[9] Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in their predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Kew Gardens Hills in Queens, New York, three blocks away from one another.

[22] "Hey, Schoolgirl" attracted regular rotation on nationwide AM pop stations, leading it to sell over 100,000 copies and to land on Billboard's charts at number 49.

[22] Prosen promoted the group heavily, getting them a headlining spot on Dick Clark's American Bandstand alongside Jerry Lee Lewis.

[35] They performed three new songs—"Sparrow", "He Was My Brother", and "The Sound of Silence"—and attracted the attention of Columbia Records staffer Tom Wilson, a prominent A&R man and producer (who would later become a key architect of Bob Dylan's transition from folk to rock).

[38] Simon & Garfunkel's debut studio album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., produced by Wilson, was recorded over three sessions in March 1964 and released in October.

[29][51] In the United States, Dick Summer, a late-night DJ at WBZ in Boston, played "The Sound of Silence"; it became popular with a college audience.

When Wilson heard about this new wave of interest, he took inspiration from the success of the folk-rock hybrid that he had created with Dylan in "Like a Rolling Stone" and crafted a rock remix of "Sound of Silence" using studio musicians.

[56] Recorded in three weeks and consisting of rerecorded songs from The Paul Simon Songbook plus four new tracks, Sounds of Silence was rush-released in mid-January 1966, peaking at number 21 Billboard Top LPs chart.

[57] Since they considered The Sounds of Silence a "rush job" to capitalize on their sudden success, Simon & Garfunkel spent more time crafting the follow-up.

[61] Garfunkel considered the recording of "Scarborough Fair" to be the point at which they stepped into the role of producer, as they were constantly beside engineer Roy Halee mixing.

[63] Manager Mort Lewis also was responsible for this public perception, as he withheld them from television appearances unless they were allowed to play an uninterrupted set or choose the setlist.

[64] During the sessions for Parsley, Simon and Garfunkel recorded "A Hazy Shade of Winter"; it was released as a single, peaking at number 13 on the national charts.

[68] Simon was distrustful of label executives; on one occasion, he and Garfunkel recorded a meeting with Davis, who was giving a "fatherly talk" on speeding up production, to laugh at it later.

[64] Leonard Hirshan, a powerful agent at William Morris, negotiated a deal that paid Simon $25,000 to submit three songs to Nichols and producer Lawrence Turman.

[72] The duo were signed under an older contract that specified the label pay for sessions,[69] and Simon & Garfunkel took advantage of this, hiring viola and brass players and percussionists.

[75] Prior to release, the band helped put together and performed at the Monterey Pop Festival, which signaled the beginning of the Summer of Love on the West Coast.

[76] "Fakin' It" was issued as a single that summer and found only modest success on AM radio; the duo were much more focused on the rising FM format, which played album tracks and treated their music with respect.

[77] In January 1968, the duo appeared on a Kraft Music Hall special, Three for Tonight, performing ten songs, largely taken from their previous album.

[78] Bookends was released by Columbia Records in April 1968, 24 hours before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which spurred nationwide outrage and riots.

[76] Bookends received such heavy orders weeks in advance of its release that Columbia was able to apply for award certification before copies left the warehouse, a fact it touted in magazine ads.

The album became the duo's best-selling to date, helped by the attention for the Graduate soundtrack ten weeks earlier, creating an initial combined sales figure of over five million units.

[80] At the 1969 Grammy Awards, the lead single "Mrs. Robinson" became the first rock and roll song to receive Record of the Year, and also won Best Contemporary Pop Performance by a Duo or Group.

[90][91] Meanwhile, the duo, working with director Charles Grodin, produced an hourlong CBS special, Songs of America, a mixture of scenes featuring notable political events and leaders concerning the US, such as the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy's funeral procession, Cesar Chavez and the Poor People's March.

[15] The song has been covered by over 50 artists,[101] including Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, Jim Nabors, Charlotte Church, Maynard Ferguson, Willie Nelson, Roy Orbison, Michael W. Smith, Josh Groban, and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

[15] Simon thanked Garfunkel at his 2001 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist: "I regret the ending of our friendship.

The Old Friends tour began in October 2003 and played to sold-out audiences across the United States for 40 dates until mid-December,[122] earning an estimated $123 million.

Following a 12-city run in Europe in 2004, they ended their nine-month tour with a free concert along Via dei Fori Imperiali, in front of the Colosseum in Rome, on July 31, 2004.

[130] By the late 1960s, they had become the "folk establishment ... primarily unthreatening and accessible, which forty years later makes them an ideal gateway act to the weirder, harsher, more complex folkies of the 60s counterculture".

[131] Their later albums explored more ambitious production techniques and incorporated elements of gospel, rock, R&B, and classical, revealing a "voracious musical vocabulary".

[133] According to Richie Unterberger of AllMusic, their clean sound and muted lyricism "cost them some hipness points during the psychedelic era ... the pair inhabited the more polished end of the folk-rock spectrum and was sometimes criticized for a certain collegiate sterility.