“Bridge Over Troubled Water” is the title song of Simon & Garfunkel’s album of the same name. The single was released on January 26, 1970, though it also appears on the live album Live 1969, released in 2008. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on February 28, 1970, and stayed at the top of the chart for six weeks. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” also topped the adult contemporary chart in the U.S. for six weeks. This song’s recording process exposed many of the underlying tensions that eventually led to the breakup of the duo after the album’s completion. Most notably, Paul Simon has repeatedly expressed regret over his insistence that Art Garfunkel sing this song as a solo, as it focused attention on Garfunkel and relegated Simon to a secondary position. Art Garfunkel initially did not want to sing lead vocal, feeling it was not right for him. “He felt I should have done it,” Paul Simon revealed to Rolling Stone in 1972. Garfunkel said that the moment when he performed it at a 1972 Madison Square Garden benefit concert, as part of a one-off reunion with Simon, was “almost biblical.” In performances on the 2003 “Old Friends” tour, Simon and Garfunkel took turns singing alternate verses of the vocal.

Simon wrote the song in the summer of 1969 while Garfunkel was filming Catch-22 in Europe. The song originally had two verses and different lyrics. Simon specifically wrote it for Garfunkel and knew it would be a piano song. The chorus lyrics were partly inspired by Claude Jeter’s line “I’ll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in me,” which Jeter sang with his group, the Swan Silvertones, in the 1958 song “Mary Don’t You Weep.” Garfunkel reportedly liked Simon’s falsetto on the demo and suggested that Simon sing. He and producer Roy Halee also thought the song needed three verses and a ‘bigger’ sound towards the end. Simon agreed and penned the final verse, though he felt it was less than fully cohesive with the earlier verses. The final verse was written about Simon’s then-wife Peggy Harper, who had noticed her first gray hairs (“Sail on, silvergirl”). The musicians were Wrecking Crew members Hal Blaine, Larry Knechtel, Joe Osbourne and Gary Coleman. Knechtel won a Grammy for his unforgettable piano arrangement. Garfunkel’s first two attempts to record the vocal failed. The first two verses were finally recorded in New York with the final verse recorded first, in Los Angeles. The majority of the song was recorded in Columbia Records in Hollywood, Ca. Part of the song was first heard in public on November 30, 1969, when it was included in the soundtrack of a one-hour TV special by the duo aired by CBS; called Songs of America. The music appeared in the background of a clip with John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Larry Knechtel spent four days working on the piano arrangement. Garfunkel came up with the intermediate piano chords between the verses while working with Knechtel. “Bridge” became one of the greatest popular songs of all time.

By Simon and Garfunkel

Lyrics