Introduction

In 1969, in a small studio in Los Angeles, a 27-year-old singer named Arthur Garfunkel walked up to a microphone and recorded a vocal that would still be played at funerals fifty years later. The song was “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” His partner Paul Simon had written it on guitar and originally planned to sing it himself. He gave it to Garfunkel, who delivered a performance of such purity that critics still argue about whether any other voice could have carried it. The song became the title track of an album that won six Grammys, sold more than 25 million copies, and broke up the most successful folk duo of the 1960s within months of its release.

Art Garfunkel’s career is shorter and stranger than his fame suggests. He is one of the most recognizable voices in popular music, the recorded face of “The Sound of Silence,” “Mrs. Robinson,” “Cecilia,” and “The Boxer.” He is also a man who walked across the United States on foot in pieces over fourteen years, kept an annotated reading list of every book he finished since 1968, taught math at a private school, and spent much of his life uneasy about the partnership that made him famous.

Why Art Garfunkel’s Voice Mattered

In the late 1960s, folk and rock music ran on a current of male voices that were rough, blues-inflected, or affectedly weathered. Dylan, Jagger, Lennon, Cocker, Joplin. Against that, Garfunkel’s clean high tenor sounded almost arrogantly pure. There was no rasp, no studio trickery, no theatrical strain. He sang quietly, with a child-singer’s open vowels, and the recordings preserved every breath. That voice gave Simon’s songs a particular emotional register that nothing else in the era matched. Where Dylan made you think, and the Rolling Stones made you move, Simon and Garfunkel made you sit still in a kitchen at 11 p.m. and remember somebody.

His performance on “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is sometimes called the greatest vocal in pop music history. That is a defensible claim. The song has an unusually demanding range, climbs dramatically across three verses, and asks the singer to hold a long note at the climax with no time to breathe before the next phrase. Garfunkel delivered it on the third take. Producer Roy Halee said later that the only technical decision was whether to use it as-is or do another, and they used it as-is.

The Beginning: Two Boys in Queens

Garfunkel was born in 1941 in Forest Hills, Queens. He met Paul Simon in elementary school. The two were classmates in a sixth-grade production of Alice in Wonderland, Simon was the White Rabbit, Garfunkel was the Cheshire Cat, and started harmonizing together as eleven-year-olds. By high school they had a small record deal as a duo called Tom & Jerry, releasing a single called “Hey, Schoolgirl” that briefly charted in 1957. That early success was followed by failure. By 1963 they had reunited as Simon & Garfunkel and recorded a folk album that flopped. The album might have been forgotten entirely if their producer Tom Wilson, working on a Bob Dylan record, had not added rock instrumentation to “The Sound of Silence” without telling them. The remixed version became a number-one hit in 1965.

The Five Albums

In the five years between 1964 and 1970, Simon & Garfunkel released five studio albums and produced almost the entire body of work people know them for: Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., Sounds of Silence, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Bookends, and Bridge Over Troubled Water. The arc across those albums is essentially Simon’s compositional maturation. He began as a literate folk songwriter writing about loneliness and ended writing some of the most ambitious pop songs of the era. Garfunkel did not write the songs, but his voice shaped how they sounded.

The Split

Simon & Garfunkel broke up in 1970. The official reason was that Garfunkel was spending more time on a movie project than on music. The real reasons were more complicated. Simon was the writer. Every Simon & Garfunkel hit was a Paul Simon composition. Yet Garfunkel had the most famous voice, often got more attention on tour, and was widely seen as the star of the duo by audiences who did not look closely at the songwriting credits. The asymmetry frustrated Simon. By the end of Bridge Over Troubled Water, the two were rarely in the same room. They reunited for the legendary 1981 Concert in Central Park, but each reunion ended with renewed conflict, and they have not toured together since 2010.

The Second Act

After the split, Garfunkel released a string of solo albums. The 1973 single “All I Know” reached number nine on the Billboard chart, and his 1975 cover of “I Only Have Eyes for You” topped the British charts. But the singing was only part of what he did. Starting in 1983, Garfunkel began walking across the continental United States in stages, flying to wherever he had left off, walking 100 to 200 miles, flying home, returning months later to continue. The walk took fourteen years. He kept a list of every book he read from 1968 onward, with brief commentary, organized by author. He taught math at a private school for several years in the 1990s. In 2010 his voice began to fail. He developed vocal cord paresis and spent years rehabilitating it with patient daily practice.

What His Career Teaches

The visible half is rarely the engine. Garfunkel was the face of Simon & Garfunkel. Simon was the engine. Audiences confuse those two things constantly.

Range matters less than fit. Garfunkel had a fairly narrow vocal range and a single tonal color. Within that color, he was unmatched.

You can be famous and still have a life. Garfunkel walked across continents, kept reading lists, taught math, and lived in the same New York apartment for decades.

Creative partnerships rarely survive their own success. Two people who needed each other to break through stop needing each other once they have, and the inequality that was tolerable when the stakes were small becomes intolerable when the stakes are enormous.

Conclusion

Art Garfunkel is one of the great voices of the 20th century and one of its quieter careers. He sang on songs that everyone knows, in a partnership that everyone knows, and then spent fifty years doing things almost nobody noticed. The next time the song plays in a coffee shop or at a funeral, listen for the long note at the climax. It is the sound of a man at 27 doing the most important thing he would ever do, in a single take, with a friendship he was about to lose. The whole career is in that note.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Did Art Garfunkel write any Simon & Garfunkel songs?
No. Every Simon & Garfunkel song was written by Paul Simon, though Garfunkel contributed to arrangements, song selection, and vocal production.

Why did Simon & Garfunkel break up?
The official reason was Garfunkel’s growing film career, but the deeper cause was Simon’s frustration with the imbalance of recognition. Simon wrote the songs but Garfunkel, with the famous voice, often received more public attention.

What happened to Art Garfunkel’s voice?
In 2010 he developed vocal cord paresis, a partial paralysis that made singing unreliable. He spent years rehabilitating it and eventually returned to performing with a more limited but still expressive range.

Is “Bridge Over Troubled Water” really sung by Garfunkel?
Yes. Paul Simon wrote the song and initially planned to sing it himself, but he gave it to Garfunkel, whose performance is the version on the record. Simon later expressed some regret about handing it over.

Are Simon & Garfunkel still on speaking terms?
The relationship has been strained for most of the past fifty years, punctuated by reunions and renewed conflicts. As of the mid-2020s the two are not actively collaborating.