(Credits: Far Out / Matthew Straubmuller)
Sat 15 November 2025 16:30, UK
For a songwriter like Paul Simon, the importance of all great songwriting comes from a lot of patience.
As much as people can come up with a tune on a whim and create the greatest melody anyone has ever heard, sometimes it stirs in someone’s mind for years before they’re finally ready to share it with the world. It can be anywhere from weeks to months to even years, but sometimes Simon could take the perfect melody and give the smash hit treatment centuries after it came out.
Then again, Simon was always fairly consistent when it came to releasing his records. While his more recent work does have more than a few hiccups due to his health struggles, his run throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s with Graceland was enough to leave Simon and Garfunkel as a distant memory. But the key to Simon’s success wasn’t only about writing great songs. It was about searching for the next kind of music that was out there.
And that’s not to say that Simon was hopping on trends, either. He was never going to play the MTV game and strut up and down a music video set in spandex, but he could find ways to twist his sound into different directions. There was a lot more the music world had to offer other than folk-rock, and the next few years saw him taking elements of everything from jazz to South African music and beginning to incorporate them into his sound.
Although some of them came together with a bit of a thud, it’s not like Simon was ever afraid to try something new. Even as far back as Simon and Garfunkel, he could throw in the odd tune that messed with the usual formula like ‘A Simple Desultory Phillipic’, and judging by how brilliant his ballads were, it was no surprise that he took a few cues from classic music along the way.
There was already a Bach piece that he borrowed heavily from when working on ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, but when telling the story of his own influences, he knew that all the credit didn’t belong to him. Bach helped him with ‘American Tune’, and even with a few embellishments, Simon was proud to be the one to bring the song ‘Scarborough Fair’ to the masses when working on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
He may have added another melody underneath it, but Simon knew that the central piece was about breathing new life into the traditional folk song, saying, “’American Tune,’ I learned from Bach , but the melody preexisted Bach; he took it. So I mean, that’s really a hit. ‘Scarborough Fair’ [took] 400 years, and you’ve got a hit. And Spotify would owe you… like, what? Hundreds of dollars!”
Streaming injustices aside, Simon might not be giving himself enough credit here. There are many pieces of ‘Scarborough Fair’ that are indebted to the original folk tune, but the ‘Canticle’ section is much more important than people realise. The melody is nowhere near as memorable as the folk song, but given the lyrics all about a soldier reflecting on the meaninglessness of war, ‘Scarborough Fair’ is almost a mantra for the moments when things felt so much better for those soldiers still lost on the battlegrounds.
Simon may have added a few more elements to the final tune, but if you really think about it, that’s what all good folk music is supposed to be. Not everyone needs to have some massive production behind everything they’re doing, and sometimes it’s best to add just the right changes to a song for it to be recognised as a classic.
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