As the 1937 disappearance of Amelia Earhart approaches the century mark, the public’s fascination with the pilot continues to thrive. Professional historians and amateur sleuths alike continue to work to uncover the mystery surrounding one of the world’s most recognizable women. The aviator is even the subject of an annual celebration; the Amelia Earhart Festival occurs on the third weekend in July in the pilot’s hometown of Atchison, Kansas.
Film and television have long sought to dramatize Earhart’s life. Diane Keaton played the famous flyer in the 1994 television movie Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight, for example, while Hilary Swank assumed the same role for the film Amelia (2009).
Musicians, too, have often put Earhart’s legacy to song. Joni Mitchell incorporated the pilot’s tale into her 1976 song “Amelia” (“A ghost of aviation / She was swallowed by the sky / Or by the sea like me she had a dream to fly”) and singer/songwriter Heather Nova included a track called “I Miss My Sky (Amelia Earhart’s Last Days)” on her 2005 record Redbird. It was a short-lived folk-rock band led by British guitarists/vocalists Iain Matthews and Andy Roberts, however, that turned Earhart’s vanishing into the centerpiece of a full-length album.
The reference point for all of this, of course, is Earhart’s ill-fated attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world. On June 1st, 1937, Earhart and her lead navigator, Fred Noonan, launched their 29,000-mile journey from Miami. Slightly more than a month later, on July 2, running low on fuel while looking to land on Howland Island (about 1,700 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu), Earhart and Noonan disappeared. They were never seen or heard from again.
Amelia Earhart’s legacy was firmly established by the time she attempted to cross the globe. In May 1932, she became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean. A few months later, in August, she became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the continental United States. Then, in January 1935, Earhart became the first person (man or woman) to fly solo nonstop from Hawaii to the West Coast of the United States. She received both the National Geographic Society’s gold medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Shortly after the pair’s disappearance, the government launched a search led by the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. A two-week-plus operation found no evidence of either the crew or its plane (a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra). As the years passed, several hypotheses about her disappearance emerged, most notably from Fred Goerner, a CBS news correspondent, who, in his 1966 bestselling book The Search for Amelia Earhart, theorized Earhart and Noonan were US government spies and ended up as prisoners of the Japanese in a failed reconnaissance mission. In a related story, a man by the name of Jesus Salas alleged he was imprisoned next to a Caucasian woman on the island of Saipan shortly after Earhart’s disappearance. Neither claim was ever verified.
Several other theories emerged. Some believed Earhart secretly slipped back into America and assumed a new identity, while others claimed she landed on an unknown island and became a castaway. The most common (and, for many, the most logical) theory is that her plane simply crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
Thirty-five years later, a quartet called Plainsong used Amelia Earhart’s disappearance as the basis for an 11-song LP called In Search of Amelia Earhart. “Andy and I were fascinated by it [the story] at the time,” Matthews explained in a May 2025 episode of the Vinyl Relics podcast. “We just lived and breathed the story of Amelia Earhart.”
Amelia Earhart: Just a Speck Against the Sky
Iain Matthews played briefly with Fairport Convention before forming his own group, Matthews Southern Comfort, which scored a UK No. 1 hit in 1971 with a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” (the band shortened its name to Southern Comfort upon his departure and released three additional albums). He assembled Plainsong in early 1972 with Andy Roberts, who, along with piano and bass player David Richards, came from an obscure, short-lived group called Everyone. American guitarist and bass player Bob Ronga rounded out the lineup.
The band signed with Elektra Records and released its only album in October 1972. Despite the album’s title, its cover art and the photographs of Earhart on the inner gatefold and back cover, Plainsong’s lone LP isn’t necessarily a concept album. In fact, there are only two songs directly related to the pilot: “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight” is a cover of a 1939 number written by Red River David McEnery; Matthews wrote, “True Story of Amelia Earhart” (one other song — “I’ll Fly Away” — is not tied to the Earhart story although its title might suggest otherwise).
In the same podcast, Matthews explained how he and Roberts came up with the idea for an Earhart-related project: “Andy was the one that introduced me to Amelia Earhart,” said Matthews. “He bought a book — I believe it’s called The Search for Amelia Earhart. It was written by a San Francisco journalist by the name of Frederick Goerner. Andy read this book, and he was fascinated by all the theories and conspiracies.”
The two songs dedicated to Earhart take very different approaches. The matter-of-fact narrative of McEnery’s composition is buoyed by a memorable chorus: “And there’s a beautiful, beautiful field / Far away in a land that is fair / Happy landings to you, Amelia Earhart / Farewell, first lady of the air.”
The verses themselves recount the story of Earhart’s disappearance by relying on the most common theory that she and Noonan plunged into the sea:
Just a ship out on the ocean, just a speck against the sky
Amelia Earhart, flying out that day
With her partner, Captain Noonan, on the first day of July
She fell into the ocean far away
Twenty minutes later, an S.O.S. was heard
The voice that came was weak, but sounded brave
In the shark-infested waters, her plane came down that day
And our heroes fell into a watery grave
Now you’ve heard the story, this awful tragedy
We pray that she may fly home safe again
And in years to come, though others blaze a trail across the sea
We’ll never forget Amelia and her plane
Matthews’ piece provides an alternative viewpoint to McEnery’s interpretation of Earhart’s disappearance. As he explained in the Vinyl Relics podcast, Matthews felt it was important to counterbalance McEnery’s hypothesis.
“I just thought that the difference in the two songs was so great that we just had to show both sides of the story,” he explained. “It was almost like Red River Dave had written the official government song for Amelia Earhart to cover up all the dirty deeds, and I had to write my song to uncover all those dirty deeds.”
Thus, “True Story of Amelia Earhart” leans into the theory promoted by both Goerner (and, to a certain extent, Salas) that suggests the pilot served as a government spy and was captured by the Japanese and held prisoner on the island of Saipan:
For thirty days, the Lexington and others searched the sea
Before pronouncing Earhart lost
And all was going smoothly and the senators relaxed
Amelia and Noonan paid the cost
But the CBS man Goerner was confused by all the facts
He said, “There’s someone telling lies
Amelia’s plane was not the one they detailed in the news
The fuel tanks alone were twice that size”
And Jesus Salas, one of many, he had no call to lie
He was working in the harbour that day
And Saipan was a wartime stronghold of the Japanese
And Jesus saw the flyers led away
The song’s chorus reinforces Matthews’ suggestion of a government cover-up: “Oh Amelia, it’s true, you’re the lady of the air / This I’m not disputing anyhow / But if what Mr. Goerner said / Is only half the truth, then Amelia.”
Although Fred Goerner’s theory was never proven, his book sold almost half a million copies. He died of cancer in 1994 at the age of 69.
Can’t Fade Away
After Plainsong’s demise, Matthews dedicated himself to a solo career. He landed his biggest US hit in 1978 when “Shake It” from his Stealin‘ Home album hit the Top 20 (the song was used during the opening credits of the 1980 movie Little Darlings with Kristy McNichol and Tatum O’Neal). He continues to record and tour today. Roberts released two solo albums for Elektra Records in 1973 — Urban Cowboy and Andy Roberts and the Great Stampede — working alongside the likes of guitarists B.J. Cole, Ollie Halsall and Richard Thompson, and keyboardist Zoot Money.
In 2022, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the album, Lemon Records, a division of UK-based Cherry Red Records, released a whopping six-CD, 118-track box set called Plainsong: Following Amelia — The 1972 Recordings & More. The collection includes a previously unreleased album, various radio sessions and a series of live performances. The label has also released a trio of Iain Matthews solo collections, including Thro’ My Eyes: The Vertigo Years 1970-1974, Rhythm of the West: The Columbia Years 1975-1977 and I Can’t Fade Away: The Rockburgh Years 1978-1984.
The search for Earhart and Noonan continues. In 2025, a report from Nauticos, a deep-sea exploration and historical research organization, claimed to have estimated Earhart’s plane’s approximate position based on a restored radio system. Meanwhile, a group from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University is prepping for an October 2026 expedition to comb the area near Nikumaroro, a remote island in Kiribati in the central Pacific Ocean.
“We’ll never forget Amelia and her plane,” wrote David McEnery in 1939. His words were prophetic. As the anniversary of the pair’s attempted flight around the world nears 100 years, what happened to Amelia Earhart and Edward Noonan remains one of America’s greatest unsolved mysteries.