Chapter 21: Folk Revival and Folk Rock
One of the most successful folk-rock duos of the 1960s, Simon & Garfunkel exemplified how acoustic introspection and pop accessibility could coexist within a single act. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had met in elementary school in Queens, New York, and began recording together as teenagers under the name Tom & Jerry. Their early material drew from Everly Brothers-style harmony pop, but by the mid-1960s, they reemerged as a folk-based duo with deep lyrical sophistication and intricate vocal interplay.
Their breakthrough came in 1965 with “The Sound of Silence,” originally recorded as a purely acoustic track on their debut album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. Without the duo’s knowledge, producer Tom Wilson overdubbed the song with electric guitar, bass, and drums—essentially turning it into a folk-rock track inspired by the Byrds’ success. The remix was released as a single and became a surprise hit, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1966. Simon & Garfunkel had unintentionally become part of the folk-rock movement, and from that point on, they embraced the hybrid style in full.
“The Sound of Silence” stood out not only for its haunting arpeggiated electric guitar and minor-key melody but also for its bleak, introspective lyrics. Paul Simon’s words—“Hello darkness, my old friend”—capture a sense of alienation and spiritual disconnection that resonated with a generation disillusioned by political assassinations, Cold War paranoia, and a growing distrust in institutions. The song's enigmatic imagery—“the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls”—blended poetic mysticism with a pointed critique of modern apathy. These themes of isolation and urban angst would reappear throughout the duo’s catalog, making them chroniclers of emotional and existential dislocation during a period of great cultural upheaval.
Their follow-up single, “I Am a Rock,” continued this introspective thread. A self-contained anthem of emotional withdrawal, the lyrics declare, “I am a rock, I am an island,” reinforcing Simon’s recurring themes of loneliness and self-preservation. Musically, the track reveals the influence of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” through its use of electric organ and fuller instrumentation. The organ part, in particular, adds a sharp, driving texture that connects the song to Dylan’s electric turn in 1965, underscoring how Simon & Garfunkel were adapting to—and contributing to—the changing folk-rock soundscape.
Their follow-up single, “I Am a Rock,” continued this introspective thread. A self-contained anthem of emotional withdrawal, the lyrics declare, “I am a rock, I am an island,” reinforcing Simon’s recurring themes of loneliness and self-preservation. Musically, the track reflects the seismic shift Bob Dylan initiated with his 1965 hit “Like a Rolling Stone,” particularly through the use of the Hammond B3 organ. On Dylan’s track, Al Kooper’s impromptu organ line added a swirling, expressive urgency that helped redefine the sound of folk rock. Simon & Garfunkel adopted a similar approach in “I Am a Rock,” using the B3 to add a bright, almost defiant edge to the song’s otherwise somber tone. The organ’s warm, slightly distorted timbre offered a middle ground between the acoustic purity of folk and the electric assertiveness of rock, allowing Simon & Garfunkel to evolve their sound without abandoning their lyrical seriousness.
The Hammond B3 organ’s unmistakable sound is due in large part to its pairing with the Leslie speaker cabinet, an ingenious electro-mechanical device that creates a swirling, undulating tone. The Leslie isn’t just a speaker—it’s a rotating speaker system designed to manipulate sound through motion. Inside the cabinet, it contains a treble horn and a bass rotor, both of which physically spin at varying speeds. As the organ’s sound projects through these moving components, the Doppler effect (the same phenomenon that causes a passing siren to change pitch) alters the frequency and amplitude of the sound waves, producing a vibrato (wavering pitch) and tremolo (wavering volume) effect.
This rotation gives the B3 organ its rich, immersive character—one that can shift from a gentle shimmer to a roaring, expressive whirl. The Leslie can switch between a "chorale" (slow) and "tremolo" (fast) setting, allowing players to dynamically shape the emotional tone of a song. In folk rock, particularly in the wake of Dylan’s electric pivot, the Leslie-enhanced B3 became a powerful expressive tool. It conveyed urgency, introspection, or even a psychedelic haze, depending on how it was played—making it a bridge between the acoustic intimacy of folk and the broader emotional palette of rock. The organ’s warm, slightly distorted timbre offered a middle ground between the acoustic purity of folk and the electric assertiveness of rock, allowing Simon & Garfunkel to evolve their sound without abandoning their lyrical seriousness.
Their subsequent albums—Sounds of Silence (1966), Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (1966), and Bookends (1968)—fused poetic lyricism, soft rock textures, and subtle orchestral arrangements. Their rendition of the traditional ballad “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” added a counterpoint melody drawn from Paul Simon’s earlier anti-war song “The Side of a Hill,” transforming the centuries-old English folk tune into a haunting commentary on the Vietnam War. While the main vocal line evokes a medieval atmosphere with its refrain—“Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme”—the counter-melody underneath paints a starkly modern picture of war’s brutality, with lines like “Generals order their soldiers to kill / and to fight for a cause they’ve long ago forgotten.” The juxtaposition of pastoral nostalgia and militaristic violence creates a poignant tension, reflecting the 1960s generation’s disillusionment with romanticized notions of honor and sacrifice. By weaving in layered harmonies and baroque-inspired instrumentation such as the harpsichord, the duo helped elevate folk music into a more refined, studio-crafted art form, bridging the gap between pop accessibility and literary ambition.
Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends (1968) reveals the clear influence of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, both in form and concept. Like Sgt. Pepper, Bookends includes the complete lyrics on the album sleeve and presents a loosely connected narrative arc, especially on Side 1. The album begins with a brief instrumental—“Bookends Theme”—which returns at the end of the side, this time with lyrics, framing the album’s meditation on the passage of time and the stages of human life.
The early tracks reflect this thematic structure: the first song introduces a child standing precariously on the edge of a building, possibly contemplating suicide. “America” follows a young couple on a road trip across the country, searching not just for place, but for purpose and meaning. “Overs” portrays a stagnant relationship, suggesting a married couple stuck in the routine of a life that has lost its spark.
One of the album’s most distinctive moments is “Voices of Old People,” a sound collage assembled by Garfunkel from real-life recordings he made while visiting nursing homes. The voices, filled with confusion, loneliness, and longing, offer a poignant, unfiltered portrait of aging. It is immediately followed by “Old Friends,” a quiet, contemplative song about two elderly men on a park bench, bound together by memory and routine. The lyrics—“Old friends, sat on their park bench like bookends” and “Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange to be seventy”—echoed with unsettling resonance for a generation that famously declared, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
Side 1 closes with the return of the “Bookends Theme,” bringing the listener full circle and reinforcing the album’s cyclical meditation on life, death, and memory. The image of “bookends” becomes a powerful metaphor: childhood and old age mirror one another, with both marked by vulnerability and dependence. Musically, “Old Friends” builds into a lush orchestral crescendo, recalling the dramatic climax of “A Day in the Life” from Sgt. Pepper and signaling Simon & Garfunkel’s growing ambition to fuse folk lyricism with broader sonic experimentation.
Simon & Garfunkel’s music became closely tied to the New Hollywood movement in film. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation of directors such as Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, and Dennis Hopper rejected traditional studio formulas in favor of edgier, more experimental storytelling. These films often reflected the disillusionment of the era, centering on anti-heroes, countercultural themes, and a growing distrust of institutions. As part of this broader shift, directors increasingly turned to contemporary popular music instead of conventional orchestral scores, using folk and folk-rock songs to capture the mood of a restless generation.
Perhaps the most iconic example of this trend is Mike Nichols’ 1967 film The Graduate, which prominently features Simon & Garfunkel tracks such as “The Sound of Silence,” “Scarborough Fair,” and the newly written “Mrs. Robinson.” Rather than relying on a traditional score, Nichols used the duo’s introspective, melancholy songs to underscore the emotional alienation of the film’s protagonist. The film’s critical and commercial success helped launch Simon & Garfunkel to superstardom and demonstrated that pop and folk-rock could serve as powerful narrative tools in cinematic storytelling.
The Graduate follows Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman), a recent college graduate adrift in the aimless drift of post-adolescent uncertainty. Caught between the expectations of his parents’ generation and his own sense of disaffection, Benjamin drifts into an affair with the older, married Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), whose seductive control masks her own disenchantment with suburban life. Their emotionally hollow relationship becomes a metaphor for Benjamin’s internal confusion and the emptiness of the adult world he’s been groomed to enter. When he falls for Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, the narrative pivots from satire to emotional entanglement, dramatizing the tension between youthful longing and inherited dysfunction.
Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” recurs throughout the film as a motif of emotional detachment and existential drift. In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, the song plays while Benjamin floats passively in a pool on an inflatable raft, surrounded by a world that feels sterile and unfulfilling. aptures the ironic detachment and veiled moral critique at the heart of the story. Its now-famous refrain—“And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson / Jesus loves you more than you will know”—points to the hollow piety and performative moralism at the heart of postwar American suburbia..
The film’s final scene remains one of the most discussed endings in American cinema. After violently crashing Elaine’s wedding and running off with her, Benjamin and Elaine board a city bus and sit in the back, grinning breathlessly—until their smiles fade into uneasy silence. As “The Sound of Silence” returns, the camera lingers on their uncertain expressions, suggesting that their act of rebellion may offer no clear resolution. The ambiguity of the ending, underscored by the haunting music, reflects the broader uncertainties of a generational anxiety of entering adulthood in a world without stable meaning or direction.
As noted in an earlier chapter, bluegrass gained popularity during the folk revival because revivalists viewed it as “untainted” by commercialism. It was seen as raw, authentic, and rooted in a pre-industrial past. Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a landmark of the movement, featured a bluegrass soundtrack by Flatt & Scruggs, including their now-iconic “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”
Bluegrass had appeared in popular media before, such as in the comedic television series The Beverly Hillbillies, where Flatt & Scruggs also provided the theme song. However, its presence in Bonnie and Clyde marked a notable shift. In this new context, bluegrass was no longer just a nostalgic or humorous reference to rural Americana. It became an emotionally charged symbol of rebellion and cultural resistance. By repurposing bluegrass in a violent, stylish, and morally ambiguous film, Penn and music supervisor Gene Parsons helped expand the expressive possibilities of roots music in cinema, aligning it with the countercultural values and cinematic experimentation of New Hollywood.
Similarly, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) eschewed a traditional orchestral score in favor of a patchwork of contemporary folk, blues, and rock songs. This decision gave the film a raw immediacy and helped position it as a cinematic landmark of the counterculture. Tracks by The Byrds, Steppenwolf, and The Band served not just as sonic backdrops but as active elements in the storytelling. The Byrds’ “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” playing over a montage of open-road motorcycle travel, underscored themes of freedom, anti-conformity, and the search for spiritual meaning. Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” became an anthem for defiant independence, while The Band’s “The Weight” lent a sense of weary, existential gravity to the film’s cross-country journey. The collage-like use of music mirrored the fractured American landscape that the film depicted.
Together, Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Graduate demonstrate how folk and folk-rock music became potent cinematic tools for expressing the generational unrest of the late 1960s. More than just background music, these songs functioned as emotional commentary articulating anxieties, ideals, and contradictions that often went unspoken in dialogue. Simon & Garfunkel’s hushed introspection in The Graduate, the Byrds’ kaleidoscopic optimism in Easy Rider, and Flatt & Scruggs’ raw urgency in Bonnie and Clyde each gave aural texture to stories of disillusionment, rebellion, and cultural fragmentation. In the hands of New Hollywood filmmakers, these genres—closely tied to the folk revival—were repurposed to resonate with audiences experiencing the breakdown of postwar consensus.
Simon & Garfunkel’s contributions to this cinematic moment were especially emblematic. Tracks like “The Sound of Silence” and “Mrs. Robinson” gave voice to a generation suspended between the fading comforts of tradition and the uncertainties of modern life. Paired with Mike Nichols’ visual language, the duo’s music shaped the emotional tone of The Graduate, providing an internal monologue for a protagonist adrift in a world of superficiality and unfulfilled promise. Folk and folk-rock, in this context, became not just the soundtrack of a movement, but the inner voice of a culture in transition.