I'm guessing that Paul Simon may have had all three "Josephs" in mind when he wrote the song. And I believe his thesis in the song is that Jewish and African American cultures are joined at the roots.
As a Jewish kid growing up in New York City next to Blacks and Latins and Italians, at a time when there was still come solidarity between the Jewish and Black communities (this was during the civil rights movement), Simon belonged to a long tradition of Jewish musicians who felt a kinship with Black musicians, from Al Jolson and George Gershwin to Bob Dylan and Carole King.
It's likely that both Biblical "Josephs" were dark-skinned, if not "black as night," and they both "walked their days under African skies" as exiles in Egypt. Not the first time African and Semitic cultures touched, and certainly not the last.
The clue to this interpretation is the second verse, which I read as another link between two strains of religious "roots music." The woman singing is Linda Ronstadt, a Mexican-American woman who grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and tells the same story about her girlhood that Paul Simon tells in the song "Late in the Evening," that listening to music, from Catholic hymns and Mariachi Canciones, to Black Gospel, C&W, R&B and Brill-building Pop, "pulled her through," giving her the courage to leave her hometown. (She finally came back, but that's a different story.)
So Graceland is "the story of how we begin to remember," the common roots of our different musical traditions, which have their origins in "the powerful pulsing of love in the vein," a love both physical (as in "sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll"), and spiritual, as in the ecstatic chants of the earliest religions.
For the meaning of "the dream of falling," see my notes on "An American Tune."
@tappanking My intuition says "I think you've nailed it". However, I do not see a reference to "the dream of falling" in "An American Tune". My feeling about it is that it is a reference to the biblical fall of man, and his calling upon God for salvation from his plight, and this is a kind of fantasy that the modern world has woken up from (I have an opposite perspective).
@tappanking My intuition says "I think you've nailed it". However, I do not see a reference to "the dream of falling" in "An American Tune". My feeling about it is that it is a reference to the biblical fall of man, and his calling upon God for salvation from his plight, and this is a kind of fantasy that the modern world has woken up from (I have an opposite perspective).
I'm guessing that Paul Simon may have had all three "Josephs" in mind when he wrote the song. And I believe his thesis in the song is that Jewish and African American cultures are joined at the roots.
As a Jewish kid growing up in New York City next to Blacks and Latins and Italians, at a time when there was still come solidarity between the Jewish and Black communities (this was during the civil rights movement), Simon belonged to a long tradition of Jewish musicians who felt a kinship with Black musicians, from Al Jolson and George Gershwin to Bob Dylan and Carole King.
It's likely that both Biblical "Josephs" were dark-skinned, if not "black as night," and they both "walked their days under African skies" as exiles in Egypt. Not the first time African and Semitic cultures touched, and certainly not the last.
The clue to this interpretation is the second verse, which I read as another link between two strains of religious "roots music." The woman singing is Linda Ronstadt, a Mexican-American woman who grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and tells the same story about her girlhood that Paul Simon tells in the song "Late in the Evening," that listening to music, from Catholic hymns and Mariachi Canciones, to Black Gospel, C&W, R&B and Brill-building Pop, "pulled her through," giving her the courage to leave her hometown. (She finally came back, but that's a different story.)
So Graceland is "the story of how we begin to remember," the common roots of our different musical traditions, which have their origins in "the powerful pulsing of love in the vein," a love both physical (as in "sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll"), and spiritual, as in the ecstatic chants of the earliest religions.
For the meaning of "the dream of falling," see my notes on "An American Tune."
@tappanking My intuition says "I think you've nailed it". However, I do not see a reference to "the dream of falling" in "An American Tune". My feeling about it is that it is a reference to the biblical fall of man, and his calling upon God for salvation from his plight, and this is a kind of fantasy that the modern world has woken up from (I have an opposite perspective).
@tappanking My intuition says "I think you've nailed it". However, I do not see a reference to "the dream of falling" in "An American Tune". My feeling about it is that it is a reference to the biblical fall of man, and his calling upon God for salvation from his plight, and this is a kind of fantasy that the modern world has woken up from (I have an opposite perspective).