Twelve Days of Winter #7. Simon and Garfunkel: Silent Night/Seven O’clock News
December 18, 2024
Colin Randall writes: Paul Simon is entitled to be cross about how he and Art Garfunkel were perceived in snootier corners of British folk in the 1960s. To put it bluntly, many of us foolishly looked down on them, mocked their songs and dismissed them as limp-wristed, lightweight pop-folk.
It was all so much nonsense, of course. Simon paid his dues as faithfully as Tom Paxton or Jackson D Frank or Martin Carthy to the British folk scene. He was also writing some strong, enduring songs that didn't deserve to be parodied, as we did in Bishop Auckland, Co Durham, with lyrics childishly changed to I Am a Rock, making the refrain I am a sock/ I am a nylon ....
Simon snd Garfunkel. Fair use: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1271607
Now 83, Simon can look back on an extraordinary career that has brought him 16 Grammy awards and twice seen him inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He even made up with Carthy after a 35-year feud over the arrangement of Scarborough Fair, which the young Carthy had taught the young Simon, leaving him feeling under-recognised when it became a big hit.
No help from Carthy was needed when Silent Night/Seven O’clock News was included on the 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, the third Simon and Garfunkel studio LP. Juxtaposing the soothing Christmas solemnity of a much-loved carol with a ghastly news bulletin was a stroke of genius.
With gathering volume, each news item dealing with war, racial violence and mass murder competed with the verses of the carol, reducing their cosy seasonal character to a heap of cant.
Paul Simon once said Silent Night was the song he most wished he had written. It has been described as the most recorded Christmas song in history, having started out as a poem written in 1816 by Fr Joseph Moor, an assistant priest in Austria, and put to the music two years later at Moor's request by Franz Gruber, the organist at the church near Salzburg to which he had moved.
For their innovative treatment of the song, Simon and Garfunkel recorded it with the accompaniment of not only a piano but the news bulletin compiled and read by a broadcaster, Charlie ODonnell, covering heartwarming tidings of the Vietnam war, celebrity death, serial murders of student nurses and attempts to stop Martin Luther King leading a civil rights march.
in 2019, Phoebe Bridgers recorded an updated version with a different set of items in the news bulletin including the opioid scandal, Talibanesque curbs on American women's right to abortion and Trump impeachment proceedings. It's good but Simon and Garfunkel earned much greater credit for doing it first.
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