When I was discovering pop music as a Dallas fifth grader somewhere around 1978, Simon & Garfunkel was the first band to blow my mind. Their greatest hits collection may have been the first pop music album I ever owned, and their 1983 concert at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas was the first live pop music performance I ever attended. When my ninth grade English teacher asked us to write about the poets we loved, I earnestly listed Paul Simon along with E. E. Cummings and William Shakespeare.
So I was very pleasantly shocked a few years ago to discover a Paul Simon album I’d never owned or listened to — Live Rhymin’, featuring the Peruvian musicians Urubamba and a gospel group called the Jessy Dixon Singers. The whole album is a pleasure, featuring fun but familiar variations of many Paul Simon classics. But the performance of “Bridge over Troubled Water” with the Jessy Dixon Singers is a revelation and has become my very favorite version of the song.
Pretty obviously, having an actual gospel group in the mix brings the gospel feel of the song to the forefront. But there’s also a hypnotic bass line that reverberates throughout the first half of the song that creates a very different vibe from the piano and orchestral accompaniment of the original. For me, it’s deeper, subtler, and more intensely personal. And then about three quarters of the way through, Simon and the Jessy Dixon singers start repeating “I will ease your mind” again and again, ascending into near ecstasy and then gently gliding back down to Earth. The song ends with a kind of quiet benediction instead of a crescendo, and I absolutely love it.
Please feel free to listen to the song on Paul Simon’s Youtube page. I hope you enjoy it as much I have.
