{"id":20227,"date":"2024-03-27T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=20227"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:49:20","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T14:49:20","slug":"kathys-song-for-a-girl-i-never-knew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2024\/03\/27\/kathys-song-for-a-girl-i-never-knew\/","title":{"rendered":"KATHY\u00b4S SONG for a girl I never knew"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

KATHY\u00b4S SONG for a girl I never knew<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having lived in my semi detached home with suburban parents and younger brother, throughout my secondary modern all boys school days I didn\u00b4t really know what a girl was. I had heard lots of talk about them, of course, and I knew the lyrics to every love song I heard on the radio and I knew that dates were not only a foodstuff. Being a poetic soul, even then, when I left school at sixteen I was ready for romance rather than the snog against the wall that other lads boasted about. I wanted to be in love, and I knew that to have loved and lost would be better than never to have loved at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The first girl I fell in love with at sixteen was a girl called Cathy, and when I met her she was only two years older than I, but was married and running a \u00b4b and b\u00b4 in Scotland with her forest ranger husband. I was on holiday with my family touring the West Highlands when dad pulled in hopefully to a small cottage in Spean Bridge with a B & B vacancy sign on the door. We got two rooms for the night, stayed for a week and re-visited for a holiday for the next five or six years. We all became good family friends for the rest of our lives and Cathy introduced me to the music of Johnny Cash. What more could a girl do for a guy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One of those songs I loved on the radio was Kathy\u00b4s Song by Paul Simon with a beautiful little guitar riff behind lyrics of his yearning for a girl who lived in a different country, just like Cathy with a C lived in Scotland whilst I lived in England.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gazing soulfully out of his bedroom window into the pouring rain one evening Paul Simon drew the name of Kathy with a K in the condensation on the window. I paid a similar tribute for Cathy in Scotland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Did I fall in love with Cathy? Certainly not; she was a married woman and in our early relationship I hadn\u00b4t even seen The Graduate. When the film came around, just a little later I watched three successive showings on one night in The Mayfair in Whitefield so my first ever girlfriend walked out on me because I was too engrossed in the film. As I made my own exit a couple of hours later it was snowing heavens high, and I should have wondered if she had got home ok, on a night such as this in those pre-mobile phone days. Instead I was still thinking of how the soundtrack, of April Come She Will and Mrs Robinson enhanced the film. Come to think of it I might even have been thinking of how beautiful Mrs. Robinson was !<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kathy\u00b4s Song, of \u00b4words that tore and strained to rhyme\u00b4 remains one of my very favourites songs, and I still think of it as my favourite track on the album, Indeed I think it is still one of the loveliest songs in a Paul Simon Songbook (the name of the album) that has grown exponentially over the last sixty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As this week\u00b4s Time Capsule article in Paste on-line magazine reminded us this week many of the 12 songs on that early album would end up on Simon & Garfunkel records eventually, but they were Paul Simon\u2019s debut darlings first. Recorded and released in between the Simon & Garfunkel albums\u00a0Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.\u00a0and\u00a0Sounds of Silence,\u00a0The Paul Simon Songbook\u00a0was Simon\u2019s attempt at recalibrating after the former sold poorly. He made the record at Levy\u2019s on New Bond Street in London, having travelled to Europe frequently to perform at clubs around Paris, Copenhagen and Harlem. The process of making Songbook was daunting, as he only had a single mic for his voice and guitar, often having to do multiple takes just to get one track right.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While The Paul Simon Songbook came out in 1965, it was only initially released in the UK\u2014and it didn\u2019t see a US release until its inclusion in the Paul Simon: Collected Works box set in 1981. Even today, Songbook doesn\u2019t carry the same strong foundation of listeners as Simon\u2019s later work, like Still Crazy After All These Years<\/em> or Graceland<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But before all that Simon would write\u00a0a lot<\/em>\u00a0of songs while in England in 1964 and 1965, and many of them, like \u201cHomeward Bound\u201d and \u201cFor Emily, Whenever I May Find Her,\u201d would form his and Art Garfunkel\u2019s breakout record\u00a0Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme<\/em>\u00a0in 1966\u2014which would then crack open the floodgates for the duo on\u00a0Bookends<\/em>\u00a0and \u201cMrs. Robinson\u201d (a song from the film, The Graduate two years later.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Paul Simon Songbook<\/em> is, claims Paste, the epitome of a stepping stone, as nearly all of its songs have lived stronger lives elsewhere. But still, these songs are beautiful and unkempt and transcendent. It sounds like Paul Simon walked into a studio and sang into the first microphone he found, unbothered about whether anyone else was there to hear or tape him.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cKathy\u2019s Song\u201d is Simon\u2019s first track, Paste reminds us, on which \u00a0he explicitly calls out his then-girlfriend and momentary muse Kathy Chitty (who appears alongside Simon on the album\u2019s cover, as they sit on a cobblestone street in London while holding wooden figurines), whom would inspire the song \u201cAmerica\u201d a few years later. 60 years later, I fear that Simon has failed to write lines as beautiful as \u201cAnd as I watch the drops of rain weave their weary paths and die, I know that I am like the rain, there but for the grace of you go I.\u201d \u201cKathy\u2019s Song\u201d features one of Simon\u2019s best guitar performances, a moment of delicate finger-picking that precisely matches the ingenuity of his own<\/em> singing.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What makes Paul Simon such a quintessential folk singer is, for better or for worse, his ability to not only remain in key and pitch, but his gorgeous and methodical delivery of his own vocabulary. The way his tone briefly warps when he sings \u201cAnd a song I was writing is left undone, I don\u2019t know why I spend my time writing songs I can\u2019t believe\u201d on \u201cKathy\u2019s Song\u201d is a masterful display of letting the story continue to unravel through meter and syllable breaks<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think my own love of the album has diminished at all since my first listen to it, and whilst I have been thrilled by later Simon and Garfunkel albums and, of course, by the scores of subsequent solo albums proper, by each of those partners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, while reviewing the album in retrospect for Blender in 2004, critic Robert Christgau disliked The Paul Simon Songbook, awarding it a 2-out-of-5 stars and proclaiming that \u201c[Simon\u2019s] true solo debut, 1972\u2019s Paul Simon, is about 10 times better.\u201d Record Mirror and Rolling Stone felt similarly, leaving 3-out-of-5 star-reviews, with the former writing that the album was full of \u201cappealing and worthwhile folk songs\u201d and that Simon \u201chas a voice of power, of contrast, and of simple musicianship.\u201d Simon himself wasn\u2019t even fond of the album when it was released, explaining that \u201cthere are some [songs] I would not write today\u201d in the original liner notes, before professing that they \u201cplayed a role in the transition\u201d to his place in music at the time.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s understandable that anyone would take that stance, given Reginald Warburton and Stanley West\u2019s uninspired production, but there\u2019s a certain level of cynicism on \u201cA Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara\u2019d into Submission)\u201d that we never got on a Simon & Garfunkel record, especially not when the duo re-recorded the track for Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Dismissing The Paul Simon Songbook for what it is\u2014a collection of songs assembled by a gifted songwriter in the wake of the debut album with his singing partner having flopped\u2014is a disservice to how the album, in many ways, resurrected Paul Simon\u2019s ascent, acting as the bridge from a disappointing first outing to a period of great, unparalleled success.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Though <\/em>The Paul Simon Songbook<\/em> is, at its core, just a measure of one man with his guitar and damn-near nothing else, it\u2019s a clear-eyed, minimal document of one of our greatest storytellers properly capturing his own voice. \u201cFrom the moment of my birth to the instant of my death, there are patterns I must follow just as I must breathe each breath,\u201d Simon sings, unknowingly tracing the genesis of a six-decade, 15-album career. It\u2019s the kind of record you might share with a first love, and there\u2019s a level of craftsmanship here that\u2019s rife with flourishes of brilliance. The emotional cord that links each song on Paul Simon\u2019s debut album remains profound and pertinent.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking for myself, the album The Paul Simon Songbook was pretty much my introduction to contemporary folk music and was, at that stage, an album that served as a bridge over troubled waters from my love of British pop to what later became a love of the then yet-to-be-named genre of Americana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Simon became a missing link that led me to Dylan (I had disdained those members of my youth club who carried his albums), and Tom Paxton, both of whom I considered as folk and to John Stewart, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith and Mary Chapin Carpenter and scores of other great singer-writers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first three chapters of the new Paste series, Time Capsule, with each chapter being posted on a Saturday has already placed three great albums into that Time Capsule by each of Townes Van Zandt, Janis Joplin and Paul Simon. It is potentially an endless series, that will provide hours of happy reading,\u00a0 days, weeks and months of intense conversation with mates about what Paste have had to say, and will serve as a Back To The Future vehicle as we whizz back to the fifties and sixties to hear what we somehow missed and to transport it on to the playlists of tomorrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So there\u00b4s much to look forward to and much to do\u2026 like that song I was writing and left undone !<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of those songs I loved on the radio was Kathy\u00b4s Song by Paul Simon with a beautiful little guitar riff behind lyrics of his yearning for a girl who lived in a different country,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20233,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,45,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literary","category-music","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20227"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20238,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20227\/revisions\/20238"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}