Artist · chart history · #48 in indie & aaa artist polls
Simon and Garfunkel
Band Kew Gardens Hills United States Active 1963–1970
Simon and Garfunkel formed in 1963 in Kew Gardens Hills, United States and was active until 1970. Simon and Garfunkel has 161 chart appearances on 41 radio countdowns from 16 stations on RockLists, spanning 1987–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, which appears on 24 lists with a best position of #20. The station that charted Simon and Garfunkel most often is WXPN (Philadelphia, PA), with 38 appearances.
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel met at school in Queens in 1953, and they learned to sing together before they learned much else, with Simon already writing the songs. As teenagers they called themselves Tom & Jerry and had a minor hit in 1957 with "Hey Schoolgirl", a knockoff of their heroes the Everly Brothers. In 1963 they came back together under their own names and signed to Columbia, but the debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., went nowhere; Simon headed to England to play solo, and Garfunkel went back to his studies at Columbia University.
Then somebody remixed "The Sound of Silence", and in 1965 the thing took off on AM radio and went all the way to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The duo reunited to catch the wave: the Sounds of Silence album and a nationwide college tour in 1966, then Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, with "Homeward Bound" and "Scarborough Fair/Canticle", the first record where they really called the shots. Simon's songs were literate, lonely and soft-spoken, and Garfunkel's high, clear voice wrapped around his voice so closely you couldn't see the seam.
Mike Nichols put their music all over his 1967 film The Graduate, and in 1968 both the soundtrack and Bookends, with the hit version of "Mrs. Robinson" and the slow-unfolding "America", went to number one. By then the partnership was fraying. The two didn't get along, and they fought over the music, and it ended in 1970, just after Bridge Over Troubled Water came out that January. It went on to be one of the best-selling albums in the world: the title song's gospel swell, "The Boxer" with its thunderclap drums, the bouncing, handclapping "Cecilia", and "The Only Living Boy in New York".
Simon went on to a strong solo career, Graceland in 1986 above all, and Garfunkel had hit singles and a run as an actor, starting with Catch-22 in 1970. They have reunited several times, most famously for a 1981 concert in Central Park that may have drawn more than 500,000 people. They won 7 Grammys, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003, and have sold more than 100 million records.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Simon and Garfunkel on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bridge Over Troubled Water | 24 | #20 | – | – | |
| 2 | The Boxer | 22 | #26 | – | – | |
| 3 | America | 23 | #3 | – | – | |
| 4 | Mrs. Robinson | 17 | #40 | – | – | |
| 5 | The Sound of Silence | 17 | #17 | – | – | |
| 6 | The Only Living Boy In New York | 14 | #54 | – | – | |
| 7 | Cecilia | 13 | #308 | – | – | |
| 8 | Sounds Of Silence | 6 | #30 | – | – | |
| 9 | Homeward Bound | 7 | #208 | – | – | |
| 10 | Kathy's Song | 3 | #596 | – | – | |
| 11 | Scarborough Fair Canticle | 2 | #694 | – | – | |
| 12 | The Sound of Silence (aka "The Sounds of Silence") | 1 | #233 | – | – | |
| 13 | I Am A Rock | 2 | #602 | – | – | |
| 14 | Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard | 1 | #425 | – | – | |
| 15 | Baby Driver | 2 | #608 | – | – | |
| 16 | Kodachrome | 1 | #472 | – | – | |
| 17 | Scarborough Fair | 2 | #313 | – | – | |
| 18 | The 59th Street Bridge Song | 1 | #793 | – | – | |
| 19 | Bookends Theme | 1 | #1347 | – | – | |
| 20 | 59th Street Bridge Song | 1 | #1845 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
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