Red Rubber Ball

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Red Rubber Ball
Written by Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley, 1966

Before “The Sound of Silence” made him famous, Paul Simon spent time in England as a young, wandering folk singer, playing wherever he could. While he was there he met Bruce Woodley, a guitarist with the Australian folk group The Seekers, and the two sat down and wrote “Red Rubber Ball” together. It’s a cheerful-sounding song with a bit of a bruise underneath. The singer has been let go by someone who never really cared, and instead of moping, decides the worst is over and the morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball.

The song found its way to the radio by a lucky route. A young musician named Tom Dawes had a band with his college friend Don Dannemann, and the two had met as students at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. When that band briefly fell apart, Dawes went out on the road playing bass for Simon and Garfunkel. Somewhere on that tour, Paul Simon played him a homemade recording of “Red Rubber Ball,” just Paul singing with his guitar. Simon had no plans to record it with Art Garfunkel, so when Dawes’s band got back together in early 1966, they worked up a bouncy arrangement and recorded it.

The band had some remarkable people in its corner. They had been discovered by Brian Epstein, the man who managed the Beatles, and he gave them a new name. The story goes that John Lennon supplied the unusual spelling, which is how they became The Cyrkle. Their very first single was “Red Rubber Ball,” released in April 1966. It climbed all the way to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, went to number one in Canada, and sold more than a million copies, earning a gold record. That same summer, Epstein picked The Cyrkle to open for the Beatles on their 1966 American tour, playing to stadium crowds far bigger than the little clubs they were used to.

The Seekers recorded their own version of the song that same year, and Neil Diamond, Cliff Richard, and many others followed. Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley wrote a few more songs together, but their partnership didn’t last. Woodley later had trouble collecting his fair share of royalties, and his name was left off the credits of another song they wrote together, “Cloudy,” when Simon and Garfunkel put it on an album. The Cyrkle broke up within a couple of years, and Dawes and Dannemann went on to write advertising jingles.

The song has stayed with people all the same. Years later, Don Dannemann said he was moved by how many fans told him what it had meant to them, from those who remembered it as their very first record to those who said it helped them through hard times. One soldier told him they had played it on a little battery tape recorder in Vietnam. For a short, sunny tune about letting go of someone who didn’t deserve you, that’s quite a legacy.