"Scarborough Fair" is a traditional English ballad about the Yorkshire town of Scarborough.
The song relates the tale of a young man who instructs the listener to tell his former love to perform for him a series of impossible tasks, such as making him a shirt without a seam and then washing it in a dry well, adding that if she completes these tasks he will take her back. Often the song is sung as a duet, with the woman then giving her lover a series of equally impossible tasks, promising to give him his seamless shirt once he has finished
As the versions of the ballad known under the title "Scarborough Fair" are usually limited to the exchange of these impossible tasks, many suggestions concerning the plot have been proposed, including the hypothesis that it is about the Great Plague of the late Middle Ages.
Paul Simon learned the song in London in 1965 from Martin Carthy, who had picked up the tune from the songbook by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger and included it on his eponymous 1965 album. Simon & Garfunkel set it in counterpoint with "Canticle"—a reworking of the lyrics from Simon's 1963 anti-war song, "The Side of a Hill", set to a new melody composed mainly by Art Garfunkel.
I'm feeling hesitant to write this, but here goes. I took LSD last year and listened to this song for the first time. Somehow I found it during that moment. I'm feeling goosebumps just thinking about it. I looked at trees and the landscape in front of me and the world danced to these tunes... bending as waves in a slow, mesmerizing movement. It was hypnotic. Dream-like. Beautiful.
When I was an introverted kid in 7th grade I listened to Simon & Garfunkel non-stop. This song intrigued me the most. I remember reading Lord of the Rings and
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series for the first time while listening to S&G. They are forever entwined in my mind.
One of those songs where you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when you first heard it. It's almost traumatic to experience something so beautiful for the first time.
The harpsichord and the bells add to the ancient feel of Scarborough Fair. The Canticle sort of slips and slides around the main melody. Have any two men's voices ever blended together so well?
The Graduate...and the scenes of Benjamin driving his red alfa romeo spider.... crossing the Oakland Bay Bridge heading to Berkeley to find Elaine... Great Movie, Great Soundtrack....
This is a song that makes you stop doing whatever you're doing and just sit still and listen, letting yourself be completely drawn into the music and singing. That last stanza always stuns me, when they ask for the last time: "Are you going to Scarborough Fair".
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary & thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine
Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
(On the side of a hill in the deep forest green)
Parsely, sage, rosemary & thyme
(Tracing a sparrow on snow-crested ground)
Without no seams nor needlework
(Blankets and bedclothes a child of the mountains)
Then she'll be a true love of mine
(Sleeps unaware of the clarion call)
Tell her to find me an acre of land
(On the side of a hill, a sprinkling of leaves)
Parsely, sage, rosemary, & thyme
(Washed is the ground with so many tears)
Between the salt water and the sea strand
(A soldier cleans and polishes a gun)
Then she'll be a true love of mine
Tell her to reap it in a sickle of leather
(War bellows, blazing in scarlet battalions)
Parsely, sage, rosemary & thyme
(Generals order their soldiers to kill)
And to gather it all in a bunch of heather
(And to fight for a cause they've long ago forgotten)
Then she'll be a true love of mine
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary & thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine.
HOW, HOW, HOW can anyone dislike this masterpiece of transporting beauty? Layering the two songs is a stroke of musical genius which awes me every time I listen.
