The Boxer

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The Boxer
Written by Paul Simon, 1968

Paul Simon wrote “The Boxer” in 1968, at a time when he was feeling bruised. For their first few years of fame, he and Art Garfunkel had heard almost nothing but praise. Then the critics turned, and it stung. Simon later said he’d been reading the Bible around then, and some of the song’s old-fashioned turns of phrase came from its pages. In a 1984 interview with Playboy he was plain about who the song’s battered fighter really was: “I think the song was about me: everybody’s beating me up.”

The best-loved part of the song almost wasn’t meant to stay. That famous wordless chorus was only a placeholder, something to sing until Simon found the right words. He never found them, and in the end he decided he didn’t need to. He felt the rest of the song carried enough feeling on its own, and he believed the chorus without words helped the song travel around the world, since anyone in any language could sing along.

Making the record was a long labor of love. Recording began on November 16, 1968, at Columbia’s studio in Nashville, where session guitarist Fred Carter Jr. played the gentle finger-picked guitar you hear at the start. The work went on for more than 100 hours, moving from Nashville to Columbia’s New York studios and to St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University, whose tiled dome gave the voices their deep, echoing sound. The instrumental break has its own surprise. A pedal steel guitar had been recorded in Nashville, and a piccolo trumpet was added later in New York. Rather than choose one, producer Roy Halee blended the two, so a bit of Tennessee country and a bit of New York concert hall play the same melody together.

And then there is that thunderous drum. Session drummer Hal Blaine set up his drums in a hallway at Columbia’s New York offices, right beside an open elevator shaft, and struck his snare as hard as he could each time the chorus came around. “It sounded like a cannon shot!” he recalled. At one point an elderly security guard stepped out of the elevator and nearly jumped out of his skin.

Released as a single in March 1969, “The Boxer” followed “Mrs. Robinson” and climbed to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was later included on the duo’s final studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, in 1970. That same year Bob Dylan recorded his own version. Simon often sings an extra verse in concert that never made it onto the record.

The song has come to mean resilience to many listeners. On September 29, 2001, when Saturday Night Live returned to the air for the first time after the September 11 attacks, producer Lorne Michaels asked Simon to open the show with “The Boxer.” He sang it on a stage filled with New York firefighters and police officers who had spent the past weeks at Ground Zero. And in 2016, during a concert in Berkeley, Simon paused near the end of the song to tell the audience that Muhammad Ali had died. Then everyone joined him in singing the final verse.