwar protest song saying, 'We don't want your war machines, we don't want your ghetto scenes, stay away from me,'” Bachman describes of the lyrics. “'American Woman' is not the woman on the street.”

This is a Canadian band and it was around the time of the Vietnam war… American men were draft dodging into Canada

There are differing perspectives on the meaning of the lyrics. However, Bachman and Cummings both have a pretty clear vision of how the song originated. “American Woman” actually started off by accident. The band was playing a gig at a curling arena in Canada in the late 1960s. Guitarist Bachman had a broken guitar string that led to a delay in the set, the band members dispersing around the venue. While fixing and tuning the guitar, Bachman started to play the riff that would ultimately become the famous one that opens “American Woman.”
“I started to play that riff on stage, and I look at the audience, who are now milling about and talking amongst themselves, and all their heads snapped back,” Bachman recalls to Songfacts. “Suddenly I realize I’m playing a riff I don’t want to forget, and I have to keep playing it. So I stand up and I’m playing this riff.”
One by one, his bandmates returned to the stage, resulting in an impromptu jam session. “I yell out, ‘Sing something!’” Bachman recalled of what he said to lead singer Cummings and how they wrote “the song right there on stage.” “And he goes, ‘What?’ And I say, ‘Sing anything!’ And the first words out of his mouth were, American woman, stay away from me.”
At this point, The Guess Who had been touring in the U.S. where men were actively being drafted for the Vietnam War, and many people in the audience that night were draft dodgers from the States. “It’s basically an antiwar protest song saying, ‘We don’t want your war machines, we don’t want your ghetto scenes, stay away from me,’” Bachman describes of the lyrics.
“‘American Woman’ is not the woman on the street. It’s the Statue of Liberty and that poster of Uncle Sam with the stars and stripes top hat where he has a finger pointing to you, ‘Uncle Sam Wants You.’ That basically was our thought at the moment onstage when that song was written,” he adds.
But Cummings remembers the lyrical process differently, rebuking Bachman’s claims that the song was politically charged. Instead, the former frontman says that the lyrics came to him as naturally as the riff did for Bachman. “I just raced onto the stage and sang whatever came into my head. I jammed words along with the music. It was all stream of consciousness. Let me make it clear. It was never a song. It was a riff from Randy and then I laid some words on it,” Cummings explained to Toronto Star in 2013.
“It had nothing to do with politics. What was on my mind was that girls in the States seemed to get older quicker than our girls and that made them, well, dangerous,” he continues. “When I said American woman / Stay away from me, I really meant ‘Canadian woman, I prefer you.’ It was all a happy accident.”
“A lot of people thought it was political. It was never political,” Cummings emphasized in a 2020 interview with CBC Radio.” I’ve heard Jim Kale explain the lyrics; he didn’t have anything to do with the lyrics. Neither did Bachman, really. But for some reason, these guys have started to say the ‘American Woman’ was the Statue of Liberty. That’s just not true.”

"Sparkle someone else's eyes" best line in the song.

I like this group, no bad songs at all. I love these tunes!