Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” Hid Fred Carter Jr’s Guitar in Plain Sight
The strings were already near their physical limit when Fred Carter Jr. began to play. On November 16, 1968, Paul Simon sat inside Columbia’s Music Row Studios in Nashville with a Martin D-18 tuned to open C, fingerpicking the foundational rhythm of a new song. Across the room, Carter listened with a smaller Martin 000-18…