Simon and Garfunkel – "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (1970)

I’ll take your part when darkness comes

And pain is all around

Like a bridge over troubled water

I have a vivid memory of lying in my bed 50-plus years ago and watching TV news footage of Robert Kennedy’s funeral train that was accompanied by Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

A crowd watches Robert Kennedy's funeral
train pass through the Princeton, NJ station

But Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, while “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” wasn’t recorded until November 1969 – almost a year and a half later.

So it would seem that my memory was wrong.  

Except that it wasn’t.

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For most of my childhood, my hometown – Joplin, Missouri – had only two television stations.  

KODE-TV (channel 12) was a CBS affiliate, while KOAM-TV (channel 7) broadcast a mixture of NBC and ABC shows.

That became a problem when The Man from U.N.C.L.E. premiered on NBC in 1964.  KOAM chose to broadcast ABC’s Wagon Train instead of the coolest show ever, which made me throw a conniption fit.   (Since “conniption” means “fit,” the term “conniption fit” has an element of redundancy.  But my grandmother always said “conniption fit,” so that’s what I say, too.)

Things changed on January 4, 1968, when Joplin got its third TV station – KUHI-TV, which broadcast on channel 16 on the new-fangled UHF (“ultra high frequency”) band.  

For some reason, the three stations played musical chairs with their network affiliations when the new station signed on.  KUHI replaced KODE as the local CBS affiliate, while KODE switched its allegiance to ABC.  That left KOAM with NBC’s shows – including The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

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Originally, all American TV stations broadcast on the VHF (“very high frequency”) band, which spanned channels 2 through 13.  But the airwaves were getting crowded in the fifties as more and more stations were granted licenses to broadcast in large urban areas, and the government opened up the UHF band – which spanned channels 14 through 83 – to relieve the crowding.

My TV

Older TVs could receive only VHF broadcasts.  But in 1962, a law was passed requiring all newly manufactured televisions to have UHF tuners as well.  So the 12-inch RCA black-and-white TV my parents gave me for Christmas only days before KUHI-TV signed on could receive all three stations.

I spent a lot of time watching that TV in my bedroom because my parents and I didn’t exactly have similar tastes in television programs.  They had no interest in Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In or Star Trek, for example.  Also, I took a liking to AFL football, while my father remained loyal to the NFL.  (The two leagues merged in 1966, but maintained separate regular-season schedules until the 1970 season.  The NFL was on CBS, while AFL games were on NBC.)

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While I was researching today’s featured song, I  came across a BBC.com article about Simon and Garfunkel’s first TV special, which was titled “Songs of America.”  It aired on CBS a few weeks after “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was recorded.  

Here’s an excerpt from that article:

Directed by actor Charles Grodin, “Songs of America” used the duo’s hits to soundtrack footage of riots, marches and the war in Vietnam, much to the horror of sponsor AT&T, who demanded their $600,000 investment back. Even more sympathetic viewers found the movie’s earnest sermonizing hard to swallow. . . .

The heaviest sequence was a dark twist on the film’s travelogue theme, juxtaposing clips of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King on the campaign trail with footage of mourners watching Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train go by.  The musical accompaniment was unfamiliar: a kind of white gospel song, stately and hymn-like, building to a shattering climax as the long black train sped through America’s broken heart. 

One million viewers responded by turning the dial and watching the figure skating on NBC instead. Some sent hate mail. “Songs of America” wouldn’t be seen again for over 40 years.  This was the US public’s inauspicious introduction to what would become one of the defining songs of the 1970s and beyond: “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

So it turns out that I really did see TV news footage of RFK’s funeral train that was accompanied by Simon and Garfunkel singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

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I was never a big Simon and Garfunkel fan – partly because they were my best friend’s favorite group, and partly because earnest, acoustic-guitar-accompanied folkie music was mos’ definitely NOT my cup of tea.

Quite a few of Paul Simon’s songs are either ostentatiously intellectual – like “A Simple Desultory Philippic” (an obnoxious and somewhat insulting Bob Dylan parody) and “Richard Cory” (based on a cheaply ironic Edwin Arlington Robinson poem) – or so twee that they would give a dead man douche chills (“The Dangling Conversation” and “At the Zoo”). 

Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon in 1969

But I have to admit that he wrote some pretty good songs – “A Hazy Shade of Winter,” “Fakin’ It,” “America,” “The Boxer,” and “Keep the Customer Satisfied” among them.

“Bridge Over Troubled Water” not only stands head and shoulders above anything else Simon ever wrote, it also towers above 99.99% of all the songs anyone else ever wrote.

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The title of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was inspired by a line that Simon heard on an old gospel album that Al Kooper had loaned him.

“I have no idea where [the song] came from,” Simon said in a 2011 interview.  “It just came, all of a sudden. . . . I remember thinking, this is considerably better than what I usually write.” 

He once called the song “my ‘Yesterday’,” referring to the well-known Beatles song – which makes me question Paul Simon’s musical judgment.  (I’ll listen to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” any day of the week, but I wouldn’t mind if I never heard “Yesterday” again.)

The late Allen Toussaint famously said that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” had two writers: Paul Simon and God.  If you ask me, God had nothing to do with “Yesterday.”

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Simon wrote the song using his guitar.  It fell to legendary “Wrecking Crew” keyboard player Larry Knechtel to translate Simon’s musical concept to the piano.  

Knechtel was a talented and versatile studio musician who recorded hundreds of tracks with dozens of groups (including the Beach Boys, the Mamas & the Papas, the Doors, and Elvis Presley), but his piano work on “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was his greatest musical achievement.  It’s magnificent.

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“Bridge Over Troubled Water” clocked in at just under five minutes long, but Columbia Records decided to break with tradition and release it as a single.

The song went to number one on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart and stayed there for six weeks.  Billboard ranked it as the number one single of the year, and it won the Grammy for “Record of the Year” as well. 

Now that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” has been inducted into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME, its place in the pantheon of great records is truly secure.

Click here to listen to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

Click here to see the segment from the Simon and Garfunkel “Songs of America” TV special that contains the “Bridge Over Troubled Water”-accompanied news footage that I remembered watching.  (“Bridge Over Troubled Water” begins at about 11:55 of that video.  The Robert Kennedy funeral train footage begins at about 15:03.  Warning: a couple of commercials may pop up right in the middle of the song.)

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: