Paul Simon Paul Frederic Simon (born October 13, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter. He entered to public conciousness in 1965 as part of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, along with longtime artistic partner Art Garfunkel. Simon solely wrote most of the music of the duo, including memorable songs as The Sound of Silence, The Boxer and Mrs. Robinson, and Bridge Over Troubled Water. In 1970, at the height of its popularity, the duo split and Simon began a successful solo career, highlighted by his 1986 experiment with African music on the album Graceland, which was decisive on the introduction of world music into the mainstream. Simon's work has been generally praised by critics and the public, and enjoyed notable commercial success for over four decades of production. In 2006, Time magazine called him one of the 100 "people who shape our world." Paul Simon was born in Newark, New Jersey to Jewish Hungarian parents Bella (b. 1910, d. June 16, 2007), an Elementary School teacher, and Louis Simon (b. circa 1916, d. Jan. 17, 1995), a college professor, bassoon player, and dance bandleader who performed under the name "Lee Sims." In 1941 his family moved to Kew Gardens in New York City. Simon's musical career began at Forest Hills High School when he and his friend Art Garfunkel began singing together as a duo, occasionally performing at school dances. Their idols were the Everly Brothers, whom they often emulated or imitated in their early recordings. Paul took the biggest interest in Jazz, Folk of Woody Guthrie, and Folk blues like Lead Belly and others. Simon and Garfunkel were named "Tom & Jerry" by their record company and it was under this name that the duo first had success. In 1957, they recorded the single "Hey, Schoolgirl" on Big Records; it reached forty-nine on the pop charts while they were still in their teens. After graduating from high school, Simon attended Queens College, while Garfunkel studied at Columbia University in Manhattan. Simon was a brother in the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. Though Simon earned a degree in English literature, his real passion was rock and roll. Between 1957 and 1964, Simon wrote, recorded, and released more than thirty songs, occasionally reuniting with Garfunkel as Tom & Jerry for some singles, including "Our Song," "That's My Story," and "Surrender, Please Surrender," among others. He also briefly attended Brooklyn Law School. Most of the songs Simon recorded in the six years after 1957 were performed alone or with musicians other than Garfunkel. They were released on several minor record labels, such as Amy, ABC-Paramount, Big, Hunt, Ember, King, Tribute, and Madison. He used several different pseudonyms for these recordings, including Jerry Landis, Paul Kane (from Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane) and True Taylor. Simon enjoyed some moderate success in recording a few singles as part of a group called Tico and the Triumphs, including a song called "Motorcycle" which reached #97 on the Billboard charts in 1962. Tico and the Triumphs released four 45s. Marty Cooper, a member of the group, sang lead on several of these releases and was actually known as Tico. Bobby Susser, children's songwriter and record producer, and childhood friend of Simon's, co-produced the Tico 45s with Simon. That same year, Paul reached #99 on the pop charts as Jerry Landis with the hit "The Lone Teen Ranger." Both chart singles were released on Amy Records. During the mid-1960s, while living in the United Kingdom he performed at Les Cousins in London and toured provincial folk clubs. In these venues he was exposed to a wide range of musical influences and, while in England, recorded his solo The Paul Simon Songbook in 1965. In late 1965 whilst touring England, he performed at a large house in Great Shelford near Cambridge which was the location for the 21st birthday celebration of Libby January, girlfriend of Pink Floyd album cover designer Storm Thorgerson. The Pink Floyd Sound and David Gilmour's band Jokers Wild also performed at this party with a then unknown Paul Simon. This location was to be later used for the Cover Art on Pink Floyd's 1969 double album Ummagumma. During his time in the U.K. Simon co-wrote several songs with Bruce Woodley of the Australian pop group The Seekers. "I Wish You Could Be Here," "Cloudy", and "Red Rubber Ball" were written during this period. However, Woodley's co-authorship credit was incorrectly omitted from "Cloudy" off the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album. When the American group The Cyrkle recorded a cover of "Red Rubber Ball," the song reached number two in the US. Simon also contributed his original composition to The Seekers catalogue, "Someday One Day," which was released in March 1966. In early 1964, Simon and Garfunkel got an audition with Columbia Records, whose executives were impressed enough to sign the duo to a contract to produce an album. Columbia decided that the two would be called simply "Simon & Garfunkel," which Simon claimed in 2003, was the first time that artists' ethnic names had been used in pop music. Simon and Garfunkel's first LP, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was released on October 19, 1964 and comprised twelve songs in the folk vein, five of them written by Simon. The album initially flopped, but East Coast radio stations began receiving requests for one of the tracks, Simon's "The Sound of Silence." Their producer, Tom Wilson, overdubbed the track with electric guitar, bass, and drums, releasing it as a single that eventually went to number one on the pop charts in the USA. Simon had gone to England after the initial failure of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., pursuing a solo career (including collaborations with Bruce Woodley of The Seekers) and releasing the album The Paul Simon Song Book in the UK in 1965. But he returned to the USA to reunite with Garfunkel after "The Sound of Silence" had started to enjoy commercial success. Together they recorded four influential albums, Sounds of Silence, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Bookends and Bridge over Troubled Water. Simon and Garfunkel also contributed extensively to the soundtrack of the 1967 Mike Nichols film The Graduate (starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft). While writing "Mrs. Robinson," Simon originally toyed with the title "Mrs. Roosevelt." When Garfunkel reported this indecision over the song's name to the director, Nichols replied, "Don't be ridiculous! We're making a movie here! It's Mrs. Robinson!" Simon pursued solo projects after the duo released their very popular album Bridge over Troubled Water. Occasionally, he and Garfunkel did reunite, such as in 1975 for their Top Ten single "My Little Town," which Simon originally wrote for Garfunkel, claiming Garfunkel's solo output was lacking "bite." The song was included on their respective solo albums; Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years, and Garfunkel's Breakaway. Contrary to popular belief, the song is not at all autobiographical of Simon's early life in New York.[4] In 1981, they got together again for the famous concert in Central Park, followed by a world tour and an aborted reunion album Think Too Much, which was eventually released (sans Garfunkel) as Hearts and Bones. Together, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. In 2003, the two reunited again when they received Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. This reunion led to a U.S. tour, the acclaimed "Old Friends" concert series, followed by a 2004 international encore, which culminated in a free concert at the Colosseum in Rome. That final concert drew 600,000 people. The cover of the immensely popular album "There Goes Rhymin' Simon", released in 1973.After Simon and Garfunkel split in 1970, Simon began to write and record solo material. His eponymous album was released January 1972, preceded by his first experiment with world music, the Jamaican-inspired "Mother and Child Reunion", which is widely considered one of the first reggae attempts by a white musician. The single was a hit, reaching both the American and British Top 5, and the album was particularly well received, with critics praising the variety of styles and the confessional lyrics, and with the Paul Simon reaching at #4 in the U.S. and #1 on the UK and Japan. It later spawned another Top 30 hit with "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard". Simon's next project was the pop-folk masterpiece, There Goes Rhymin' Simon, released in May 1973. It contained some of his most popular and polished recordings - the lead single, "Kodachrome", with its fresh arrangement and comical message, was a #2 hit in America, and the follow-up, the gospel-flavored "Loves Me Like a Rock" was even bigger, topping the Cashbox charts. Other songs, like the patriotic "American Tune" or the melancholic "Something So Right" – a tribute to Simon's first wife, Peggy – became standards on the musician's catalogue. Critical and commercial reception for this sophomore album were even stronger than there were for his debut. At the time, it was remarked how the songs were very fresh and unworried on the surface while they were exploring socially and politically conscious themes on the deepest (particularly the dark cloud of the Watergate scandal involving the Richard Nixon administration. The album reached #1 on the Cashbox album charts. As a souvenir for the tour that came next, in 1974 it was released a live album, Live Rhymin', which was moderately successful and showed, again, some changes in the Simon's music style, adopting world and religious music. Highly anticipated, Still Crazy After All These Years was his next album. Released in October 1975 and produced by Simon and Phil Ramone, it was received as one of his finest works, marking another departure from his previous work as the atmosphere of the recordings were sad, darker and entirely confessional, as he wrote and recorded in the wake of his divorce. Preceded by the feel-good duet with Phoebe Snow, "Gone at Last" (a Top 25 hit) and the Simon & Garfunkel reunion track "My Little Town" (a #9 on Billboard), the album managed to be his only #1 on the Billboard charts to date, and eventually won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year. With Simon in the forefront of popular music, the third single from the album, "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" was immensely popular, reaching the top spot of the Billboard charts (this was, also, his only single to reach #1 on this list).