Songfacts®: You can leave comments about the song at the bottom of the page.
This was written for the movie The Graduate, starring Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, a middle age woman who seduces the much younger Dustin Hoffman. Although Bancroft has had a long and successful film career, she is still best known for her part in this movie.
Regarding the famous line, "Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?": DiMaggio was a star baseball player for the New York Yankees who was briefly married to Marilyn Monroe. Simon was using him to represent heroes of the past. DiMaggio was a little miffed when he heard this, since he was still very much alive even though he retired from baseball in 1951, but he realized that he had become a new icon now with the baby boomer generation due to this song's success.
Simon, who is a huge fan of The Yankees, explained in a 1990 interview with SongTalk magazine: "The Joe DiMaggio line was written right away in the beginning. And I don't know why or where it came from. It seems so strange, like it didn't belong in that song and then, I don't know, it was so interesting to us that we just kept it. So it's one of the most well-known lines that I've ever written."
Paul Simon was a much bigger fan of Mickey Mantle than Joe DiMaggio. On The Dick Cavett Show, Simon was asked by Mantle why he wasn't mentioned in the song instead of DiMaggio. Simon replied, "It's about syllables, Mick. It's about how many beats there are."
When DiMaggio died in 1999, it was a very emotional event for many baseball fans who grew up watching him play. The part of this song that mentions him summed of the feelings of many people who felt there was no one left to look up to. Simon wrote an editorial about DiMaggio in The New York Times shortly after his death.
Simon began writing this as "Mrs. Roosevelt." He changed it to "Mrs. Robinson" for the movie. He may have written this about Eleanor Roosevelt. Some of the lyrics support this such as "We'd like to help you learn to help yourself. Look around you, all you see are sympathetic eyes" and "Going to the candidates debate. Laugh about it, shout about it. When you've got to choose. Every way you look at it, you lose." Roosevelt was a female rights and black rights activist, always helping everyone but herself during the Great Depression. A lot of the time she seemed to have been running the country as much as FDR, but never would have actually won the presidency because she was female. (thanks, Megan - Rochester, NY)
Simon & Garfunkel's "
The Sound Of Silence" and "Scarborough Fair" were also used in
The Graduate, but they had appeared on earlier albums. This was not heard until the movie opened.
Frank Sinatra covered this on his 1969 album My Way. He changed the words, adding some of his own jive and making reference to the movie The Graduate.
This would have had a good chance to win an Oscar for Best Song From A Movie, but it was never nominated because Simon & Garfunkel never filled out the forms to get it considered, leaving "Talk To The Animals" from Doctor Dolittle as the winner. Simon explained, "It was the '60s, we just weren't paying attention." It took 35 years, but Simon finally was nominated for an Oscar in 2003 for his song "Father And Daughter," which was used in The Wild Thornberry's Movie.
According to a "making of" feature on The Graduate DVD, Paul Simon did not originally write a full-length version of this song, only the verses that are heard in the movie. After the movie became a hit, he finished the lyrics and recorded the full version that is known today. (thanks, Snatchworth - Seattle, WA)
This song won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1969. The award was first given out in 1959, and in the '60s, songs like "
Moon River" and "
I Left My Heart in San Francisco" won the award. "Mrs. Robinson" was the first Record of the Year with ties to Rock music.
Many top session musicians recorded with Simon & Garfunkel, including drummer Hal Blaine, who played on this and considers it one of his favorites.
A cover version of this song was recorded and charted by the '90s group Lemonheads. Their single peaked at US #8 on the US Modern Rock chart in 1992, and hit #19 on the UK Pop chart. The Lemonheads were asked to record the song for the 25th anniversary release of The Graduate, prompting Lemonhead Evan Dando to comment, "Some people, probably wearing Italian shoes, said, 'Hmmm, we need to get The Graduate out to more of a flannel-wearing kind of audience." Dando would later say, "I'm more proud of my own songs than the version of 'Mrs. Robinson,' which frankly I can take or leave – mostly leave."
Learn about this song and its use in
The Graduate in
Song Images.
Comments (48):
Get the Ringtone
Get Song @ Amazon
Get the Sheet Music
View Lyrics
The song is wonderful the movie is terrific, each boosted the success of the other, but the two are barely related.
She longs for time past "Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio", a time when America had clear values. You can picture her as active in politics when it was relatively clean, "Going to the canidates' debate."
She had done something embarrassing when she was younger, "It's a little secret...Most of all you've got to hide it from the kids."
But the major theme is one of nostalgia, "Joltin' Joe has left and gone away."
What she was hiding in the pantry was her birth control pills...they allowed her to be promiscuous.
"The Pill" was the big symbol of sexual freedom for women.
I think Mrs. Robinson is trying to uphold the "perfect" image that was the 50's.
Mrs. Robinson is more or less every house wife in the 60's that felt society was starting to fall apart in america. They thought the flower childern were the most terrible thing ever. They were trying to keep the perfectionism in life and it's impossible.
This song is accually quite sad becuase Mrs. Robinson kept living in a delusion that Jesus loved her more than anybody and that she was perfect.
This is the perfect song.
Remember the film EARTHQUAKE, Heston (56) plays the father of Ava Gardner (54). What are film makers thinking ?
oh, and its "jesus loves you more than you will know", not youre a slutty moron.
I prefer the song "America" on the same album and Garfunkel's solo version of Breakaway to this song by this duo.
u can definately tell that shes an alcoholic when they sing "coo coo ca choo" hence a glugging, drinking noise
...
i didnt think there was any dispute about the meaning anyway
Hi! I do know about this song. :)
There were only snippets of the song used in the movie "The Graduate" and those snippets weren't in the finished product. Someone above was correct when commenting that the song was not finished until after the movie was released. Besides "Mrs. Robinson" there are no new songs by the duo in the film or on the soundtrack. The new songs Simon did write for the film were rejected as not being "right" for the film. Perhaps this idea miffed Simon... but whether it did or not, the finished product he produced after the film was completed was not at all about the movie. What the song is referring to is a Welfare office. It describes the passive/aggressive way that financially troubled people are treated by the welfare system and how they are made to feel less than worthy. It highlights the religious aspect of "charity" and how that, too, can be condescending. It tells about the need humiliated people, down on their luck, feel to keep public assistance a "dirty secret" that they hide from their children out of shame, hiding vouchers in the pantry. It refers to the futility these people feel knowing that whichever candidate takes the presidency, nothing will change. And they remember carefree days of Dimaggio, gone away.
Hope this helps. :)
We'd like to help you learn to help yourself
Look around you, all you see are sympathetic eyes
Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home" that's definitely about an asylum. Actually I have the impression that the subject changes everytime. First it's about an asylum, then it's about the Graduate I think, and well I don't know about the rest. Allright, that was really useless, sorry.
Here's to you Mrs Robinson- Heaven holds a place for those who pray. R.I.P.
Peter "Hey how 'bout 'Here's to you Mrs. Fleckenstien'"
S & G "Yeah you've been pitching that for an hour but it's just not a very attractive name"
Peter "Oh oh fine fine I suppose we're also not going with Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Lowery's Seasoning salt. Thats it I'm going to Nam."
Also I like the Weezer version of this.