The 1960s File Feature
Scarborough Fair (/Canticle)
Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" and Its Path to the Charts The recording known as "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" represented a sophisticated c…
01 The Story
Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" and Its Path to the Charts
The recording known as "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" represented a sophisticated creative intervention by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel into an ancient piece of English traditional music. The folk song "Scarborough Fair" has roots stretching back centuries in the British Isles, existing in multiple variants and regional versions long before it entered the formal folk revival repertoire of the twentieth century. Simon had encountered the song while living and performing in England during 1964 and 1965, a period in which he was deeply immersed in the British and Irish folk tradition and developing the musical and lyrical sensibility that would inform his most ambitious later work.
Paul Simon learned a version of the song from the English folk singer Martin Carthy, who had developed his own influential arrangement of the traditional material. Simon's subsequent arrangement for Simon and Garfunkel's recording drew on what he had absorbed during this period, though his treatment diverged significantly from Carthy's through the addition of an original countermelody. The countermelody, titled "Canticle," featured lyrics by Paul Simon that were adapted from an earlier Simon composition called "The Side of a Hill." These new lyrics introduced anti-war imagery that ran simultaneously against the traditional folk melody, creating a two-layered textual and musical structure that gave the recording its distinctive and ambitious character.
The recording was produced by Bob Johnston and appeared on the soundtrack album for the 1967 Mike Nichols film The Graduate. The film's use of Simon and Garfunkel music was itself a significant cultural moment, as the pairing of their sound with Nichols's exploration of postwar American anxiety and generational disillusionment created a mutually reinforcing artistic statement that amplified both the film's impact and the duo's cultural standing. "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" appeared on both the soundtrack album and on the duo's earlier studio album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, released in 1966, where it had already attracted critical attention before the film made it a mainstream phenomenon.
The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on March 2, 1968, debuting at number 61. Its chart climb was steady rather than explosive, moving to number 42 the following week, then to number 29, and reaching number 13 by March 23. The song reached its peak position of number 11 on the Hot 100 on April 20, 1968, spending a total of eleven weeks on the chart. The commercial performance was solid, placing the recording in the upper reaches of the Hot 100 during a period of intense competition and cultural turbulence.
The Grammy recognition that accompanied the recording was substantial. The duo won Grammy Awards for their work on The Graduate soundtrack, and "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" contributed significantly to the critical and commercial profile of a body of work that was already widely regarded as among the most artistically distinguished pop music of the late 1960s. The recording helped cement Simon and Garfunkel's reputation as artists operating at a different level of literary and musical ambition from most of their contemporaries on the pop chart.
The question of songwriting credit for "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" became a matter of ongoing discussion. Martin Carthy has noted that Simon's arrangement of the traditional song drew substantially on his own, a concern that reflects the broader complexities of folk music adaptation and the boundaries between arrangement, interpretation, and original composition. Simon has acknowledged his debt to the English folk scene of the mid-1960s, though the specific question of credit has been handled differently in different contexts and remains a point of some discussion among folk music scholars and enthusiasts.
In the decades since its release, "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" has been recognized as one of the signature recordings of Simon and Garfunkel's career and as a landmark in the broader history of folk rock. Its integration of ancient melodic material with original counterpoint, its connection to one of the defining films of the 1960s, and the exceptional quality of Art Garfunkel's vocal performance have all contributed to a legacy that extends well beyond its initial chart performance. The recording continues to appear in film and television soundtracks, in music education contexts, and in retrospective assessments of the 1960s folk rock tradition.
02 Song Meaning
Impossible Tasks, Anti-War Imagery, and Layered Meaning in "Scarborough Fair/Canticle"
The traditional song "Scarborough Fair" is built around a series of impossible tasks. A narrator asks a former lover to perform a sequence of actions that cannot be accomplished under the laws of nature: sewing a shirt without seam or needlework, finding an acre of land between salt water and sea strand, performing an elaborate ritual using tools that do not exist. The lover is instructed to complete these tasks as a precondition for the renewal of love, tasks whose impossibility signals that the relationship is definitively over. The impossible assignment is a way of saying something that direct language cannot comfortably carry: that the conditions for reconciliation cannot be met, that what is lost cannot be recovered.
This ancient thematic core is given additional complexity in the Simon and Garfunkel version through the countermelody "Canticle," which runs simultaneously against the traditional folk text. The Canticle lyrics, adapted by Paul Simon from his earlier composition "The Side of a Hill," introduce imagery of wartime conflict and suffering: soldiers marching, the sounds of battle, the cost of military action. This anti-war text was woven into the recording so that it could be heard simultaneously with the folk song's narrative of lost love, creating an effect in which two separate planes of meaning coexist and comment on each other without directly intersecting.
The pairing of these two texts was not arbitrary. The thematic connection between personal loss and collective destruction is one of the organizing concerns of much of Paul Simon's songwriting, and "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" represents an unusually formal statement of that connection. Both the folk narrative and the anti-war countermelody deal with things that are broken and cannot be fixed, with demands that cannot be met and costs that cannot be recovered. The recording asks listeners to hold both registers simultaneously, to hear private grief and public catastrophe as related forms of the same underlying experience of irreversibility and loss.
The context of the 1967 film The Graduate added a third interpretive layer to the recording's meaning. Mike Nichols used "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" to accompany scenes depicting the alienation and drift of the film's protagonist, a young man unable to connect meaningfully with the world he has been prepared to enter. The folk song's impossibility tasks and the Canticle's evocation of a world at war together served as an appropriate sonic environment for a narrative about the futility of expectation and the exhaustion of inherited values. The film made the recording inescapable for audiences of the late 1960s and fixed it as a sound associated with a particular moment of cultural questioning.
The herbal imagery in the traditional refrain, with its references to parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, has been interpreted in various ways. Some scholars have noted that these herbs carried distinct symbolic associations in older European folk tradition, ranging from protection and wisdom to remembrance and courage. Whether audiences in 1968 were aware of these historical meanings is uncertain, but the plants' names give the refrain a sensory and incantatory quality that contributes to the song's atmosphere of timelessness and ritual significance.
Art Garfunkel's vocal performance gave the recording its distinctive emotional texture. His clear, high tenor treated the ancient text with a delicacy that emphasized its dreamlike and melancholy qualities, while the interplay between his voice and the countermelody created a sonic experience unlike anything else on the pop chart of its era. The formal sophistication of the arrangement, combining an ancient melody, an original counterpoint, and a production aesthetic drawn from the folk revival, produced a recording that operated simultaneously as accessible pop music and as a genuinely complex artistic statement.
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