The Story of "Graceland" as Told by Paul Simon

The "Graceland" story is a very interesting story
 In that it's a very good example of how a collaboration works
 Even when you're not aware of it occurring
 The track is one of the early tracks
 Because I only did five tracks in South Africa
 On the sessions that I did with Forere
 Who is the accordion player
 Plays on "Boy in the Bubble"
 We did a few other tracks
 One of the tracks, I said
 "You know, I like only the drums on this track
 I don't really want anything else
 I don't want the accordion or bass
 I just want the drums"
 And the drums were...
 Something like a kind of a traveling rhythm
 In country music
 I'm a big Sun Records fan
 Early 50's, mid-50's Sun Records
 You hear that drum beat a lot
 ♪
 Like a fast, Johnny Cash type of rhythm
 And somewhere later in the week of recording
 When I had, you know put together a rhythm section of Ray Phiri
 And Bakithi Kumalo and Isaac Mtshali as the rhythm section
 I said to Ray one day, "I like this drum pattern
 Take a listen to it and see if it does anything for you
 You know it sounds kind of like a country thing to me"
 So he starts to play his version of American country, Ray
 He was in the key of E, and then he was playing, you know
 Of course he's playing electric
 But he'd be up over here, you know, like
 ♪
 And then the drums are going
 ♪
 Oh, then he went
 
 Which is a relative minor chord to that key
 I said, "Hey, that's interesting that you played a minor chord"
 Because all the music that I'd been recording with
 In South Africa, with the exception of the Sotho music
 It was all three-chord major chords
 And there was never a minor chord
 There were times when I'd ask Black Mambazo to sing a minor chord
 They couldn't sing a minor chord
 They just didn't hear it
 So he put in this minor chord, and I said
 "That's interesting, why'd you do that?"
 He said, "I was just imitating the way you write"
 I said, "Well, play this lick over it"
 ♪
 In an overdub
 And he did, and it was a really nice, really nice mix
 And Bakithi was playing
 ♪
 The track has a beautiful emptiness to it
 I think that's part of what makes me think that it's
 Something like Sun Records
 You know, when it was just a few instruments and
 Nothing really much except slap-back echo and a song
 There's also another connection, musically, that's in there, and that is
 There's a pedal steel guitar in there
 Which is a, of course, a, you know, like a country instrument
 But it's also a West African instrument, and the guy who played it, his name was Demola Adepoju
 He played with King Sunny Ade's band
 You know, I wanted to hear what that lick sounded like
 
 Seemed like it would be a very good pedal steel lick
 ♪
 And it was a great pedal steel lick, but it was also a great Ray Phiri performance
 ♪
 To me, what's interesting is that Ray reaches into his memory
 For some kind of approximation of what he thinks of as American country
 And Bakithi plays straight ahead to the African groove
 And so, the two, you know, the two musics find a commonality
 And the lyric expresses that
 Don and Phil Everly came in and sang
 I always heard that songs as a perfect Everly Brothers song
 Poor boys and pilgrims with families
 And we are going to Graceland
 I was down in South Africa in, I think, February
 Maybe early March, and I think I didn't go down to Memphis until maybe May
 Brought it home, and I was trying to write to it
 I would, you know, sing these lines about Graceland
 Graceland, of course I wanted to get rid of the Graceland part because
 I mean, what's Graceland got to do with South Africa or anything like that
 So that's gotta go
 It's just a question of what I'm going to replace it with
 But then I couldn't replace it with anything
 I was always singing that
 And finally I said, "I don't know, well maybe I'm supposed to go to Graceland"
 I've never been, maybe I'm supposed to go on a trip and see what I'm writing about. So I did
 And and then I began to describe the trip
 The Mississippi Delta
 'Cause I was driving up from Louisiana
 Where I cut the Zydeco track on "Graceland"
 I was driving from Highway 61
 You know, I'm just writing about what the countryside looked like
 The Mississippi Delta
 Was shining like a national guitar
 I am following the river
 Down the highway
 Through the cradle of the Civil War
 I'm going to Graceland, Graceland
 Memphis, Tennessee
 I'm going to Graceland
 And finally got there to, you know, to Graceland
 And just, you know, made a tour through Graceland
 But what's interesting about all of this is that
 The part of me that had "Graceland" in my head
 I think subconsciously was reacting to what I first heard in the drums
 Which was a kind of Sun Records country-blues amalgam
 And what Ray was doing was mixing up his aural recollections of
 What American country was, and what kind of chord changes I played
 ♪
 And so the whole song really is just one sound evoking a response
 And that eventually became a lyric that evoked instead of being specifically
 About a South African subject or even a political subject
 It became a traveling song, that had to do with the original sound
 Which was the drums, and and and Sun Records and Graceland
 That's really the secret of world music, is people are able to listen to each other
 And make associations, and play their own music
 That sounds like it fits into, into another culture
 And that's how, that's how it worked, and that's how it worked then
 The story of Graceland
 Ooh, ooh, ooh
 In Graceland, in Graceland, in Graceland
 I'm going to Graceland