The Power to Evoke

David Halberstam on the music/poetry of Simon & Garfunkel:

"The time is I think early 1967, and I am driving north through the Mississippi Delta, a part of the country which I have covered on and off for 12 years and where I never feel safe. I am, as is my wont down there, keeping my eye on the rearview mirror to be sure that no pickup truck with a whiplash antenna is following me, and I am fiddling with the car radio with my right hand. As I do I pick up a sound that is at once pure and oddly haunting, even though I have never heard it before. I am immediately struck by the beautiful quality of the voice of the lead singer and the lyrical quality of the writing - if you are a writer and your business is words then there is no greater pleasure than hearing a song and knowing that it is the work of a real writer, or in this case, a distinguished American poet.

"I am hooked: there is a quality to the voice, Art Garfunkel's, that recalls something I had already come to love in the early Everly Brothers work, a certain clarity and purity, that makes me think that is the way the olde English balladeers sang two and three hundred years earlier. Added to that is the beauty of Paul Simon's writing, which both then and now has a capacity to make me pay attention and listen carefully, not just to the beat, but to the words, for the words with him always matter, and are never obvious, always full of surprises. My friend Russell Baker, the writer, who is also an admirer of the music, swears that he can hear shades of T. S. Eliot in Simon's writing. The song is over, and I find myself singing in the car, "And the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls..." as I head towards the Memphis Airport.

"I was immediately in its power, and I have stayed that way for well more than thirty years. The music of Simon and Garfunkel still has a special power over me - the power to evoke another time and place. Music after all is the background score to our lives, not merely surviving in our memory banks long after so many of our other seemingly stronger memories have faltered, but serving to remind us of who we were at a given moment of our lives, where we were, what we dreamed of, what we feared and, of course, who we loved. So it is for me with the work of Simon and Garfunkel: though they are not ostensibly political, they are woven so deeply into the fabric of a special moment that I am always transported back in time. When I hear them I am brought first and foremost to that period of the late sixties and early seventies when this country was alive with political challenge, both on civil rights and on Vietnam, and I was a much younger reporter, deeply involved in covering both, two great stories which were oddly twined as America in conflict with itself, and the country seemed to be torn between two very different definitions of itself, each challenging the other for supremacy. It was above all else an exhilarating time to be alive, and to care about things which were bigger than you were, and their music seemed to form the background music for so much of it; beautiful, challenging, yet not so angry as to be discordant.

"Now, more than thirty years later, their music still has its own special haunting quality, and though for young listeners it obviously stands of itself, for those of us who lived through that remarkable time, it has an additional power - the power to evoke."

Hello, darkness, my old friend

I've come to talk with you again

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