01 The Story

Simon and Garfunkel's "Wake Up Little Susie"

Simon and Garfunkel's recording of "Wake Up Little Susie" came from their landmark concert in Central Park in 1981, an event that brought the duo back together publicly after years of estrangement and became one of the most watched live performances in American television history. The original song had been written by the Everly Brothers songwriting team of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant and recorded by Phil and Don Everly for Cadence Records, where it had reached number one on both the pop and country charts in 1957. Simon and Garfunkel's version, released as a live single in 1982 from the concert recording, gave the duo one of their final collaborative chart entries.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had originally risen to fame in the mid-1960s with a string of folk-rock recordings for Columbia Records, achieving their greatest success with the soundtrack to The Graduate and the 1970 album Bridge Over Troubled Water. The duo had separated that same year amid personal and professional tensions, and both had pursued solo careers in the intervening decade. Simon's solo work had been particularly successful, producing acclaimed albums including Still Crazy After All These Years and One-Trick Pony, while Garfunkel had scored commercial success with recordings of other writers' material.

The September 19, 1981 concert in Central Park drew an audience estimated at between 400,000 and 500,000 people, making it one of the largest attended concerts in American history. The event was broadcast on television and subsequently released as a live album, The Concert in Central Park, which reached number six on the Billboard 200 in 1982. The concert's success was a testament to the enduring power of Simon and Garfunkel's catalog and to the appetite of a generation of listeners who had grown up with their recordings for a reunion performance.

"Wake Up Little Susie" was included in the Central Park setlist as an example of the duo's characteristic approach to covering older pop and folk material, bringing their vocal harmony style to songs from the American popular music tradition. The Everly Brothers' original had been one of the defining recordings of late-1950s rock and roll, and Simon and Garfunkel's version honored that heritage while translating it through their own more intimate harmonic sensibility. The live recording captured the energy of the enormous Central Park crowd responding to a beloved song delivered by beloved performers.

Released as a single in April 1982, the live recording entered the Billboard Hot 100 on April 3, 1982, debuting at number 67 and climbing over eleven weeks to reach its peak of number 27 on May 29, 1982. The chart performance reflected the promotional reach of the live album campaign and the ongoing commercial appeal of the Simon and Garfunkel name. Warner Bros. Records distributed the release with full major-label promotional support, giving the single access to radio stations that might not have picked up an independently released live recording from a duo that had been officially inactive for over a decade.

The Concert in Central Park album also generated significant sales and radio play for other tracks from the reunion performance, creating a full commercial campaign around the event. The album's success prompted discussions of a possible full studio reunion between Simon and Garfunkel, though the personal tensions that had separated them proved persistent, and the duo did not record a new studio album together in the immediate aftermath of the concert. Individual concerts and television appearances followed, but a sustained creative collaboration remained elusive.

The choice of "Wake Up Little Susie" for the Central Park concert set reflected Simon and Garfunkel's awareness of their own history within the broader narrative of American popular music. The Everly Brothers had been a primary influence on their own harmonic development, and covering this song was an acknowledgment of that lineage. The two-part harmony that the Bryants had written for the Everlys translated naturally to Simon and Garfunkel's own two-voice blend, making the cover feel organic rather than forced, a natural extension of a musical tradition that ran from 1957 through to 1981 and beyond.

02 Song Meaning

The Meaning of "Wake Up Little Susie" in Simon and Garfunkel's Hands

The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant composition "Wake Up Little Susie" told a story of minor domestic transgression: a young couple who fell asleep together during a late-night movie and now face the social consequences of being found in each other's company at an hour that convention disapproved of. The original Everly Brothers recording played the situation for a mixture of anxiety and mild comedy, acknowledging the social rules being violated while treating them with a lightness that suggested the rules themselves were somewhat absurd. This tonal balance was essential to the song's appeal.

When Simon and Garfunkel performed the song at Central Park in 1981, the context transformed its meaning considerably. The innocence of the original's premise, two young people accidentally falling asleep and worrying about social disapproval, was filtered through the experience of a vast audience that had grown up with both the Everly Brothers' version and Simon and Garfunkel's own legacy. The performance became not simply a cover of an old song but a layered cultural event, a reunion of beloved artists performing a song associated with an even earlier era of beloved artists.

The nostalgia embedded in this layering was not incidental but central to the experience the Central Park concert provided. The audience of hundreds of thousands was drawn not only by the music but by the desire to inhabit, if only for an evening, the world in which the songs they loved had first been encountered. "Wake Up Little Susie" functioned within this context as a kind of time travel, evoking not just the Everly Brothers' late-1950s America but also the late-1960s Simon and Garfunkel moment when the duo had first achieved their greatest cultural impact.

There is also something telling about Simon and Garfunkel's choice to cover this particular song. Its subject matter, an accidental intimacy that becomes publicly visible and that must be explained to the community, has an analogue in the Simon and Garfunkel story itself. The duo's relationship had always been publicly intimate, their harmonies presenting a seamless union to audiences even as their private dynamic was more complicated. Their reunion performance was itself a kind of "waking up" in public after years of separation, and the choice of this song, however unconsciously, resonated with that biographical dimension.

The live performance energy captured on the Central Park recording added yet another dimension of meaning. The audience response audible in the recording, the crowd's recognition of the song, their participation in the moment, became part of the text of the performance. Live recordings of classic songs function differently from studio originals precisely because they capture a specific communal event, a moment in which thousands of people shared an experience simultaneously. "Wake Up Little Susie" as performed in Central Park was not just a song but a documented social occasion, and the meaning of any social occasion includes the fact of the community that gathered for it.