Bridge over Troubled Water

This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Bridge over Troubled Water is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:

Bridge over Troubled Water
Bridge over Troubled Water cover
Studio album by Simon and Garfunkel
Released January 26, 1970
Recorded November 1968 and
November 1969
Genre Folk rock
Length 36:29
Label Columbia Records
Producer Paul Simon,
Art Garfunkel,
Roy Halee
Professional reviews
Simon and Garfunkel chronology
Bookends
(1968)
Bridge over Troubled Water
(1970)
Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits
(1972)

Bridge over Troubled Water is the fifth and final studio album by Simon and Garfunkel.1 First released on January 26, 1970, it reached No. 1 on Billboard Music Charts pop albums list. It won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, as well as for Best Engineered Recording, while its title track won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and Song of the Year in the Grammy Awards of 1971.1 It has since sold over 25 million worldwide.

The album proved to be a vast success in the United Kingdom, enjoying several runs at number one, spending some years in the charts and eventually becoming the country's biggest-selling album of 1970, 1971 and the 1970s.1 In August 2006, the continued popularity of the album was proven when it charted 7th place in The BBC Radio 2 Music Club Top 100 Albums.

In 2001, the TV network VH1 named Bridge over Troubled Water the thirty-third greatest album of all time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 51 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.1

The songs "Cuba Si, Nixon No," "Groundhog," and the demo "Feuilles-O" (later Garfunkel released "Feuilles-Oh/Do Space Men Pass Dead Souls on Their Way to the Moon?" as the flip to his "I Shall Sing") were recorded during sessions but not released on the album. "Cuba Si, Nixon No" was later released on a bootleg copy of a November 11, 1969 concert by Simon and Garfunkel at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, while the demo recording of "Feuilles-O" was released on October 4, 1997 on the boxed set Old Friends.

A remastered and expanded version of the album was released on CD in 2001, also containing "Feuilles-O" and a previously unreleased demo version of "Bridge over Troubled Water."

Contents

Track listing

All songs by Paul Simon except where noted.

Side one

  1. "Bridge over Troubled Water" – 4:52
  2. "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)" (Daniel Alomía Robles, English lyrics by Paul Simon, arranged by Jorge Milchberg) – 3:06
  3. "Cecilia" – 2:55
  4. "Keep the Customer Satisfied" – 2:33
  5. "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" – 3:41

Side two

  1. "The Boxer" – 5:08
  2. "Baby Driver" – 3:14
  3. "The Only Living Boy in New York" – 3:58
  4. "Why Don't You Write Me" – 2:45
  5. "Bye Bye Love" (Felice and Boudleaux Bryant) (live recording from Ames, Iowa) – 2:55
  6. "Song for the Asking" – 1:49

Bonus tracks (2001 CD reissue)

  1. "Feuilles-O"
  2. "Bridge over Troubled Water" (demo)

Personnel

Awards and ratings

In the 1971 Grammy Awards' ceremony the album (and its contents) won six Grammys:

  • Record of the Year — "Bridge over Troubled Water" (relates to one track)
  • Album of the Year — Bridge over Troubled Water (relates to the whole album)
  • Best Contemporary Pop Song — "Bridge over Troubled Water"
  • Song of the Year — "Bridge over Troubled Water"
  • Best Engineered Recording (Non-Classical) — Bridge over Troubled Water
  • Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s) — "Bridge over Troubled Water"

Chart positions

Album

Year Chart Position
1970 Billboard Pop Albums (Billboard 200) 1
1970 Australian Kent Music Report Albums Chart 1

Singles

Billboard Music Charts (North America) — singles

Year Single Chart Position
1969 "The Boxer" Pop Singles 7
1969 "The Boxer" Adult Contemporary 3
1970 "Bridge over Troubled Water" Pop Singles 1
1970 "Bridge over Troubled Water" Adult Contemporary 1
1970 "Cecilia" Pop Singles 4
1970 "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)" Pop Singles 18
1970 "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)" Adult Contemporary 6

Trivia

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d "Bridge over Troubled Water - Simon & Garfunkel" (notes), Super Seventies RockSite!/Amazon.com, 2006, webpage: SPSimGarf.

References

  • "Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge over Troubled Water" (notes/reviews), Super Seventies RockSite!/Amazon.com, 2006, webpage: SPSimGarf.
Preceded by
Led Zeppelin II by Led Zeppelin
Billboard 200 number one album
March 7 - May 15, 1970
Succeeded by
Déjà Vu by Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young)
Preceded by
Led Zeppelin II by Led Zeppelin
Australian Kent Music Report number one album
April 6 - May 17, 1970
June 1 - June 14, 1970
July 27 - September 13, 1970
Succeeded by
Hey Jude by The Beatles

Wikipedia content modification information:

  • This page was last modified on 7 January 2009, at 23:15.

Wikipedia Authorship and Review

Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.

Wikipedia Usage Guidelines

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Bridge over Troubled Water".

The URL for this specific entry is:

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.