Paul Simon once said this was the closest he came to an overtly political song. He wrote it shortly after Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972, well before the Watergate scandal broke, which makes its mood of grief seem prescient. I heard this spare version by Boston sort-of bluegrass band Crooked Still on somebody’s Spotify feed the other day and thought how appropriate it still seems today.
Simon released the song on 1973’s “There Goes Rhymin’ Simon” and it was a highlight of his first reunion concert with Art Garfunkel, but mustache aside, I best like this 1975 solo version from the BBC:
The words to the song are Simon’s, but the melody goes back to J.S. Bach, who stole it from an earlier secular love song for use in his St. Matthew Passion. It’s known to English-speaking church-goers as the hymn “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” and I guarantee that Simon knew not just the tune but the 13th-century poem that inspired it. He kept the melody, added a bridge and rewrote the poem as an elegy for the idealized America of our youth:
