There are many meanings within the title track of Paul Simon’s 1986 magnum opus, Graceland, but there is one that eclipses them all. While “Graceland” at times plays nonsensical with illustrations of New York City and Memphis, Tennessee against South African sounds, the song is a coming together of cultures, of genres, of father and son in a place where everyone is welcome.
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Behind the Song
Simon went to South Africa to record the instrumentals for the album that would be Graceland. This was at a time the artist was experiencing a career slump, a disintegrated marriage, and various other personal woes. A bootleg cassette of mbaqanga, or street music from the townships of apartheid South Africa, brought him to the divided country without a single song prepared.
There, he assembled some of the acts that had first inspired his travels—like General M. D. Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters, the Boyoyo Boys Band, and the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo to name a few—and together, they laid the musical foundation on which songs like “Graceland” would be built.
“’Graceland’ is really the true hybrid of South African music and American,” Simon explained, breaking down the song in conversation with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
“I kept singing ‘I’m going to Graceland,’ and every time I’d sing it I’d think well I’m not going to keep that,” the artist said of the lyrics’ origins, adding his intentions to replace the chorus once something better came to mind. “This is not going to be a song about Elvis Presley.”
I’m going to Graceland / Graceland / Memphis Tennessee / I’m going to Graceland, the lines go, detailing an urgent need to be at the late Elvis Presley’s Memphis estate. It was something that he couldn’t shake. “I thought Gee, I can’t get this out of my head,” he said. “I better go down Graceland and see if there’s something that this song is telling me I should investigate by going there.”
And so he did. Driving to Graceland from Louisiana, where he had been recording the vocals for the album’s track “That Was Your Mother,” the song began to unfold.
On Highway 61, he followed the Mississippi River up to Memphis and there the opening lines came to be: The Mississippi Delta was shining / Like a National guitar / I am following the river / Down the highway / Through the cradle of the civil war. “It was literally in front of me,” Simon said.
And to Graceland he went, visiting the sacred home-turned-museum of the late rock legend on his trip. “I didn’t tell anybody I was coming. I didn’t get any special treatment. I just waited on the line.” He walked around and said he was “singularly unimpressed” by it all. He finished the tour and went outside where he spotted Presley’s grave. “It said ‘Elvis Presley whose music touched millions of people all around the world,’” Simon recalled, “and I read it and I just started to cry, I mean this guy was loved by everybody.”
He compared going to Graceland and waiting with the crowds to a religious experience, a pilgrimage people from all walks of life take, gathering together in remembrance of their common god, Elvis. This is something narrated in the song’s second verse. I’m going to Graceland, the chorus plays before heading into the lines, Poorboys and Pilgrims with families / And we are going to Graceland / My traveling companion is nine years old / He is the child of my first marriage / But I’ve reason to believe / We both will be received / In Graceland.
“The song started to write itself,” he explained. “It became a narrative and eventually became about this journey, this father and son journey, to mend a broken heart and Graceland became more like a metaphor than an actual destination.”
The metaphor of Graceland continues throughout the song. It becomes a place where the broken-hearted, the empty, the girl in New York City / Who calls herself the human trampoline, all can feel accepted and find peace.
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