By Randal C. Hill
It’s rather humorous to see exactly where music “experts” opined was the location of Simon and Garfunkel’s “My Little Town,” the duo’s final Top 10 Columbia Records single.
Let’s take a look.
In my little town I grew up believing
God keeps His eye on us all
And He used to lean upon me
As I pledged allegiance to the wall
In my little town I never meant nothin’
I was just my father’s son
Saving my money, dreaming of glory
Twitchin’ like a finger on the trigger of a gun
Really nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
Pretty dreary stuff, huh? But the fun began when people began to speculate just where they thought that unnamed “little town” was located.
In his book “Paul Simon: A Life,” writer Marc Eliot says, “’My Little Town’ is clearly Queens, and all the references to schoolbooks, saluting the flag, and so on appear to be symbols of nostalgia…for the years of Simon and Garfunkel.”
Not so, counters veteran music critic Dave Marsh, the author of “The Heart of Rock and Soul.” “’My Little Town’ is a portrait of the middle-class Forest Hills, New York, neighborhood where Paul and Art grew up.”
Related: Music Flashback: “You Are So Beautiful”
Hold on just a minute! Simon’s partner Art Garfunkel had his own take on the subject. In a Wikipedia article, he stated that the tune was about his childhood, how he grew up where music was not seen as either desirable or exciting, and that his parents insisted that their boy acquire an education unrelated to singing. (Art earned degrees in art history and mathematics.)
So where was this “mysterious” burg? Nobody knew until the mid-1980s. In an interview with Bill Flanagan for his book “Written in My Soul: Conversations with Great Songwriters,” Simon admitted, “I was picturing a town. I was thinking about Gloucester, Massachusetts. A friend of mine comes from Gloucester, and he used to talk about what it was like to grow up there…That song was entirely an act of imagination…There’s no element of me in there at all.”
