Writer: Paul Simon
Producers: Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and Roy Halee
Recorded: February 2, 1968 at Columbia Records Studios in New York City
Released: Spring 1968
| Players: | Paul Simon — vocals, guitar Art Garfunkel — vocals other players unknown |
| Album: | Bookends (Columbia, 1968) |
Boyhood friends Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel began performing together as Tom & Jerry, scoring a top 50 hit with the song “Hey Schoolgirl” while in high school in 1957. After drifting apart, the duo came back together in 1964.
“Mrs. Robinson” was Simon & Garfunkel's second Number One hit, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in June 1968.
The song's success was mostly due to its appearance on the soundtrack to the Mike Nichols film The Graduate, which starred Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. Simon & Garfunkel recorded a different version of the song for the film, but it was the version of the song that appeared on the Bookends album that received airplay.
The song's lyrics originally were about “Mrs. Roosevelt,” but were changed by Simon to make the song fit the plot of The Graduate.
Paul Simon remembers that Nichols was planning to use existing songs when he presented “Mrs. Robinson” to the director. “While I was writing a whole score for the film, Mike Nichols was using existing material to fill in the places where the score was supposed to be. And the more he lived with it, the more he decided that that material was absolutely appropriate, so the only new song that made it into there was 'Mrs. Robinson.'”
The Graduate soundtrack also featured the Simon & Garfunkel songs “The Sound Of Silence,” “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” and “April Comes She Will.” The soundtrack album actually featured two versions of “Mrs. Robinson,” both different from the Bookends version.
Describing the duo's singing approach to the song, Simon explained that “Simon & Garfunkel's vocal sound was very often closely worked-out harmony, doubled, using four voices, but doubled right on, so that a lot of times you couldn't tell it was four voices…'Mrs. Robinson' was four voices.”
The Bookends album also reached Number One on the Billboard 200 chart, selling more than two million copies.
The Graduate soundtrack, released just before Bookends, was also a chart-topper and earned a gold certification.
