Maggie May on Apple Music

In the late September of memory, Maggie May lingers not as a person but as a presence, one of those women who, in the aftermath of the sixties, walked through the world with the unhurried confidence of someone who has already seen the inside of every room. We remember her as Rod Stewart’s older muse, the woman who “stole his heart” and, in the process, his innocence, at a jazz festival in the English countryside. The song immortalized her, but the world moved on, and so, eventually, did Maggie.

The truth is, Maggie May was never her real name. Stewart borrowed it from an old Liverpudlian folk song about a woman who took what she wanted from men and left them changed, if not always better for it. The real woman’s name is lost to the grass and the years, her identity folded into the myth of the song, and perhaps that is for the best. We understand that the stories we tell about women like Maggie May are often more about ourselves — our longing, our regret, our need to find meaning in the chaos of youth — than about the women themselves.

But let us imagine, for a moment, that Maggie May is more than a cipher, more than a cautionary tale or a punchline about the brevity of teenage encounters. Let us suppose that after the festival, after the brief, awkward coupling with a boy who would become a star, Maggie returned to her own life — a life that did not end with the last chord of a mandolin, but stretched on, quietly, into the years that followed.

Perhaps she moved to London, as so many did, and found work in one of the city’s newly opened galleries, where she could talk about art and music and the way the light falls on the Thames in late afternoon. She would have watched the world change around her: the miniskirts giving way to flared jeans, the Beatles to Bowie, the optimism of the sixties dissolving into the cynicism of the seventies. She might have married, or not; had children, or not. She would have become, in the way of women who survive their own legends, both more ordinary and more extraordinary with each passing year.

In the mornings, she might have caught herself in the mirror and remembered the boy with the nervous smile and the wild hair, and felt a brief, private satisfaction at having been the subject of a song that played on radios from Southampton to San Francisco. But she would not have dwelled on it. Life, after all, is not lived in the refrains of pop songs but in the slow accumulation of days: the making of tea, the tending of gardens, the laughter of friends who do not care about old scandals.

And so, in the spirit of a young biographer focused on gentle nostalgia and its insistence that time, if not always kind, is at least democratic, we find Maggie May content. She is older now, of course, but unbowed. She volunteers at the local library, teaches painting to children, and sometimes, when the mood strikes, she puts on a record and dances alone in her kitchen, smiling at the memory of a long-ago September and the boy who would write her into history.

If you asked her about Rod Stewart, she would laugh and say, “He was sweet, but he never did know my real name.” And she would mean it, kindly. Because in the end, Maggie May is not the sum of a single song or a single night. She is every woman who has ever lived beyond the story told about her, and found, in the quiet aftermath, a happiness all her own.

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