America at 250: Following the Sound to "Graceland"

Forty years after Paul Simon followed a cassette to South Africa, a fellow Queens native set out to find the story behind an album he never stopped loving.

A few weeks back, I read that the 40th anniversary of Graceland arrives on August 25, 2026. So, I started listening to the album again. Surprisingly, for me at least, those familiar songs still sound fresh. That same article also mentioned the political noise surrounding Simon's trip to Johannesburg, South Africa. Still, listening to Graceland this time, I realized how little I actually knew about that trip and how the record came to be.

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Turns out that part of the story started with a cassette.

In the summer of 1984, Simon was making long drives between New York City and Montauk, listening again and again to a bootleg tape of South African mbaqanga, sometimes called township jive. The accordion-heavy music was unfamiliar, but something about it reminded him of the early rock' n' roll he had grown up hearing and playing as Tom and Jerry with Art Garfunkel. That detail immediately hooked me.

Most of us hear a song we love and play it over and over again. Simon did the same, but his curiosity went a step further. He wanted to know who was making that sound. That question eventually took him to Ovation Studios in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In February 1985, Simon and his longtime recording engineer Roy Halee flew to Johannesburg. They went quietly. Simon & Garfunkel had previously turned down an invitation to perform at Sun City in a Township outside of Johannesburg. This resort had become an international symbol of the cultural Apartheid boycott. So, Simon understood that simply getting off a plane in South Africa would carry political significance, whether he wanted it to or not.

When Paul Simon stepped off the plane in Johannesburg in 1985, Nelson Mandela was still in prison. The African National Congress was banned. Steve Biko had been dead for less than eight years. Archbishop Desmond Tutu had received the Nobel Peace Prize only months earlier. Apartheid was not history. It was the law of the country Simon had just entered, and Simon had come there because of a cassette.

He wasn't universally welcomed simply because he was Paul Simon. Some of the musicians at Ovation Studios were wary of the American visitor. Others saw an opportunity. On Simon's first night in Johannesburg, local producer Hilton Rosenthal held a party attended by members of the city's multiracial music community. Simon later said that was where he learned something extraordinary: leaders of the Black musicians' union had discussed his visit and voted to work with him. They wanted South African music to be heard internationally and believed he might help bring it to an international audience.

That changes the story a little. We usually tell the Graceland story as the story of Paul Simon discovering South African music. But some South African musicians were making a decision about Paul Simon, too. Was this American someone they wanted to work with? Could this project take their music somewhere it had not gone before? Was he listening?

Then they went to work. At Ovation Studios, Simon tried something very different from the way he had traditionally written songs. Rather than arrive with a collection of finished songs for local musicians to accompany, he recorded extended sessions. He listened for rhythms, melodies, and phrases around which songs might eventually be built. I love imagining that room. Somebody tries a phrase. Somebody answers it. A groove takes shape. Halee keeps the tape running. Simon hums or sings over what he hears. Bakithi Kumalo later remembered the atmosphere becoming almost like a party as everyone relaxed and ideas began moving around the room.

Nobody yet knew that millions of people would eventually know these sounds.

And the work didn't stop in Johannesburg. Recordings were sent back to New York and, through additional sessions in the United States, were processed. Guitarist Ray Phiri, Kumalo, and drummer Isaac Mtshali came to New York for more recording, including work on "You Can Call Me Al." One of that song's most memorable moments came from Halee playing with Kumalo's extraordinary fretless bass performance. He took part of the passage, reversed the tape and joined it to the original, in 1985 it was a time-consuming process. And there's something fitting about the song that emerged. Its character eventually finds himself wandering through what Simon calls a "strange world," surrounded by unfamiliar sights and sounds.

On "Homeless," the collaboration was even more explicit. Simon and Joseph Shabalala, the founder of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, shared songwriting credit. The song brought Simon together with the isicathamiya vocal tradition (a traditional South African a cappella vocal style developed by Zulu migrant workers) that Shabalala and his group had spent years developing.

The voices sing of being "homeless, homeless." And somehow, out of all this experimentation came a record that still seems incapable of sitting still. That surprised me when I recently went back and read the lyrics to all eleven songs. There is a lot of pain in Graceland. Aging. Divorce. Loneliness. Homelessness. Mortality. Dislocation. People who have lost each other. People who are strangers to the places they find themselves. Yet the record moves, it bounces and rolls, and keeps going. Even the title song takes heartbreak and puts it on the highway. A man who has lost love gets into a car and drives toward Memphis, holding on to the hope that "we all will be received."

I had listened to these songs without really noticing how much traveling they contained.

There are highways and long-distance calls. The title song follows the Mississippi toward Memphis and the "cradle of the Civil War." "You Can Call Me Al" puts its traveler in that strange world. "Under African Skies" reaches backward toward memory and what Simon calls the "roots of rhythm." "That Was Your Mother" wanders into Louisiana and zydeco. The final song opens the lens all the way to "All Around the World." The album seems constantly to be going somewhere. So was Simon.

But even when the music was working, South Africa kept intruding. Simon later remembered exhilarating sessions but also tension beneath the surface. At Ovation Studios, as evening approached, Black musicians sometimes became concerned about getting home. Apartheid controlled where people could live and move, and the musicians faced a world outside the studio that was radically different from the one Simon would encounter. Inside the room, Black and white musicians were listening to one another, trying a bass line, answering a guitar phrase, making something new. Outside the room was apartheid. The music could create its own space, but it could not make South Africa disappear.

That part of the story mattered because South Africa was not a distant political abstraction in those years. The world knew the names Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Steve Biko, and followed the struggle against apartheid. We knew Mandela was in prison and Biko had died in police custody. Archbishop Tutu had just received the Nobel Peace Prize for his role as a unifying leader in the nonviolent campaign to resolve and end apartheid in South Africa.

So, when controversy followed Simon's decision to record there, it was understandable why people were angry, even if we didn't understand nearly as much about how Graceland had actually been made.

An international cultural boycott was part of the effort to isolate the apartheid government. Before leaving the United States, Simon spoke with Harry Belafonte, who advised him to consult the African National Congress. Simon declined. He believed musicians should be able to decide for themselves whether to work together. His critics believed individual artists could not simply create their own exceptions to a collective campaign aimed at isolating an unjust government.

We don't need to settle that argument to understand why it mattered. Simon didn't travel to South Africa to entertain the apartheid government or perform for wealthy white audiences at Sun City. He went to record with Black South African musicians. That distinction mattered to him. It didn't satisfy everyone. And the musicians themselves had opinions, too.

Ray Phiri, Bakithi Kumalo, and Joseph Shabalala were not simply names buried in the album credits. They were accomplished musicians who brought their own ideas and musical traditions into those rooms. Graceland could not sound like Graceland without them. Some of those relationships lasted for years. Ladysmith Black Mambazo went on to a much larger international career. Phiri and Kumalo became inseparable from the sound listeners associate with the album. And Hugh Masekela, one of South Africa's greatest musicians, offered the simplest explanation for why he could understand Simon's impulse.

Masekela remembered hearing Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker and wanting to come to America himself. He understood "the music pulling him." Hearing American jazz, he felt himself pulled toward America. Decades later, Simon heard South African music and felt himself pulled in the other direction. The music traveled both ways.

None of this love of music erases the boycott controversy. Nor does it erase disagreements over money, songwriting credit, and ownership. Several musicians later questioned how contributions to Graceland had been credited, including Phiri and members of Los Lobos. Simon disputed some of those accounts. Those disagreements belong in the history, too.

Graceland was released on August 25, 1986. It entered the Billboard chart at No. 94 and took months to climb toward the top. Radio programmers initially seemed unsure what to do with a record that moved among musical traditions they were accustomed to putting in different boxes. Ashley Kahn calls it a "damn unicorn," or more to the point, in his book, Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland, "It was a damn unicorn. In the zoo of music, they had no idea which cage to put it in." Listeners eventually figured out what to do with it…we listened.

And somewhere along the way, the opening song had already given us a pretty good description of what listening to this strange record felt like in 1986:

"These are the days of miracle and wonder."

I first loved Graceland because of how it sounded. I still do. But now, I hear more of it.

I hear Bakithi Kumalo's bass. I hear Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. I hear Ray Phiri's guitar and the strange studio inventions of Roy Halee. I hear zydeco from Louisiana alongside mbaqanga (an upbeat, electrified township groove blending jazz, marabi, and Western instruments) and isicathamiya (a traditional South African a cappella vocal style developed by Zulu migrant workers with synchronized, tiptoe choreography) from southern Africa. And somewhere outside the music, I hear echoes of South Africa from those years. Mandela. Tutu. Biko. Apartheid.

And somewhere in this story, I found a small piece of the American story I have been exploring with America at 250.

So much of what we think of as American culture began when someone heard something from somewhere else. Those sounds arrived with people, traveled on records and tapes, moved through neighborhoods and across oceans, and became part of something nobody could have predicted when the journey began. Maybe Graceland even found the words for that, too.

"This is the story of how we begin to remember."

Paul Simon heard a cassette and followed the sound, and with writing this, I did too.

Same album. Different listening.