Art Garfunkel

Art Garfunkel (born November 5, 1941, Queens, New York, U.S.) is an American singer and actor who partnered with singer-songwriter Paul Simon to form one of the most popular duos in the history of popular music, Simon and Garfunkel. Garfunkel’s remarkable lyrical tenor and high harmonies were as pivotal to the duo’s success as Simon’s extraordinary musicality, literate songwriting, and own stellar voice. The pair had a long string of hits together that stretched across the 1960s and into the early ’70s, when they split and pursued solo careers.

Early life and partnership with Paul Simon

Garfunkel was raised in the middle-class neighbourhood of Forest Hills in the Queens section of New York City. His father, Jacob Garfunkel, who was of Romanian Jewish descent, was a traveling salesman, who earlier in his life had been an actor. His mother, Rose (née Pearlman) Garfunkel, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, was a homemaker. Art Garfunkel had an elder brother and a younger one. He began singing at the age of four when his father brought home an early tape recorder. He met Simon in the sixth grade, and the pair became friends while appearing together in a school play. They listened to radio endlessly, sang together, and experimented with compositions, accompanied by Simon’s acoustic guitar. In high school they formed a duo, calling themselves Tom and Jerry. Despite recording a hit single, “Hey Schoolgirl” (written together) and landing an appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, they initially chose not to pursue a musical career, at least partly because of bad blood that had arisen between them after Simon made a recording as a solo act. Instead, Garfunkel attended Columbia University in New York, where he earned a B.A. in art history and an M.A. in mathematics. Simon majored in English at Queens College and briefly attended law school.

Success in Simon and Garfunkel

During some five years of relative estrangement from each other, neither Garfunkel nor Simon gave up on music. Simon wrote songs and recorded demos at the Brill Building and then relocated for a time to England. Meanwhile, Garfunkel recorded a number of solo singles as “Artie Garr.” In the early 1960s they reconnected, discovered their mutual admiration for folk music, and began performing together again, this time as Simon and Garfunkel, focusing on the folk songs Simon was writing under the influence of Bob Dylan. A Columbia Records executive heard them play at a folk club in New York City’s Greenwich Village and signed them. They released their first album, Wednesday Morning, 3 am, in 1964. Although that album failed to gain much attention, roughly two years later the title song from their next album, Sounds of Silence (1965), became a hit after producer Tom Wilson added electric guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards to the mix of their original recording of the song, infusing it with folk rock energy.

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Thereafter Simon and Garfunkel had a string of hits that stretched into the 1970s. Among them were “Homeward Bound,” “I Am a Rock,” “Mrs. Robinson” (from the feature film The Graduate [1967]), “A Hazy Shade of Winter,” “At the Zoo,” “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” “The Boxer,” “Bridge over Troubled Water,” and “Cecilia.” However, at the height of their popularity, the duo’s personal relationship began to unravel, in part because of Garfunkel’s desire to pursue an acting career, and they ended their partnership in 1971.

Acting career

While Simon concentrated on music after their dissolution, Garfunkel made his mark as both an actor and a solo recording artist. Garfunkel’s association with director Mike Nichols on the soundtrack of The Graduate led to roles in the subsequent Nichols films Catch-22 (1970) and Carnal Knowledge (1971). Garfunkel also appeared in Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing/A Sensual Obsession (1980) and in Good to Go (1986) and Boxing Helena (1993).

Solo musical career

After his split with Simon, Garfunkel did not record again until 1973. His debut solo album, Angel Clare (1973), included the hit single “All I Know” by Jimmy Webb and earned Garfunkel a gold record. His second album, Breakaway (1975), did even better, going platinum. In addition to the title song, which rose to number 39 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, the album featured “I Only Have Eyes for You,” a much-recorded composition by Al Dubin and Harry Warren that had been a hit for the doo-wop group the Flamingos in 1959 and that charted at number 18 for Garfunkel. The album reunited Garfunkel with Simon for “My Little Town” (which also appeared on Simon’s 1975 album, Still Crazy After All These Years). In 1978 Garfunkel released Watermark, a collection of songs written by Webb with the exception of a cover version of Sam Cooke’s “(What a) Wonderful World,” with which Garfunkel, teaming with Simon and James Taylor, scored a hit.

Garfunkel’s albums Fate for Breakfast (1979) and Scissors Cut (1981) met with mostly lukewarm reviews, and during the 1980s he kept a fairly low profile. However, in 1981 he and Simon appeared together before an enormous audience at a free open-air concert in New York City’s Central Park. After an international tour with Simon in 1982–83, Garfunkel resumed his solo work and released several more albums, including a greatest-hits compilation, Garfunkel (1989).

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In 1993 Garfunkel released the compilation Up ’Til Now and reunited with Simon for a series of retrospective concerts at Carnegie Hall. Garfunkel’s live album Across America and his children’s album Songs from a Parent to a Child arrived in 1997. Everything Waits to Be Noticed was released in 2002 to much critical acclaim. Garfunkel’s album Some Enchanted Evening (2007) contains his renditions of classics from 20th-century songwriting masters, including Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, and the duo Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.

Personal life

Garfunkel was married briefly during the early 1970s to Linda Grossman. The woman with whom he then had a relationship for several years, actress Laurie Bird, committed suicide in 1979. In 1985, while making Good to Go, Garfunkel met Kim Cermack, an actress, model, and singer, whom he married in 1988. They have two sons. The eldest, James (known as Art Garfunkel, Jr.), has followed in his father’s footsteps as a singer.

In 1968 Garfunkel, a book lover and an insatiable reader, began exhaustively cataloging every book that he read, which he shelved in the order of reading in his enormous home library. In 1989 he published a collection of poems, Still Water: Prose Poems, and in 2017 a memoir, What Is It All but Luminous: Notes from an Underground Man. Garfunkel loves to walk, and in 1984 he began an incremental “Walk Across America,” which he completed in 1997.