Paul Simon

Queens

Paul Frederic Simon was born in Newark, New Jersey, on 13 October 1941, to Hungarian-Jewish parents. His father, Louis, taught education at City College of New York and led dance bands as Lee Sims, and his mother, Belle, was an elementary school teacher. In 1945 the family moved to Kew Gardens Hills in Queens. He met Art Garfunkel at about eleven, and by thirteen the two were singing together. As Tom & Jerry they reached number 49 on Billboard in 1957 with Hey, Schoolgirl, which sold more than 100,000 copies. Into the early 1960s he made records under other names, among them Jerry Landis and Tico and the Triumphs, and he graduated in English from Queens College in 1963.

London and the duo

Columbia signed Simon & Garfunkel in early 1964 after the producer Tom Wilson heard them sing The Sound of Silence, but their first album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., failed. Simon moved to England and played folk clubs, coffeehouses and the BBC. At a folk club in Brentwood, Essex, he met Kathy Chitty, who sold the tickets. She was eighteen. She is the Kathy of Kathy's Song and of America, and she stands beside him on the cover of The Paul Simon Songbook, which he recorded alone with an acoustic guitar in London in June 1965.

Meanwhile Wilson had overdubbed electric instruments onto The Sound of Silence without telling the duo, and by January 1966 it was number one in America. Simon & Garfunkel made Sounds of Silence, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and Bookends, and songs for The Graduate. Mrs. Robinson won Record of the Year, and Bridge over Troubled Water (1970) won Album of the Year. That year the duo split.

On his own

His first solo album for Columbia, Paul Simon (1972), went to number one in Britain, and Still Crazy After All These Years (1975) topped the American chart and won Album of the Year. He moved to Warner Bros. for One-Trick Pony (1980), which was also his film, and in September 1981 he and Garfunkel played to more than half a million people in Central Park. Hearts and Bones (1983) sold worse than anything he had made, and his marriage to Carrie Fisher ended in 1984.

Graceland

That year Heidi Berg, whom he had agreed to produce, lent him a bootleg cassette of South African music, and he kept it. In February 1985 he and the engineer Roy Halee flew to Johannesburg and spent about two weeks at Ovation Studios with local players, paying them $200 an hour, about three times the top New York rate. Harry Belafonte had advised him to seek the approval of the ANC, and he did not. The tracks came first, and the songs were written over them and finished at the Hit Factory in New York. Graceland came out in August 1986 with You Can Call Me Al as its lead single, alongside the title song, Graceland, and Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes, written with Joseph Shabalala of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

It went to number one in Britain and number three in America, sold more than 14 million copies and won Album of the Year. It also drew fury. Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and Jerry Dammers said he had broken the UN cultural boycott of South Africa, the ANC voted to ban him, and he stayed on the UN blacklist until January 1987. The guitarist Ray Phiri said the musicians had used Simon as much as he used them. The 1987 tour, with Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, ended with two shows in Harare, filmed as Graceland: The African Concert.

The tracks preceded the songs.

Paul Simon, on Graceland

Later years

The Rhythm of the Saints (1990) turned to Brazil and West Africa and also reached number one in Britain. The Capeman, his Broadway musical with Derek Walcott, closed after about six weeks in 1998. He entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in 2001, received the first Library of Congress Gershwin Prize in 2007, and kept recording, with Brian Eno on Surprise (2006) and on to Stranger to Stranger (2016), another British number one.

He said goodbye to touring in Queens in September 2018, but came back. Seven Psalms (2023) is a single acoustic piece of about 33 minutes that began with a dream. Hearing loss in his left ear made him give up You Can Call Me Al, and in 2025 he began A Quiet Celebration, playing Seven Psalms in full before the older songs in smaller, acoustically suited halls.