It was the summer of 1984 and things weren’t going well for Paul Simon. The year prior, a blockbuster Simon and Garfunkel tour ended in bickering. Meanwhile, even though the 1980 single Late in the Evening reached the US Top 10, Simon’s last two albums had not sold very well, and his marriage to Carrie Fisher was starting to unravel.
In the midst of all that the 43-year-old folk icon was steadily working on building a beach home out on the far end of Long Island. Many of Simon’s pilgrimages from Manhattan out to Montauk were soundtracked by a bootleg tape of accordion-heavy mbaqanga, a South African music style with jazz rhythms and bright guitar chords, he had received from a friend. It was on those drives that the seeds of Graceland, the crown jewel of Simon’s discography, were planted.
It’s constructed around contributions from South African musicians whose “township jive” reminded Simon of the early rock and doowop records he heard as a kid in Queens. There’s musical detours of all kinds – a trip to Louisiana inspired Simon to record with zydeco group Rockin’ Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters, while the song All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints features Los Lobos’ fusion of norteño and rock. Simon is at his best when among resonant rhythms from Johannesburg.
Inspired by the bootleg, Simon booked jam sessions in Johannesburg with different bands – General MD Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters, Tao Ea Matsekha, the Boyoyo Boys – where he developed melodies and scribbled down lyrics as engineer Roy Halee tracked the group’s grooves. Some of the songs that ended up on Graceland were assembled on top of these groups’ already-finished songs, such as Gumboots, a thrilling pop confection that Simon initially heard as an instrumental on that tape. For Simon, whose process often started with an acoustic guitar, it was a profound shift in how he approached his craft.
After dark, the Black musicians weren’t allowed on the streets of Johannesburg, nor were they allowed to use public transportation. As a result, a day of recording would reach an “uncomfortable time when the players couldn’t concentrate until they knew there might be a car to take them home”, Simon told Rolling Stone in 1986. In a foreshadowing of the backlash Graceland would go on to receive, the manager of the Soul Brothers told Simon he believed recording in South Africa constituted a violation of the United Nations’ 1980 boycott, which was passed to prevent the South African government from using culture as propaganda for apartheid.
Kahn believes that Simon had the musicians’ labor rights in mind. But there wasn’t a set formula of how to approach this.” Simon has still faced backlash over the years about Graceland’s songwriting credits from several musicians who appeared on the album, including Los Lobos, Rockin’ Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters, and even guitarist Ray Phiri, who helped construct the album’s title track. Against charges of cultural appropriation, Graceland advocates have suggested that Simon’s work in South Africa helped bring these bands, such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who round out the starry-eyed Diamonds on the Souls of Her Shoes, to a larger audience.
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