“Nobody can touch”: the singer Art Garfunkel put above everyone else
The entire arc of Simon and Garfunkel tends to be a little too biased when it comes to their solo careers.
It’s clear that Paul Simon wanted to move in a different direction once Bridge Over Troubled Water, and even if Art Garfunkel was content to keep making the catchiest tunes that he could, he was more than happy to come together with his old singing partner if it was for the right reasons. And when looking at both of their record collections, it was clear that they would go back to the smoothest voices that they’d heard as kids to get back on the same page with each other.
Because, regardless of how far Simon strayed from his folk roots, there’s no way of replacing the chemistry he had with his friend. Garfunkel took a lot of their greatest songs to new heights whenever he started singing, and even though there were many times where he could put his nose into places where it didn’t belong, it’s easy to forgive him since he was the same guy who laid down the vocals on ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’.
But neither of the duo grew up listening exclusively to the Everly Brothers throughout their career. They were interested to see where they could take their voices every single time they made a record, and that meant taking cues from every singer they could. Simon looked outside the conventional pop structure, but Garfunkel knew that the best singers usually came from the world of soul music.
This is the same genre that gifted the world people like Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, after all, and even later into the 1970s, the fact that Marvin Gaye was still notching up some of the greatest tunes that anyone had ever heard was unheard of in pop music at the time. Every other artist had their own sonic trip to go on, but if you were looking to get anywhere close to good soul music, you were better off taking a few pages from what Sam Cooke was doing in the pre-rock and roll days.
Cooke was the epitome of musical class whenever he made a record, and even when he made a few tunes that were too risque for the time, he was still well ahead of the curve. Without ‘A Change is Gonna Come’, we were never going to get a song like ‘What’s Going On’ or ‘Fight the Power’, and a lot of his fearlessness is the reason why so many people see him as the blueprint for what good soul music was supposed to sound like.
But beyond being a great figure in the genre, Garfunkel felt that the most important gift he had was the timbre of his voice, saying, “He was such a rising star, a fabulous singer with intelligence. And that brilliant smile. I used to think he was just a great singer. Now I think he’s better than that. Almost nobody since then can touch him.” That’s not the kind of voice that normally comes to mind when looking at the same person who sang ‘Bright Eyes’, but if you look at the way that Garfunkel constructed his songs, he was looking to make songs that soul musicians could do justice to as well.
The biggest names in the genre might not have seen him as the first choice when listening to him, but a song like ‘All I Know’ has all the makings of a great soul song whenever Garfunkel sings it. He puts as much gravitas into the song as he can, but if you imagine someone like Stevie Wonder singing the tune, the Cooke influence begins to make a lot more sense in the context of his career.
Garfunkel wasn’t looking to make anything too flashy when he first went solo, but as long as he kept making songs in the same vein as Cooke, it wasn’t like the quality was ever going to suffer. He was out there to make songs that people could sing along to, and while Simon had much grander plans for himself, both of them could at least agree that someone like Cooke was an absolute God of singing.
