Paul Simon on Almost Everything, Chapter 4 of 5: "Graceland: 1984-1992"

"'Graceland,' says Paul Simon, "the song and the album, is probably the best thing I ever did."

Roy Halee, Paul Simon’s engineer, co-producer and close collaborator, was confident that the depression that had descended on Simon with the simultaneous failure of his marriage to Carrie Fisher and his album Hearts and Bones would not last. “Paul was the most competitive person I’ve ever known,” said Halee. “I knew he’d give me a call someday, and we’d be heading back into the studio.”

The Graceland world tour getting set to hit the road, January 1987. The closest the troupe could get to South Africa was neighboring Zimbabwe: South Africa’s apartheid laws prohibited Blacks and whites from performing together or attending public events together.

In the spring of 1984, a singer/songwriter named Heidi Berg played Simon several of her songs, which appealed to him. He might be interested, he said, in producing her album, and asked her to bring in some recordings that reflected the sound she was looking for. Among them was a tape called Gumboots: Accordion Jive hits, Volume II, which a South African friend of Berg’s had sent her.

Simon was entranced; this music, which he hadn’t known existed, magically evoked genres he’d loved as a boy and still loved, including the 1950s doo-wop and R & B of

Graceland as yet unreleased and the tour yet to begin, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Simon give America a taste of what was to come, performing the album’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” on (Simon’s) home turf, Saturday Night Live, May 1986

the Cadillacs, the Del-Vikings and Clyde McPhatter’s Drifters, as well as the Sun Records that Sam Phillips had cut in mid-’50s Memphis on Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins. Simon’s creative fires were stoked. He asked the South African record producer Hilton Rosenthal to find the musicians on the tape, and others, too, and began making plans to visit and, he hoped, to record in South Africa: one of the world’s most racist countries, where Blacks were ruthlessly subjugated.