Paul Simon’s solo career began with an act of geography. Simon & Garfunkel were finished, the partnership dissolved after Bridge over Troubled Water amid exhaustion and quarrels over everything from film roles to final mixes, and the question hanging over Simon was the one that hangs over every songwriter leaving a famous act: whether the songs had belonged to him or to the blend. His first single of his new life was not recorded in New York or Los Angeles but in Kingston, Jamaica, with a band of reggae musicians who had to teach him, beat by beat, what reggae actually was. Mother and Child Reunion reached number four in America in the spring of 1972, and it stands as one of the first reggae records by a non-Jamaican musician ever to conquer American radio — a song whose breezy rhythm carries a lyric about grief, and whose strange title came off the menu of a Chinese restaurant.
Why Kingston?
Simon was a devoted listener to Jamaican music — to Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker and Byron Lee. He had heard what the music could do at full strength: Dekker’s Israelites had topped the British chart in 1969 and cracked the American top ten, the first reggae record to travel that far, yet American pop still treated the style as a novelty rather than a language. One record in particular fixed his direction: Cliff’s Vietnam, a 1970 protest song in which a mother receives the letter every mother of that era dreaded. Simon wanted that sound, and he reasoned that the sound lived where it was made. He had tried to fake it once before: Why Don’t You Write Me, recorded with Garfunkel for Bridge over Troubled Water, was meant to be a Jamaican record and had come out, by his own verdict, sounding like a bad imitation. This time he would go to the source — to Dynamic Sounds Studios at Torrington Bridge in Kingston, the studio where Cliff had recorded, and to the musicians who played behind Cliff himself.
The Track Before the Words
The Kingston session inverted Simon’s whole method. He was the most meticulous of songwriters, a man who polished lyrics for months, but in Jamaica the backing track was recorded before the words were written. The band was drawn from the heart of the Kingston scene: guitarist Hux Brown and bassist Jackie Jackson, both long-time members of Toots & the Maytals; rhythm guitarist Wallace Wilson; drummer Winston Grennan; organist Neville Hinds; percussionist Denzil Laing. Simon, a perfectionist alone among strangers, admitted he felt awkward at first — the only white guy there, and an American. The musicians schooled him in the differences among reggae, ska and bluebeat — distinct rhythms that American listeners cheerfully lumped together — and the track they built together has the unhurried, springy gait that no New York session band of the day could have counterfeited.
Cissy Houston, then one of America’s most in-demand session singers and later famous in her own right, sang backing vocals. The piano of Larry Knechtel and Simon’s own vocal were overdubbed later in New York, with Simon and Roy Halee — the engineer-producer of the Simon & Garfunkel records — producing. Halee’s presence was its own kind of statement: the sound of the duo’s meticulous studio craft, carried into a Kingston room and set gently aside while the Jamaicans led.
A Menu, a Dog, and a Song About Loss
Cutting the track first had consequences for everything that followed. Simon’s lyrics were usually the engine of his songs, drafted and redrafted until the words generated their own music; here the rhythm already existed, springing along at its Kingston pace, and the words had to be found that could ride it without weighing it down. He worked on them back in New York, over the finished groove — which may be why the finished lyric is among the sparest he ever wrote: short lines, plain words, a single idea of parting and return, repeated like something sung to oneself on a journey.
The title arrived by accident, in a Chinese restaurant in New York, where the menu offered a dish of chicken and egg called “Mother and Child Reunion”. Simon pocketed the phrase; what filled it was sorrow. The death that set the song in motion was a small one — the family’s pet dog, run over and killed — but it was, as he told Rolling Stone‘s Jon Landau in 1972, the first death he had personally experienced, and it set him wondering how he would react if the same thing happened to his wife, Peggy. “Somehow there was a connection between this death and Peggy,” he said, “and it was like Heaven — I don’t know what the connection was.” Out of that meditation came the lyric: a farewell sung to someone already gone, insisting that the parting is no more than a motion away from a reunion. The reggae lilt is not decoration on the grief; it is the consolation, the sound of a man deciding that separation is not the end of the story.
Reggae Crosses Over
Released as the lead single from the album Paul Simon in February 1972, the record climbed to number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in March, number five in Britain and number one in South Africa; Billboard ranked it among the year’s top sixty songs. The trade papers heard it coming: Cash Box predicted a top ten hit, Billboard called it an “infectious rhythm ballad”, and Record World noted the delightful strangeness of the whole enterprise — quintessential Simon in its lyric, it said, but with a sound decidedly younger and looser than anything the duo had made. Other artists heard it too: within a year the Philly soul group the Intruders had recorded their own version for their album Save the Children, carrying Simon’s Kingston experiment into yet another American tradition. Its historical position is sharper than its chart peak. In the spring of 1972 reggae was still, to most American listeners, an imported curiosity; a white New York songwriter’s record, cut in Kingston with Kingston musicians, carried it into the mainstream months before Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now and two years before Eric Clapton’s I Shot the Sheriff completed the breakthrough. Simon himself later summarised it plainly: the song became the first reggae hit by a non-Jamaican white artist outside Jamaica.
The First Step of a Travelling Career
The album around the single made the same point at greater length. Paul Simon, released in January 1972, was a traveller’s record — folk, gospel, Latin and Andean colours alongside the reggae excursion — and it was received as the work of a songwriter deliberately dismantling the duo’s sound and rebuilding alone. It became a substantial hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and its lead single, backed with Paranoia Blues, was the calling card: the harmony partner from Forest Hills suddenly fronting a Kingston band, sounding entirely at ease.
In retrospect, the Kingston trip was a rehearsal for the defining habit of Simon’s solo life. Fourteen years later he would fly to Johannesburg and build Graceland with South African musicians, using the same method: go to where the music lives, submit to being taught, and let a foreign rhythm reorganise his songwriting. Mother and Child Reunion was the first proof the method worked, and it freed him permanently from the shadow of the duo — a radically different record, on which the meticulous lyricist cut the track first and found the words afterwards, and still came home with a standard. It is one of the great first singles of any solo career: a menu item, a dead dog, a Kingston groove, and a songwriter learning in public that the world was full of music he did not yet know how to play.
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