The story of Simon & Garfunkel

Two boys from Queens

Paul Simon was born on the thirteenth of October 1941 in Newark, New Jersey, to Hungarian Jewish parents. His father Louis was a double bass player and dance bandleader who worked under the name Lee Sims, and later became a professor of education. His mother Belle was a primary school teacher. Three weeks after Paul, on the fifth of November 1941, Arthur Ira Garfunkel was born in Forest Hills, Queens, the middle of three sons of a travelling salesman named Jack and his wife Rose. In 1945 the Simons moved to Kew Gardens Hills in Queens, and the two families ended up living three blocks apart, and the boys went to the same schools, from Public School 164 to Forest Hills High.[1] [2] [3]

Art was the singer from the start. As a small boy he loved to stay behind in the school stairwell and sing, because the tiles gave his voice an echo. His father bought him a wire recorder, and he spent afternoons recording himself and listening back for flaws. At his bar mitzvah in 1954 he sang as a cantor for more than four hours. Paul first noticed him singing Nat King Cole's Too Young at a fourth grade talent show, and thought singing looked like a good way to get girls. The two became friends in 1953, when they were cast in a sixth grade production of Alice in Wonderland.[1] [2]

Like millions of kids, they fell for rock and roll on the radio. Paul remembered hearing Gee by the Crows and Earth Angel, and trying to explain the feeling to his jazz trained father, who did not buy it. The boys joined a street corner doo wop group called the Peptones and learned to harmonize, then started performing as a duo at school dances. Their true idols were the Everly Brothers, whose close two part harmony they copied note for note. Around the age of thirteen Paul wrote his first song, The Girl for Me. His father wrote out the words and chords, and sent a handwritten copy to the Library of Congress to register the copyright. It is still there.[1] [2]

Tom and Jerry

In 1957, at fifteen, the boys wrote a song while trying to remember the words to the Everly Brothers' Hey Doll Baby. They called it Hey Schoolgirl and paid twenty five dollars to record it at Sanders Recording Studio in Manhattan. A promoter named Sid Prosen overheard them, spoke to their parents, and signed them to his small label, Big Records. He gave them a new name, Tom and Jerry. Art became Tom Graph, a nod to his habit of charting the hit parade on graph paper, and Paul became Jerry Landis, borrowing the surname of a girl he had dated.[1] [2] [3]

Prosen knew how the business worked in 1957. He paid the famous disc jockey Alan Freed two hundred dollars to play the record, a practice known as payola, and Hey Schoolgirl became a nightly fixture on Freed's show. It sold more than one hundred thousand copies and reached number forty nine on the Billboard chart. The two teenagers appeared on Dick Clark's American Bandstand on the same bill as Jerry Lee Lewis. They shared about four thousand dollars from the song, and most of the money stayed with Prosen. Two more singles, Our Song and That's My Story, went nowhere.[1] [2]

Then came the first crack in the friendship. While still signed as a duo, Paul quietly recorded a solo single called True or False under the name True Taylor. Art saw it as a betrayal. Decades later he wrote in his memoir that the friendship was shattered for life, adding that he never forgets and never really forgives. In a 2015 interview he explained simply that Paul had made a record without telling him, and that he had thought friendship meant telling a friend what was going on. The pair drifted apart for several years.[1] [2] [3]

After graduating in 1958, Paul studied English at Queens College, while Art went to Columbia University, first for architecture and then art history. Paul kept making records under a string of names, including Jerry Landis and Paul Kane, and scored tiny hits like Motorcycle with Tico and the Triumphs and The Lone Teen Ranger. He also cut demo records for other songwriters, sometimes with his friend Carole King, for twenty five dollars a session. Art recorded a couple of flop singles as Artie Garr. At Columbia his roommate Sandy Greenberg went blind from glaucoma, and Art read his textbooks aloud to him so he could keep up his studies.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Folk City, a flop and a year in England

By 1963 folk music was booming, and Bob Dylan had shown that a young New Yorker could write serious songs. Paul started writing in a new style, and the old friends teamed up again. Calling themselves Kane and Garr, they played Monday nights at Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Village. Their set included a new song called The Sound of Silence. Paul later said he wrote it in his bathroom with the lights off, because the tiled room worked like an echo chamber and he liked the sound of the running tap. At Folk City they caught the ear of Tom Wilson, a Harvard educated African American staff producer at Columbia Records who was also working with Dylan.[1] [2] [3]

Wilson let them audition in the studio, they sang The Sound of Silence, and Columbia signed them. Paul insisted on using their real names, and so they became Simon and Garfunkel. Their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., was recorded in March 1964 and released on the nineteenth of October. It included a song called He Was My Brother, dedicated to Andrew Goodman, a Queens College classmate of Paul's. That summer Goodman had gone to Mississippi as a civil rights volunteer, and he was abducted and murdered along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. The album sold only about three thousand copies. At a Greenwich Village club, the folk singer Dave Van Ronk said Hello darkness became a running joke in the audience.[1] [2] [3]

As the album sank, Paul spent more and more time in England, playing small folk clubs. At the Railway Inn folk club in Brentwood, Essex, he met Kathy Chitty, an eighteen year old who sold tickets at the door. She became his girlfriend and his muse, the Kathy of Kathy's Song and America. The English folk scene changed his playing. He learned fingerpicking from Martin Carthy, and learned the guitar piece Anji from Davey Graham. Carthy also taught him an old ballad called Scarborough Fair. In June 1965 Paul recorded a solo album in London, The Paul Simon Songbook, with just his voice and guitar. Kathy is sitting beside him on the cover.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His landlady, Judith Piepe, sent a tape of his songs to the BBC, and they were played on a morning radio show. Art came over to stay for the summer of 1964, then went back to his studies, and Paul even returned home for a semester of law school to please his parents. He kept touring the north of England. After a gig in Widnes he waited for a train and began writing a song about missing Kathy. It became Homeward Bound, and a plaque on the platform at Widnes station now marks the spot. By the autumn of 1965 Paul was playing clubs in Denmark and assumed his future lay in England. Art had finished his degree and started a master's in mathematics.[1] [2] [3]

The hit nobody asked for

Back in America, something strange was happening. A late night disc jockey at WBZ in Boston started playing The Sound of Silence from the forgotten album, and college students at Harvard and Tufts loved it. Requests spread down the East Coast all the way to Florida. Tom Wilson, fresh from producing Dylan's electric breakthrough Like a Rolling Stone, decided the song needed a rock sound. In the summer of 1965, without telling Simon or Garfunkel, he took the original acoustic recording and had session players from the Dylan sessions add electric guitar, bass and drums. Engineer Roy Halee drenched it in echo. The new version came out as a single on the thirteenth of September 1965.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Paul was in Denmark when he picked up a copy of Billboard, as he did every week, and saw his own song climbing the Hot 100. A few days later Art called him, thrilled, and a copy of the single arrived in the mail. According to their friend Al Stewart, Paul was horrified when he heard it, especially the moment where the band slows down so the voices can catch up. Art was more relaxed, thinking it might sell. It did. On the first of January 1966 The Sound of Silence was number one in America, and that month it swapped the top spot back and forth with the Beatles' We Can Work It Out.[1] [2]

Paul flew home and moved back into his old room at his parents' house. He liked to tell the story of sitting in a parked car in Queens with Art one night when the radio announced that the number one record was by Simon and Garfunkel. Art turned to him and said those guys must be having a great time. Columbia wanted an album fast. Recorded in about three weeks and named Sounds of Silence, it was released on the seventeenth of January 1966 and was mostly electric remakes of songs from Paul's English album. Homeward Bound reached number five and I Am a Rock reached number three. Some critics still dismissed the duo as manufactured folk.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Parsley, sage and the movies

Paul considered Sounds of Silence a rush job, and for the next album he demanded total control. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme took months, cost around thirty thousand dollars, a huge sum for the time, and was the duo's first album on eight track tape. Art felt the recording of Scarborough Fair was the moment they became their own producers, sitting beside Roy Halee at the mixing desk. They wove the old ballad together with Canticle, an anti war lyric Paul had written earlier, set to a new melody largely by Art. The album closed with Seven O'Clock News slash Silent Night, the carol sung over a real sounding news bulletin about Vietnam, civil rights, the murders of eight student nurses and the overdose death of Lenny Bruce.[1] [2] [3]

Released on the twenty fourth of October 1966, Parsley reached number four and eventually went triple platinum. Their manager Mort Lewis kept them off most television unless they could play an uninterrupted set, which helped build an image of two serious, slightly alienated poets on the college circuit. A Hazy Shade of Winter and At the Zoo were hits as singles. In June 1967 they helped organize the Monterey Pop Festival and headlined its first night. They came on after midnight with just two voices and one guitar, and finished at half past one in the morning. One critic wrote that they already seemed left behind by the louder music of that summer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then Paul hit writer's block. There was no new album in 1967, which worried Columbia, and label boss Clive Davis sent in a young producer named John Simon, no relation, to get things moving. Paul distrusted the executives. Once, he and Art secretly taped a meeting where Davis gave them a fatherly talk about working faster, so they could laugh at it later. Meanwhile the director Mike Nichols was editing a film called The Graduate and had fallen in love with their records. He and his editor timed scenes to songs like The Sound of Silence as placeholders, then decided nothing new could replace them.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Paul worried that writing for a film meant selling out, but Nichols charmed him, and a deal paid him twenty five thousand dollars to submit three new songs. Nichols did not care for the first two, Punky's Dilemma and Overs. Asked if they had anything else, the duo played him an unfinished tune with a placeholder name, sung partly as dee de dee. It had been about Mrs. Roosevelt, and now it became Mrs. Robinson, after the film's older seductress. The Graduate opened in December 1967 with fragments of the song, plus The Sound of Silence and Scarborough Fair, and its soundtrack album went to number one.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bookends and Mrs. Robinson

Their fourth album, Bookends, was pieced together slowly from late 1966 to early 1968. Side one was a song cycle about a life, from youth to old age. For Voices of Old People, Art went to two homes for the elderly with a tape recorder. The duo's old contract meant Columbia paid for studio time, so they hired brass, viola players and percussionists, and spent more than fifty hours on Punky's Dilemma alone. Paul was writing about loneliness and mortality, in songs like America, about two young lovers on a Greyhound bus looking for the country, and Old Friends, about two old men on a park bench. Richard Avedon shot the cover.[1] [2]

Bookends came out on the third of April 1968. The next day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and riots broke out across America. The album spent seven weeks at number one, and with the Graduate soundtrack it made Simon and Garfunkel the biggest duo in the world. Clive Davis wanted to charge a dollar more for Bookends because it came with a poster. Paul was outraged at charging extra for what was bound to be Columbia's best selling album of the year, and instead the duo won a higher royalty rate. Mrs. Robinson, released as a single on the fifth of April, went to number one.[1] [2] [3]

At the Grammys in 1969, Mrs. Robinson became the first rock song to win Record of the Year. The duo refused to perform it live at the ceremony, sending a film of themselves romping around Yankee Stadium instead, a nod to the song's line about Joe DiMaggio. Years later Paul met DiMaggio in a New York restaurant. The baseball legend asked why the song wondered where he had gone, since he was busy doing commercials for Mr. Coffee. Paul explained he meant heroes were in short supply. DiMaggio accepted that, and they shook hands. Paul turned down offers to score Midnight Cowboy and other films.[1] [2]

Mike Nichols now cast both men in his next film, Catch-22. But the screenwriter Buck Henry felt the film was crowded and wrote Paul's part out, while Art's role as the young airman Nately grew. In January 1969 Art left to film in Mexico, and the shoot ran for months longer than planned. Paul stayed in New York writing songs, and wrote The Only Living Boy in New York about being left behind. In his memoir he later admitted that if Artie had become a big movie star he would have left, and that it made him realize he did not need Artie. Art himself later said the Catch-22 casting was at the heart of their break up.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That autumn the duo went on what they planned as their last tour, starting in Ames, Iowa, and ending at a sold out Carnegie Hall on the twenty seventh of November 1969. Three days later CBS aired their first television special, Songs of America, directed by their friend Charles Grodin. It set their music against footage of Vietnam, riots, marches and the funeral train of Robert Kennedy. The sponsor, AT and T, was horrified and demanded its six hundred thousand dollars back. The BBC later reported that a million viewers switched over to watch figure skating instead. The special was not seen again for more than forty years.[1] [2] [3]

Bridge over troubled water

In the spring of 1969 Paul borrowed an old Swan Silvertones album from the musician Al Kooper. On their version of Mary Don't You Weep, the singer Claude Jeter ad libbed a line about being your bridge over deep water. Paul picked up his guitar and the song came to him so quickly he wondered where it had come from. He told colleagues he had written his greatest song. The last verse, about a silver girl, was for his girlfriend Peggy Harper, who had noticed her first grey hairs. He later met Jeter and wrote him a cheque. Allen Toussaint liked to say the song had two writers, Paul Simon and God.[1] [2] [3]

Paul wanted Art to sing it alone, in a pure choirboy voice. Art hesitated, preferring Paul's falsetto on the demo, and Paul took the hesitation as a snub. The music was recorded in Los Angeles in August 1969 with the session aces Hal Blaine, Joe Osborn and Larry Knechtel, who turned it into gospel piano. Art and Roy Halee pushed for a bigger third verse and a huge ending. Art recorded his vocal in New York that November. On stage, when audiences cheered Art's solo, Paul sat to the side thinking, that's my song. Clive Davis overruled the duo, who wanted Cecilia out first, and released Bridge over Troubled Water as the lead single.[1] [2] [3]

The album took years of ideas and a lot of studio craft. The Boxer, released in March 1969, took over one hundred hours to record in Nashville, New York and inside St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University. For its huge drum crack, Hal Blaine played next to an elevator shaft. Cecilia grew out of a late night party where friends banged out a rhythm on a piano bench and a tape recorder caught it. El Condor Pasa set Paul's lyrics over a recording by the Andean band Los Incas. He had been told the tune was a traditional folk song, but it was written by the Peruvian composer Daniel Alomia Robles, whose son sued successfully in 1970. He later called it an honest mistake.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bridge over Troubled Water was released on the twenty sixth of January 1970. The single spent six weeks at number one in America, the most of any song that year, and the album topped the charts in ten countries. It was the best selling album of 1970, 1971 and 1972, and remained Columbia's biggest seller until Michael Jackson's Thriller. It has sold more than twenty five million copies. The album ended with Song for the Asking, which some heard as an olive branch between the two. On So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright, Roy Halee can be heard calling out so long already, Artie.[1] [2] [3]

But the partnership was over. Paul later said that making the album had stopped being fun, and he no longer wanted to deal with the personality abrasions. Art went off to act in another Mike Nichols film, Carnal Knowledge, and Paul began a solo record. They never formally announced a split. At the urging of Peggy, whom he married in 1969, Paul finally called Clive Davis to confirm it. Their last concert of the era was at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on the eighteenth of July 1970. In March 1971 the already disbanded duo won six Grammys, including Album of the Year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Separate roads in the seventies

After the split they spoke only two or three times a year. Art starred in Carnal Knowledge in 1971 and earned a Golden Globe nomination. Then, surprisingly, he spent a school year teaching geometry to teenagers at a small private school in Connecticut. He told his pupils they would talk about fame at the end of the year, but first they would do geometry. In 1972 he married the architect Linda Grossman, whom he had met during the sessions for The Boxer. They divorced in 1975. His first solo album, Angel Clare, came out in 1973 and reached number five.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Paul's solo career took off quickly. His 1972 album Paul Simon gave him Mother and Child Reunion, recorded with Jimmy Cliff's band, and Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard. There Goes Rhymin' Simon followed in 1973 with Kodachrome and Loves Me Like a Rock. His son Harper was born in 1972, but the marriage to Peggy ended in 1975, and the darker album Still Crazy After All These Years followed. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year and gave him a number one with 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. The duo reunited briefly in June 1972 at Madison Square Garden, singing for the presidential candidate George McGovern.[1] [2] [3]

In 1975 the two men dropped in together on a recording session with John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, and made peace for a while. Paul wrote a song for Art, telling him it would be a nasty one, because Art was singing too many sweet songs. My Little Town appeared on both of their solo albums that year and reached number nine. On the eighteenth of October 1975 Paul hosted the second ever episode of Saturday Night Live, and Art joined him to sing The Boxer, Scarborough Fair and the new song. Paul became close friends with the show's creator Lorne Michaels and lived next door to him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Art's life was shadowed by tragedy. From 1974 he lived with the actress and photographer Laurie Bird, who appeared on the cover of his album Breakaway and shot the cover of Watermark. On the fifteenth of June 1979 she died by suicide, from an overdose of Valium, in the Manhattan apartment they shared. She was twenty five. Her own mother had also taken her life. Art said she was beautiful in a lonesome, haunted way and that he adored her, and he fell into a deep depression. That same year his recording of Bright Eyes, from the animated film Watership Down, was the biggest selling single of the year in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

Central Park and the long rift

By 1980 both solo careers had cooled. Paul's film One Trick Pony had flopped and he had been treated for depression. Central Park was falling apart, and the promoter Ron Delsener and parks commissioner Gordon Davis came up with a free benefit concert. Paul liked the idea and called Art, who was on holiday in Switzerland and flew straight home. Rehearsals were miserable, Paul said, and they fought all the time. On Saturday the nineteenth of September 1981, after a day of rain, Mayor Ed Koch introduced them on the Great Lawn. They opened with Mrs. Robinson in front of an estimated half a million people.[1] [2]

They sang twenty one songs, including some of Paul's solo hits, and Art sang Bridge over Troubled Water. During a new song, The Late Great Johnny Ace, a man ran onto the stage shouting that he needed to talk to Paul, and security carried him off. It was a tense moment, only nine months after John Lennon had been shot dead a short walk away, a killing the song mentions. The live album went double platinum in America and diamond in France, where it sold more than a million copies. Yet the concert raised only about fifty one thousand dollars for the park itself.[1]

A world tour followed in 1982, but for most of it the two barely spoke. They started a reunion album called Think Too Much. According to Paul, Art refused to learn the songs in the studio and would not give up smoking, and in the end Paul wiped Art's vocals and released the record as his solo album Hearts and Bones in 1983. It sold poorly. Paul's short marriage to the actress Carrie Fisher also ended in 1984. Then came Graceland, recorded partly in apartheid era Johannesburg, which brought him huge success and fierce criticism for breaking the cultural boycott. Its long sessions also kept Roy Halee from working on Art's Christmas album, another sore point.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In a 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch, Paul played himself, a man who remembers everyone he has ever met, until Art walks up and he draws a total blank. When they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, Art thanked Paul as the person who most enriched his life by putting those songs through him. Paul replied that they agreed about almost nothing, but it was true, he had enriched Art's life quite a bit. They sang three songs and left without speaking. When Paul played his own free Central Park show in 1991, he did not invite Art, who told the New York Times he was not good enough to be invited.[1] [2] [3]

Still, the thaw came. In 1993 Paul invited Art to share a sold out run of twenty one nights at the Paramount Theater in New York, followed by shows in the Far East. Then relations cooled again for the rest of the decade. When Paul was inducted into the Hall of Fame a second time, as a solo artist in 2001, he said he regretted the ending of their friendship and hoped that one day before they died they would make peace. After a pause, he added, no rush. Art married the former model Kim Cermak in 1988, and their son Art Junior would later become a singer too.[1] [2] [3]

Old friends

The peace Paul joked about arrived in 2003. At the Grammys on the twenty third of February, where they received a Lifetime Achievement Award, they opened the show with The Sound of Silence, and it felt so good that they planned a full tour. The Old Friends tour began that October and earned an estimated one hundred and twenty three million dollars. Their heroes the Everly Brothers joined them each night to sing Bye Bye Love. On the thirty first of July 2004 they ended it with a free concert in front of the Colosseum in Rome, drawing around six hundred thousand people, even more than Central Park.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 2009, at the reopening of New York's Beacon Theatre, Paul brought out his old friend Art, who had flown in on a day off from his own tour, and they sang Old Friends, The Boxer and The Sound of Silence. A tour of Australia, New Zealand and Japan followed. Then, in January 2010, Art briefly choked on a piece of lobster at a New York steakhouse and damaged his vocal cords. At the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival that April he struggled badly, later saying he was terrible and crazy nervous and leaned on Paul. He was diagnosed with vocal cord paresis, and the rest of the tour was cancelled.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In June 2010 they sang Mrs. Robinson together at a tribute to Mike Nichols, the man who had made them film stars and, in Art's view, helped split them up. It may have been their last performance together. Art spent years slowly rebuilding his voice, and when it came back, Paul would not commit to a tour. Frustrated, Art vented in the press. In 2015 he asked, through a newspaper interview, how Paul could walk away from this lucky place on top of the world, and called him an idiot. The next year Paul told NPR that, quite honestly, they did not get along, so a reunion would never happen again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Both men kept working into old age. Paul played a farewell tour that ended in Queens on the twenty second of September 2018, and in 2023 released Seven Psalms, a single thirty three minute piece for acoustic guitar. He revealed that during its making he had suddenly lost most of the hearing in his left ear. Art published a memoir in 2017 and in April 2023 announced he would not return to touring for the foreseeable future. In November 2024 he released a duets album, Father and Son, with Art Junior. He also told The Times that he and Paul had met for lunch, that Paul told him how much an old interview had hurt him, and that he cried and said he had been a fool.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Art said he could still feel Paul's hug, and that Paul was his brother. In February 2025 Paul opened the fiftieth anniversary special of Saturday Night Live by singing Homeward Bound with Sabrina Carpenter, then went back on the road with a tour of smaller theatres chosen to suit his hearing. As of 2026, the two have not performed together again. Their legacy is secure, with a string of Grammys, more than one hundred million records sold, and songs like The Sound of Silence, which BMI ranked among the most performed of the twentieth century. As one biography put it, in just a few years they became the voice of an era.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Simon & Garfunkel

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Friends since a sixth grade play in 1953, they made some of the most beautiful harmonies in pop, yet fought for most of their lives. Garfunkel never forgave Simon's secret solo single as a teenager, and Simon resented Garfunkel's film career and his solo spotlight on Bridge over Troubled Water. They split in 1970, reunited many times, and traded barbs in the press. In November 2024 Garfunkel said they had met for lunch, cried, and made peace.[1] [2] [3]

Simon and Garfunkel and Tom Wilson. The Columbia producer, a Harvard graduate and an African American pioneer in rock production, signed the duo after hearing them at Gerde's Folk City and produced their first album. In 1965, without asking them, he overdubbed electric instruments onto The Sound of Silence and turned a flop into a number one hit. Wilson also produced Dylan, the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1978, aged forty seven.[1] [2]

Simon and Garfunkel and Roy Halee. The engineer and producer met them at their Columbia audition in 1964, helped create the electric Sound of Silence, and co produced their later albums. He discovered their blend worked best with both voices on the same microphone at the same time. Halee won Grammys for Mrs. Robinson, Bookends and Bridge over Troubled Water, then went with Simon to Johannesburg to record Graceland. His father was the singing voice of the cartoon hero Mighty Mouse.[1] [2] [3]

Simon and Garfunkel and Clive Davis. The Columbia Records boss guided their biggest years but clashed with them often. He pushed them to work faster, sent in producer John Simon, and wanted to charge a dollar more for Bookends, which Simon refused. The duo once secretly taped one of his lectures to laugh at later. Yet Davis was right about Bridge over Troubled Water, overruling them to release it as the lead single. Simon later called Davis to confirm the break up.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Simon and Garfunkel and Mike Nichols. The director fell in love with their records while making The Graduate, used their songs throughout the film, and coaxed Mrs. Robinson out of Paul Simon. That made them superstars. He then cast both men in Catch-22 but saw Simon's part cut while Garfunkel's grew, which Garfunkel blamed for the split. Garfunkel also starred in Nichols's Carnal Knowledge. In 2010 the duo sang Mrs. Robinson at a tribute to Nichols, possibly their last show together.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Paul Simon and Martin Carthy. The English folk guitarist taught Simon fingerpicking and the traditional ballad Scarborough Fair during Simon's time in England. When Simon and Garfunkel recorded it in 1966 without crediting Carthy's arrangement, it caused a rift that lasted more than thirty years. They reconciled in October 2000, when Simon invited Carthy to sing the song with him on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo in London.[1] [2] [3]

Paul Simon and Kathy Chitty. Simon met her in 1964 at a folk club in Brentwood, Essex, where she sold tickets. She was eighteen and he was twenty two. She is named in Kathy's Song and America, is behind Homeward Bound, and sits beside him on the cover of The Paul Simon Songbook. Shy by nature, she wanted no part of fame, and when The Sound of Silence made him a star and took him back to America, they parted.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Paul Simon and Peggy Harper. Simon's first wife, whom he married in 1969, is the silver girl of Bridge over Troubled Water, written when she found her first grey hairs. It was at her urging that Simon called Clive Davis to confirm the duo's split. Their son Harper was born in 1972. They divorced in 1975, and the break up fed into Still Crazy After All These Years and 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher. Simon met the Star Wars actress through Shelley Duvall in 1978. Their stormy relationship led to a marriage from 1983 to 1984, and they dated again afterwards. Fisher broke off an engagement to Dan Aykroyd to go back to Simon. Songs including Hearts and Bones and Graceland are linked to her, and she wrote that She Moves On was about her. She said she felt privileged to appear in his songs.[1] [2]

Paul Simon and Edie Brickell. The two first locked eyes in 1988 when Brickell was singing What I Am on Saturday Night Live and Simon was standing near the camera, which made her forget the words. They married on the thirtieth of May 1992 and have three children. In April 2014 police were called to their Connecticut home after a domestic dispute, and both received summonses for disorderly conduct. They later worked on duets together.[1] [2]

Art Garfunkel and Laurie Bird. The young actress and photographer, known for Two Lane Blacktop, lived with Garfunkel from 1974. She appeared on the cover of his album Breakaway and photographed the cover of Watermark. In June 1979 she died by suicide in their Manhattan apartment, aged twenty five. Garfunkel fell into a deep depression, dedicated his 1981 album Scissors Cut to her, and wrote about her in his prose poems.[1] [2]

Art Garfunkel and Sandy Greenberg. They were roommates at Columbia when Greenberg went blind from glaucoma. Garfunkel read his textbooks to him, and once deliberately left him to find his own way home through Grand Central, secretly following him the whole way. Greenberg went on to a Harvard doctorate and a career as an inventor. Greenberg is said to have given Garfunkel money to record an early demo, and decades later the two old friends retraced that subway journey together for National Geographic.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Simon & Garfunkel

• Simon and Garfunkel recorded their first song in a coin operated booth at Coney Island for twenty five cents. In a 1967 New Yorker interview, Art Garfunkel recalled that as teenage rock and roll fans the pair cut their first song in one of the booths at Coney Island. It cost them a quarter.[1]
• As a teenager, Art Garfunkel charted the top forty on sheets of graph paper, which inspired his stage name Tom Graph. Garfunkel told the New Yorker he tracked each record as a coloured dot on a line, watching songs rise and fall. The habit gave him the name he used in Tom and Jerry.[1] [2]
• Paul Simon's father was a professional dance bandleader who performed under the name Lee Sims. Louis Simon played double bass and led dance bands before becoming a professor of education at the City College of New York. He had little time for rock and roll.[1]
• To promote Hey Schoolgirl, their label paid disc jockey Alan Freed two hundred dollars in payola. Sid Prosen of Big Records bribed Freed to play the single, and it became a nightly staple on his show. It went on to sell over one hundred thousand copies.[1]
• The cover of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was ruined for hundreds of shots by rude graffiti on the subway wall. The photo was taken at the Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street subway station. Garfunkel said many pictures were unusable because of an obscene phrase behind them, which inspired Simon's song A Poem on the Underground Wall.[1] [2]
• The session men who electrified The Sound of Silence came straight from Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone sessions. Tom Wilson kept guitarist Al Gorgoni and drummer Bobby Gregg from the Dylan session, added Vinnie Bell and Bob Bushnell, and overdubbed the duo's acoustic track without telling them.[1]
• Paul Simon found out his song was climbing the charts by reading Billboard in Denmark. He had routinely bought Billboard for years. In the autumn of 1965, playing small Danish clubs, he saw The Sound of Silence on the Hot 100, then checked Cashbox and saw it there too.[1]
• The scarves the duo wear on the Sounds of Silence cover came from an English school in Hornchurch. They belonged to the Campion School, attended by the boys of the Brentwood family Simon lodged with in England. Later pressings airbrushed out the Tiger Beat magazines Garfunkel held on the back cover.[1]
• The first pressing of Sounds of Silence misspelled Anji as Angie and credited it to the wrong guitarist. The label credited the instrumental to Bert Jansch, who had recorded it, instead of its composer Davey Graham. Both mistakes were fixed on later pressings.[1]
• The newsreader on Seven O'Clock News slash Silent Night was a radio disc jockey, Charlie O'Donnell. The track sets a gentle Silent Night against a mock bulletin of real events from summer 1966, including Lenny Bruce's death and the Richard Speck murders.[1] [2]
• Simon's 1965 solo album was released in America in 1969, then recalled within days because he objected. He disliked The Paul Simon Songbook, writing in its liner notes that some songs no longer felt like him. It only became widely available in the US in a 1981 box set.[1] [2]
• The single label of Fakin' It listed its running time as two minutes seventy four seconds. The song actually ran three minutes fourteen. The impossible time was a trick to slip past radio programmers who still insisted on singles under three minutes.[1]
• Look closely at the Bookends cover and you can see photographer Richard Avedon reflected in Paul Simon's eyes. Avedon, one of the most celebrated photographers of the era, was commissioned to shoot the black and white cover of the 1968 album.[1]
• When viola players arrived for Bookends, the duo spent almost all night trying to capture the sound of them tuning up. Their old contract meant Columbia paid for studio time, so they could afford experiments like this one.[1]
• Mrs. Robinson could not be nominated for an Oscar because it was not written specifically for The Graduate. The song grew out of an unfinished tune called Mrs. Roosevelt, so it was ruled ineligible for Best Original Song.[1]
• Joe DiMaggio once asked Paul Simon why the song said he had gone away, since he was busy doing Mr. Coffee ads. Simon explained he meant DiMaggio as a true hero in an age short of them. After DiMaggio's death in 1999, Simon sang Mrs. Robinson at Yankee Stadium in his honour.[1]
• Frank Sinatra changed Jesus to Jilly in his cover of Mrs. Robinson. Some radio stations had balked at the religious line. According to Garfunkel, Simon objected, and Sinatra's office replied, in effect, shut up, kid.[1] [2]
• The famous drum crack in The Boxer was recorded next to an elevator shaft at Columbia's offices. Hal Blaine hit his snare as hard as he could in the hallway. At one point an elderly security guard stepped out of the elevator and was badly startled by the blast.[1]
• Guitarist Fred Carter Jr.'s heavy breathing is audible on The Boxer, and the producers decided to keep it. Carter was surrounded by about seven microphones, including one that picked up his breath. They tried removing it, then decided it worked almost like a rhythm part.[1]
• The Boxer was the first record to use sixteen track recording, made by syncing two eight track machines by hand. Only eight track recorders existed, so the team carefully locked two together. The song took more than one hundred hours to finish.[1]
• Simon and Garfunkel turned down an invitation to play Woodstock because they were busy recording. They were working on Bridge over Troubled Water in 1969 and declined several performance invitations, including the festival.[1]
• An arranger misheard the chorus and titled his sheet music Like a Pitcher of Water. Paul Simon framed it. The mistaken title appeared on the string score for Bridge over Troubled Water. The same arranger also misspelled Garfunkel's name.[1] [2] [3]
• Simon named a Bach chorale, O Sacred Head, Now Wounded, as an inspiration for parts of the Bridge melody. The song's title came from a gospel line by Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones, and Simon also drew on Bach for its melody.[1]
• On So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright, engineer Roy Halee can be heard calling out so long already, Artie. The song salutes the architect and also Garfunkel, who had once studied architecture. Many heard the shout as a hint of the coming split.[1]
• Paul Simon's favourite cover of any of his songs is Aretha Franklin's Bridge over Troubled Water. Franklin sang it at the 1971 Grammys, the same night the already split duo won five awards for the song.[1]
• Art Garfunkel spent a school year teaching geometry at a small Connecticut academy, after Bridge over Troubled Water. He told his students they would talk about geometry, not his hit record, and deal with the fame trip at the end of the year.[1] [2]
• Art Garfunkel walked across the United States in forty separate stages between 1983 and 1997. He walked from New York City to the Oregon coast, later walked across Japan, and crossed Europe on foot from Ireland to Istanbul, writing poems along the way.[1]
• Although born in Queens, Garfunkel has been a lifelong Philadelphia Phillies fan. He said he never followed the crowd. After seeing the Phillies at Ebbets Field at the age of eight, he stayed loyal through what he called decades of pain.[1]
• Art Garfunkel is a first cousin of Lou Pearlman, the boy band manager later convicted of fraud. Pearlman built acts like the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC before his conviction. Garfunkel's mother was born Rose Pearlman.[1]
• Paul Simon once sang Still Crazy After All These Years on Saturday Night Live dressed as a turkey. In the 1976 Thanksgiving episode he stopped mid song, embarrassed, and stormed off to yell at Lorne Michaels. It became one of the show's most replayed sketches.[1] [2]
• The famous Central Park reunion concert raised only about fifty one thousand dollars for the park. Paul Simon paid the seven hundred and fifty thousand dollar cost of staging and filming the show himself. Later benefits and donors helped restore the park.[1]
• The Concert in Central Park was certified diamond in France, selling over one million two hundred thousand copies there. In America it reached number six and went double platinum. The live Wake Up Little Susie became the duo's last top forty hit.[1]
• Paul Simon claims Simon and Garfunkel was the first pop act to use just two surnames. He said no artists before them had used their last names without first names. Columbia chose it over Tom and Jerry.[1]
• In 2017 The Sound of Silence returned to the Billboard rock charts thanks to the Sad Affleck meme. A viral video set the song to Ben Affleck's gloomy face in an interview, and it climbed to number six on the Hot Rock Songs chart.[1]
• Paul Simon personally emailed the metal band Disturbed to praise their cover of The Sound of Silence. After seeing them perform it on Conan in 2016, he wrote that it was a really powerful performance. Singer David Draiman said he was honored beyond words.[1]
• Garfunkel wrecked his voice in 2010 by briefly choking on a piece of lobster at a New York steakhouse. The incident left one vocal cord stiffer than the other. He was diagnosed with vocal cord paresis and spent years relearning to sing.[1] [2]
• Paul Simon's 2009 Beacon Theatre reunion with Garfunkel happened because Art flew up on a day off from his Florida tour. Nobody expected him, since he had solo shows the nights before and after. The crowd included Paul McCartney and New York's mayor.[1]
• During the sessions for Bridge, Bob Dylan dropped by just after the duo had been screaming harmonies in an echo chamber. Garfunkel said they came out of the booth after recording the aahs for The Only Living Boy in New York and found Dylan waiting.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.