The one band Paul Simon said are “very, very deep in the soil of American culture”
Paul Simon wasn’t necessarily the first person that most people thought of when looking at the biggest rock stars in the world.
Even if he wrote some of the finest songs that the world had ever heard in the late 1960s, no one was looking at the small guy singing with Art Garfunkel and thinking that he had the exact same stage presence as Elvis Presley when he started singing. That was never Simon’s intention, though, and a lot of his greatest inspirations were the ones that had their music steeped into the bones of America long before he started making his own melodies.
But when Simon and Garfunkel first started to make records, they weren’t looking to confine themselves by listening to one genre. Garfunkel worshipped at the altar of fabulous singers like Sam Cooke, and while Simon could appreciate the raw talent that they brought to the table, he was fascinated by what someone like Bob Dylan could do whenever he had a microphone in his hand. He wanted the chance to make people move the same way that he could, but it’s not like Simon’s first records got people dancing.
‘The Sound of Silence’ is a brilliant piece of work when you break it down, but it’s not like the folk-rock version of it was how Simon intended it. He wanted the harmonies to tell the story half the time, and that came from him listening to some of the greatest songs that he heard from The Everly Brothers’ catalogue when he was still hashing it out with Garfunkel as the duo Tom and Jerry.
And it’s not hard to see what Simon saw in the Everlys. Those harmonies might have been fairly simple when listening to a tune like ‘Cathy’s Clown’ or ‘Bye Bye Love’, but that’s why those songs work so well. Phil and Don Everly were trying to make the kind of music that they heard when they were growing up, and even if it had a dash of country sprinkled in for good measure, their voices were made for each other when they sang together.
Presley and Chuck Berry may have been the first faces of rock and roll to many people, but as far as Simon could tell, the Everlys were baked into the fabric of what America should be, saying, “The roots of the Everly Brothers are very, very deep in the soil of American culture. They had a radio show with their family, and their father, Ike, was an influential country guitar player, so he attracted other significant musicians to the Everlys’ world — among them Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, who was instrumental in getting the Everlys on the Grand Ole Opry. Perhaps even more powerfully than Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers melded country with the emerging sound of Fifties rock & roll.”
Simon wasn’t going to have the same kind of country twang to all of his songs, but you can hear him touching on the same nerve that the Everlys were whenever he applied their harmonies to his folk songs. His idols might not have done what he did on ‘Scarborough Fair’, but his idea to blend the traditional folk ballad with his own anti-war song ‘Canticle’ was a stroke of genius as the Vietnam War got underway.
But even when the duo were just having fun playing live, it’s shocking how well their voices were able to interpret Everly Brothers songs. Their performance at Central Park is still one of their most famous, but listening to their version of ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ really makes you wonder why the hell they didn’t decide to cut a studio version of the song somewhere down the line.
Simon had a lot more on his mind than making music that reflected his country, but whenever he needed to get back in touch with his own roots, he knew that those early Everly Brothers recordings would always be waiting for him. They didn’t have to make the most complex harmonies in the world, but you can feel the raw heart behind every single one of their tunes whenever they played.
