Simon & Garfunkel

Simon has been direct about where the duo began: 'When we were kids, Artie and I got our rock & roll chops from the Everlys,' he wrote, recalling how he and Garfunkel spent their Queens adolescence trying to reproduce Don and Phil's tight two-part blend. As Tom & Jerry, they wrote their 1957 debut single, 'Hey Schoolgirl,' while trying to reconstruct the Everlys' 'Hey Doll Baby' from memory — the fumbled cover became their own signature close harmony. Thirteen years later, on what turned out to be their last studio album, they repaid the debt outright, cutting the Everlys' own breakout single almost note for note.

listen: upstream & heresource: American Songwriter — "The Band Paul Simon Saw as 'The Soil of American Culture'" (Simon's own written tribute naming the Everly Brothers as the source of his and Garfunkel's rock & roll harmony) ↗share

1957

Bye Bye LoveThe Everly Brothers

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1970

Bye Bye LoveSimon & Garfunkel

listen forOn the Everlys' original, listen for how Phil's harmony sits so close under Don's lead that the two voices blur into one bright, keening tone rather than a lead-and-backup pair. Simon and Garfunkel's 1970 cover reproduces that blur with almost forensic fidelity — same tempo, same handclaps on the beat, same tight thirds — so that for two minutes the students sound less like imitators than like sons singing their fathers' song back to them.

Simon has named the source directly: 'One is the Swan Silvertones, that was Reverend (Claude) Jeter, who I became friends with,' he told Goldmine in 2015, describing the gospel album he kept playing alone in his apartment in early 1969. His biographer Robert Hilburn traces the debt to one track, 'Oh Mary Don't You Weep,' where Jeter ad-libs a line easy to miss in the clamor of the record — 'I'll be a bridge over deep water, if you trust in my name' — and Simon, listening closely, built an entire song and title around it.

listen: upstream & heresource: Goldmine — "Paul Simon explains 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'" (Simon naming the Swan Silvertones and the Everly Brothers as the song's two sources) ↗share

1959

Mary Don't You WeepSwan Silvertones

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1970

Bridge Over Troubled WaterSimon & Garfunkel

listen forListen for how Jeter's voice suddenly rises out of the Swan Silvertones' close harmony to deliver that ad-libbed 'bridge over deep water' line alone, almost startled by itself. That's the exact move Garfunkel makes eleven years later — his voice climbing solo over session pianist Larry Knechtel's rolling gospel piano, holding the note until the strings and drums finally arrive to catch him.

Simon has never hedged about the debt: 'The Sound of Silence wouldn't have been written if it weren't for Dylan,' he told Rolling Stone in 2011, recalling how, freshly signed to Columbia in 1964, he watched Dylan turn folk song into image and prophecy and decided a pop lyric could carry that same weight. The song went nowhere as a quiet acoustic track on Simon & Garfunkel's debut album; only after producer Tom Wilson overdubbed it with a rock band, without telling either man, did it become the hit that made them a name.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1963

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna FallBob Dylan

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1965

The Sound of SilenceSimon & Garfunkel

listen forDylan's original is just voice and an insistently strummed guitar, piling up apocalyptic images faster than a listener can track them. Simon's answer trades that flood for compression: the same prophetic, image-driven voice, distilled into six spare verses about a world that has stopped listening. Neither song resolves into a hook or a chorus — both let the unease build and simply stop, mid-thought, rather than release it.