Simon and Garfunkel

Simon and Garfunkel, American musical duo, consisting of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, who achieved iconic status in the 1960s by wedding Everly Brothers-styled harmonies to themes of urban alienation and self-examination, which both matched and mirrored contemporary society’s changes. With album sales in excess of 100 million and as the winners of a clutch of Grammy Awards, the duo defined their times while illustrating the pressures of huge success and the limitations of cooperation under media scrutiny.

Early success as Tom and Jerry, college interlude, and signing with Columbia Records

Paul Frederic Simon (b. October 13, 1941, Newark, New Jersey, U.S.) and Arthur Ira Garfunkel (b. November 5, 1941, Queens, New York, U.S.) met in elementary school in 1953 in Queens, New York, and bonded over a love of doo-wop harmonies and rhythm and blues. Four years later both Simon and Garfunkel fell deeply under the spell of the Everly Brothers, whose “Bye Bye Love” was a huge hit in late spring. A match was lit that created a love for close harmony singing and a desire for music industry success.

Success came surprisingly fast albeit fleetingly as the duo, calling themselves Tom and Jerry, was overheard by impresario Sid Prosen, owner of Big Records, while making a self-financed recording of an original written by the pair called “Hey Schoolgirl” and was signed to a contract by him.

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Alan Freed, the disc jockey who had popularized the phrase rock and roll, played “Hey Schoolgirl” on his influential WINS radio show, and the song hit number 49 on Billboard’s Hot 100, selling more than 100,000 copies and earning the duo a spot on American Bandstand. Two further singles did not sell, and Simon and Garfunkel both decided to go to college.

In 1958 Simon recorded and released a single on the Big label under the moniker True Taylor without Garfunkel’s participation. Garfunkel considered this action a betrayal, and the seeds of mutual mistrust were sown. That mistrust would later haunt their careers.

In late 1963 Simon was working as a song plugger for the E.B. Marks music publishing catalog (song pluggers pitch compositions to music industry representatives in an attempt to have them recorded by contracted performers) while also pushing his own songs forward. Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson became interested in Simon’s song “He Was My Brother”, and a Columbia act, the Pilgrims, recorded it. Simon persuaded Wilson to give himself and Garfunkel a studio audition (engineered by future Simon and Garfunkel collaborator Roy Halee), and an impressed Wilson signed Simon and Garfunkel, finally under their real names, to Columbia.

Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. and Simon’s sojourn in England

Their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., was recorded in March 1964 and released in October. Only five of its 12 tracks were written solely by Simon. Although sales of the album in the United States were poor, it established the template for Simon and Garfunkel: Simon’s poetic, uber-melancholic lyrics brought to life by Garfunkel’s poignant, soaring angelic tenor and Simon’s own emotive voice, which ranged from a lower harmonic tenor to a strong baritone, while Simon’s deft acoustic guitar fingerpicking held the arrangements together.

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The album helped signal that the folk revival of the early 1960s was over. Because the entire musical ensemble employed on Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was never more than Simon’s guitar and the duo’s voices, augmented by an acoustic bass (played by Bill Lee, filmmaker Spike Lee’s father) and a second guitar, the album’s release at the onset of the swingin’ 4/4 beat-driven British Invasion was terribly ill-timed. Nevertheless, it would make the charts in early 1966 as a beneficiary of Simon and Garfunkel’s later success.

The initial failure of their debut album caused Garfunkel to return to his studies at Columbia University, whereas Simon made two trips to England, immersing himself in its still-vibrant folk music scene. While sharing lodgings with fellow future stars Al Stewart and Sandy Denny, Simon also grew friendly with folk guitar stars Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch, and Davy Graham. England proved inspirational for Simon, and in June and July 1965 he quickly recorded a bare-bones solo album called The Paul Simon Songbook, which contains a dozen vocal-and-guitar renditions of songs soon to be made famous by him and Garfunkel.

Tom Wilson’s folk-rock version of “The Sound of Silence” and Simon and Garfunkel’s rise to fame

While Simon was abroad, the folk rock sound of the Byrds’ version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” shook the music world. Wilson, sensing that the acoustic Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. version of “The Sound of Silence” had potential after it received airplay in Boston and Florida, overdubbed bass, drums, and electric 12-string guitar on the track and released it as a single in September 1965. Simon was in Denmark performing at folk clubs when he bought a copy of both Billboard and Cashbox and was stunned to see this new version in the singles charts…and slowly rising.

The new year began with the overdubbed single of “The Sound of Silence” at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Simon and Garfunkel reunited to rapidly record their second album and perform a college tour. Using two songs from an April 1965 session and eight songs hurriedly recorded in December 1965, along with the electrified version of “Sound of Silence,” an 11-song album wisely titled Sounds of Silence was released in January 1966. Most of its songs reflect the approach of the then current folk rock movement in their accompaniment by an electric band (“Leaves That Are Green,” “Blessed,” “Somewhere They Can’t Find Me,” “Richard Cory,” “A Most Peculiar Man,” “We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Goin’,” and “I Am a Rock”); however, some songs are sparsely acoustic as per the duo’s first album (“Kathy’s Song,” the instrumental “Anji,” and “April Come She Will”). The producer’s credit went to Bob Johnston, this being the second time Wilson had been ungratefully pushed aside by Columbia Records (the first being Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited after Wilson had produced the hit “Like a Rolling Stone”).

The album climbed to number 21 on the Billboard 200 chart. Suddenly Simon and Garfunkel found themselves in Teen Beat, Hullaballoo, and other teen magazines. Achieving success after struggling so long gave them confidence, and the duo insisted on total control in recording their next album.

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and The Graduate

Producer Johnston was given almost five months recording time for the new album, titled Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, as Simon and Garfunkel worked with an eight-track recording system for the first time, thrilled that they could now overdub their harmonies to pristine perfection and without “leakage” from Simon’s guitar. Four songs that had first appeared on The Paul Simon Songbook album were recorded: “Patterns,” “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall,” “A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission),” and the anti-war “The Side of a Hill,” the last having been refashioned—along with the second half of “Scarborough Fair,” an English folk song Simon was introduced to by Carthy—as “Scarborough Fair/Canticle.” Curiously, the songwriting credit for “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” went to Simon and Garfunkel despite the components from the traditional song being hundreds of years old. “Cloudy” was cowritten by Bruce Woodley of the Seekers (with whom Simon wrote “Red Rubber Ball,” a million-copy seller for the Cyrkle), but Woodley was not credited on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, though he received royalties. Equally puzzling was Simon’s “A Simple Desultory Philippic,” a blatantly unflattering pastiche of Columbia labelmate Dylan.

Released in October 1966, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme reached number 4 on the Billboard 200, staying on the chart for 145 weeks and eventually selling more than 3 million copies. The album, which resided at number 202 in the 2003 version of Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” eventually birthed four hit singles. In 1966 “Homeward Bound” made number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and “The Dangling Conversation” peaked at number 25. A year later a cover version of “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” by Harpers Bizarre reached number 13, and “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” released as a single in 1968 as a result of its exposure in hit movie The Graduate, climbed to number 11. It seemed things could not get better for the duo. Yet they did.

Film director Mike Nichols had hired Simon and Garfunkel to provide part of the soundtrack for his screen adaptation of Charles Webb’s novel The Graduate (1963). Having initially rejected Simon’s first two offerings, “Overs” and “Punky’s Dilemma,” Nichols felt that older material, such as “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” “April Come She Will,” “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine,” and “The Sound of Silence”, would fit. When Garfunkel mentioned that Simon had a new song called either “Mrs. Roosevelt” or “Mrs. Robinson,” Nichols exclaimed, “Don’t be ridiculous…we’re making a movie here! It’s Mrs. Robinson!” Thus, two early sketches of the uncompleted song appear in the film, the “deet-da-dee-dee” refrain illustrating the song’s then state of incompletion. Simon shared a Grammy with Dave Grusin (who composed the instrumental score) for best original score written for a motion picture or a television special. Clearly, the Simon and Garfunkel performances were what pushed the soundtrack album, released in February 1968, to Billboard’s number one slot by April 6 and also what kept it there for seven consecutive weeks until the duo’s next album, Bookends, displaced it. These two Simon and Garfunkel albums exchanged places at the top spot for 16 consecutive weeks.

Bookends

The stark black-and-white cover of Bookends (1968) reflected Simon’s ever-developing themes of alienation and loneliness. It was the first album for which Simon and Garfunkel were credited as producers (alongside longtime engineer Roy Halee), and it seemed surprisingly cohesive in light of the first side being a concept-based consideration of aging and the second side comprising recordings that had been started earlier with previous producers Johnston in 1966 and John Simon in 1967. Yet, if the first side confirmed Simon and Garfunkel’s artistic powers, with heartbreaking songs about old age (“Bookends Theme” and “Old Friends”) and loneliness (“Save the Life of My Child” and “Overs”), the second side confirmed their commercial clout, as “A Hazy Shade of Winter” reached number 13 as a single and “At the Zoo” number 16.

Although the album features solo vocals with fewer duets, Bookends does include the completed single version of “Mrs. Robinson” (credited as “from the motion picture ‘The Graduate,’” though it doesn’t appear on the film’s soundtrack), which won the Grammy for best contemporary pop performance—vocal duo or group. “Mrs. Robinson” also won the Grammy for record of the year, marking the first time that a song had won those two awards. Moreover, it became a gold record in the United States, Italy, Germany, and Denmark, as well as a platinum record in the United Kingdom.

Bridge Over Troubled Water and breakup

Simon and Garfunkel entered 1969 as one of the hottest acts in show business. Garfunkel accepted an acting role in Nichols’s film Catch-22, as did Simon, but Simon’s part was eliminated by screenwriter Buck Henry. The film took eight months to make, and the duo’s relationship was strained to the breaking point. A CBS TV special shown on November 30, 1969, called Songs of America, featured documentary footage of Simon and Garfunkel onstage and in the studio but was heavy with political content and drew poor ratings. The duo worked in tense conditions on what would prove to be their final album, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Released in January 1970, it went on to become one of the best-selling albums of the 1970s, ultimately selling some 25 million copies and winning six Grammy Awards, including album of the year. The title track proved an evergreen classic, while the singles “Cecilia” and “El Condor Pasa (If I Could)” rose to number 4 and number 18, respectively, on the Billboard Hot 100. “The Boxer,” though recorded some nine months before the album’s sessions, reached number 7 and was included on the album.But a personal toll had been taken, and the pair parted in July 1970.

Reunions and legacy

Simon and Garfunkel have reunited several times, most notably in 1975 when a one-off reunion single, “My Little Town,” was a hit and on September 19, 1981, when they drew an estimated half a million people to New York’s Central Park for a free concert. They remained estranged despite periodically undertaking world tours, on which they seldom spoke to each other offstage. In 2003 they received a Grammy for lifetime achievement, and in 2012 the National Recording Registry added the Sounds of Silence album, earmarking “The Sound of Silence” as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Yet for all their successes, Simon and Garfunkel remain best known for poetic pleas of romance and justice delivered in beautiful, tender harmony completely at odds with their professional working disposition.