Scarborough Fair

Two songs are playing, and most people only hear one

Put the record on and you hear a hush. A guitar figure that circles rather than climbs. Two voices tuned so closely together that they stop sounding like two people. It is the sound a lot of listeners file under "beautiful and sad" and leave there.

Listen to the inner voice, though, the one drifting in behind the melody rather than on top of it, and the song splits open. That second line is not decoration. It is a separate song with separate words, about a soldier, a hillside, and a war nobody is winning. The full title on the 1966 album is "Scarborough Fair/Canticle," and the slash is doing real work: two pieces of music, one old and one new, wound around each other on purpose.

So the track is not a love song with an unusually pretty arrangement. It is an argument staged as a duet. An ancient ballad about asking the impossible of someone you have lost, playing against a modern lament about young men dying for reasons no one can explain. Once you hear the seam, you cannot unhear it, and the song turns from pretty to quietly devastating.

A young American in a London folk club

The story starts with failure. Simon & Garfunkel's first album, released in 1964, sank without a trace, and Paul Simon did what a lot of ambitious young American folk singers did in the mid-1960s: he got on a plane to England. In 1965 he was living and working in Britain, playing the small, smoke-thick folk clubs of London and the provinces, including the basement rooms of Soho where a guitarist could earn a few pounds and an education on the same night.

The British folk revival he walked into was serious, argumentative, and technically formidable. Singers there were digging through field recordings and Victorian ballad collections, reviving material that had been passed hand to hand for centuries, and reworking it with new guitar arrangements. One of the finest of those guitarists was Martin Carthy, then in his early twenties, who had worked up his own distinctive version of an old Yorkshire ballad about Scarborough Fair. Simon heard Carthy perform it and learned it from him, as folk singers had always learned from one another.

That is where the story gets uncomfortable, and it is the part most casual listeners have never heard. When "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" appeared on the 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, the arrangement credit went to Simon and Art Garfunkel. Carthy's name was not on it. Because the underlying ballad was traditional and out of copyright, nothing illegal had happened, but in the folk world an arrangement is a craftsman's work, and Carthy had reason to feel that his craft had walked across the Atlantic without him. The resentment reportedly lasted decades. It was finally, publicly healed in 2000, when Simon invited Carthy onto a London stage to play the song with him — a small, generous act of restitution that folk fans still talk about.

The recording itself was made with producer Bob Johnston and engineer Roy Halee, the team that gave Simon & Garfunkel their uncanny studio intimacy. Garfunkel's contribution was the crucial structural idea. For the countermelody he reached back to "The Side of a Hill," an anti-war song Simon had recorded in London in 1965 on a solo album released only in Britain, and rewrote it as a liturgical-sounding counterpart, the "Canticle" of the title. The two melodies were then layered so that the older song carries the surface and the newer one haunts the background. Halee's reverb does the rest, placing the voices somewhere between a bedroom and a church.

What the impossible tasks actually mean

Strip the song to its narrative and it is startlingly strange. A voice asks whoever is travelling to Scarborough Fair to carry a message to a woman who once loved him. The message is not romantic. It is a list of chores: make him a shirt out of fine linen with no seams and no stitching; find him a plot of farmland lying between the salt water and the beach; harvest that plot with a sickle made of leather and bundle the crop with heather. Do all of that, the message says, and she can be his true love again.

Every one of those tasks is impossible. A seamless shirt cannot be sewn. There is no acre of soil between the sea and the shore, only sand the tide takes back twice a day. Leather will not cut corn, and heather will not bind a sheaf. The narrator is not asking for a reunion. He is naming the conditions under which a reunion could occur, and every condition is a closed door. This is the song's real emotional engine, and it is far colder and more adult than the melody lets on: the sound of someone who knows it is over and is dressing that knowledge up as a riddle because the plain sentence would be unbearable.

The ballad Simon learned is a descendant of a much older family of English and Scottish songs, catalogued by scholars under the title "The Elfin Knight" and traceable in print to the 1600s. In those earlier versions the exchange runs both ways. A supernatural suitor, an elf or a knight who is not quite human, demands impossible work from a young woman, and she protects herself by answering with impossible demands of her own. It is a verbal duel, and the woman wins by refusing to be the only one asked to do what cannot be done. Reading the Simon & Garfunkel version against that ancestor reveals what the 1960s arrangement quietly removed: her reply. What survives is one voice, and the answering voice is gone.

Some folklorists have read the older ballads darker still, as revenant songs in which one of the two lovers is already dead and the impossible tasks are the rules that govern traffic between the living and the dead. That reading is contested, but it sits very comfortably on this recording. The hush, the circling guitar, the sense that nobody in the song is quite in the room: the track sounds less like a message sent to a market town than a message sent somewhere messages do not come back from.

Then there is the refrain of four herbs, which gives the album its title. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme carried meanings in older English usage that have mostly faded: comfort, strength and long life, remembrance and fidelity, courage. Several scholars have suggested the herb line is a worn-down replacement for an older refrain about roses growing merry with time, the kind of mutation that happens naturally when a song lives for three hundred years in people's mouths rather than on paper. Either way, the effect in 1966 was a kind of incantation, a charm muttered between verses, and American listeners who had never grown any of those plants heard it as pure atmosphere.

From a medieval Yorkshire market to The Graduate

For British readers there is a real place under all of this, and it is more remarkable than the song suggests. Scarborough is a cliff-backed seaside town on the North Yorkshire coast, and its fair was no village gathering. A royal charter granted in the 1250s under Henry III licensed a trading fair that ran for weeks at a stretch, from late summer into the autumn, drawing merchants from across England and from ports around northern Europe. For a few centuries Scarborough was a genuine international marketplace, which is why a ballad built on the idea of sending a message there made sense: everyone passed through eventually. The fair declined and was wound up in the late 1700s, long before anyone recorded the song, so the version the world knows is already an elegy for a marketplace that no longer existed.

There is a further wrinkle that undercuts the whole geography. In the ballad tradition the location moves. Northumbrian versions set the same riddles at Whittingham Fair, and other variants name other towns or none at all. Scarborough won the lottery of history largely because that was the variant Carthy sang and Simon learned. The song's most famous proper noun is, in a sense, an accident.

For American readers the song's second life matters as much as its first. In 1967 Mike Nichols used Simon & Garfunkel's music throughout The Graduate, and the film's enormous success pushed the duo from folk-rock act to generational voice. "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" was issued as a single in early 1968 and climbed into the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100, which meant that a 300-year-old English riddle ballad was on American Top 40 radio in the year of the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the Chicago convention. Listeners who caught the buried war song in the background were not hearing a historical curiosity. They were hearing the news.

The legacy since has been enormous and slightly odd. The song has become default shorthand for "ancient, English, haunted," reappearing in films, television, video games, and countless classical-crossover and Celtic-styled recordings, often performed as though it were purely a lament and with the "Canticle" layer quietly dropped. Carthy's own recording remains the connoisseur's choice and the honest starting point. Meanwhile Scarborough itself has leaned into its unexpected fame, and the town now hosts modern festivals that borrow the old fair's name from a song that long outlived the market it described.

Why it still lands

Part of the answer is simple craft. The arrangement is one of the most beautiful objects in 1960s popular music, and the two-songs-at-once structure gives it a depth that reveals itself slowly, which is exactly the quality that keeps a recording alive across generations. You can play it as background and it works. You can play it closely and it opens.

The deeper reason is that the song found a form for something most people eventually need and rarely have words for: the way loss gets expressed sideways. Nobody in real life says that a relationship is finished and unrecoverable. People say they would get back together if only a long list of things were different, and they know, as they are saying it, that the list is the point. That is the move the ballad makes, and it has been making it since before the industrial revolution, which suggests the habit is not modern at all.

The anti-war layer has also refused to date. The background song does not name a country, a year, or an enemy. It describes a soldier, an order, and a death, and leaves the particulars blank, so every listener fills them with whatever conflict is currently in their feed. In 1968 that blank held Vietnam. It has held something ever since.

And there is one more thing, quieter than either: the song is a record of transmission. A ballad kept alive by singers whose names are lost, written down by collectors, revived in a London basement by a young guitarist, carried to New York by a young American, pressed onto vinyl, pushed into millions of homes by a film about a confused graduate, and argued over for decades afterward by people who care about who gets credit for what. In an era when music is generated, cloned, and recommended at scale, a song whose chain of custody can still be traced hand to hand feels less like nostalgia and more like evidence that this is how culture has always actually worked.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme vinyl — Hearing the 1966 album on wax is the only way to catch how carefully the two interlocking melodies were placed in the stereo field. The hush between the notes is part of the composition, and vinyl holds that hush better than a compressed stream.
• Martin Carthy early recordings — Going back to the English guitarist Simon learned the song from is the honest way to hear what the arrangement was before it crossed the Atlantic. His version is starker, more Yorkshire, and in some ways more frightening.
• The Paul Simon Songbook — The British-only solo album from 1965 contains "The Side of a Hill," the anti-war song that became the buried "Canticle" layer. Hearing it standing alone first changes how you hear the famous recording forever.

📚 Follow the story

• English and Scottish Popular Ballads collection — The great nineteenth-century ballad collections are where "The Elfin Knight," the song's ancestor, sits in print. Reading the older variants, with the woman's answering riddles intact, shows exactly what the 1966 version left out.
• British folk revival history book — A good account of the 1950s and 60s revival explains the club culture Simon walked into, the fierce arguments about authenticity, and why an uncredited arrangement could sting for decades.
• Simon & Garfunkel biography — A full biography traces the London years, the role of The Graduate, and the strange mechanics of a folk duo becoming the voice of an American decade. The partnership's tensions are a story in themselves.

🌍 Visit the places

• North Yorkshire coast travel guide — Scarborough is a real cliff-top town with two bays, a ruined castle, and a Victorian spa tradition, and seeing it puts a stubbornly physical place under a song most people hear as a mist. A guide will also get you to Whitby and the moors nearby.
• Scarborough Castle and old town walking guide — The headland fortress overlooks the harbour where medieval traders landed for the fair, and the old streets below still follow their routes. Standing up there, the idea of sending a message to this particular market stops being metaphorical.
• London Soho music history guide — The folk clubs of 1960s Soho are where the song changed hands, and several of the buildings survive. Tracing that handful of streets is tracing the actual transmission route of the version you know.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• fingerstyle acoustic guitar method book — The song's spell comes from a circling fingerpicked pattern rather than strumming, and a fingerstyle method is the fastest route to producing that hovering sound yourself. It rewards patience more than speed.
• English folk ballad songbook — Working through a collection of traditional ballads reveals how many of them run on riddles, impossible tasks, and unfinished business. The pattern becomes obvious once you have played five of them.
• vocal harmony singing guide — Trying to sing the two interlocking parts with a friend teaches more about the arrangement in twenty minutes than any amount of reading. The moment the countermelody locks in is genuinely startling.

🎵 Listen to this song