Best simon and garfunkel covers

Editor’s Note: This article originally ran in Feb. 2020

Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The duo’s fifth and final album was a hit with three singles reaching the top 10 and six Grammy wins, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year for the title track, a song that would see over hundreds of versions recorded over its 50-year history.

The song’s journey from Simon & Garfunkel hit to pop (and R&B and gospel and country and jazz and even disco) single starts in Simon’s home in 1969.

He was listening to an album by gospel group the Swan Silvertones. It was just a line from one song. In the middle of “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep”, there it was. Lead singer Claude Jeter sings, “I’ll be a bridge over deep water, if you trust in my name.” As Robert Hilburn writes in his 2018 biography of Simon, “Out of the blue, he wrote his own melody, which