Looking back, these were indeed the days of miracles and wonder (to paraphrase the lyrics of Graceland's "The Boy In The Bubble"), when long distance calls led to lasers in the jungle, as art became medicine and medicine became magical.

In much the same way that the Beatles' music once helped shatter America's Cold War reserve and induce a boomer generation to acquaint itself with the social and political landscape of the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, so Paul Simon's Graceland played a greatly significant role in removing the standoffish dread Western culture harbored toward South Africa during its internal struggle against apartheid, humanizing both a country's soul-searching hunger for liberation and its simultaneous outpouring of cathartic creative expression.

"Motho ke motho ka batho babang-A person is a person because of other people,'' wrote Sorbonne-educated South African poet-activist Jeremy Cronin in 1983, while spending seven years in prison (1976-83) for his activities on behalf of the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC). The poems Cronin wrote in such places as the infamously horrid Pretoria Maximum jail (including one called "Your Deep Hair," about the lovely tresses of the wife who died during his incarceration) each detailed the tiny moments of beauty, decency and hope amongst his fellow inmates that dispelled an insistent despair.

The essential prayer of all those downtrodden or captive to injustice is that their predicament might resonate in the hearts of honorable people, however distant, as if compassion were a rhythmic sonority that no obstruction could impede or subdue. For the black citizens of Soweto, as well as those elsewhere who were touched by their suffering and resilient spirit, the sincerity of superstar Paul Simon's interest in the proud messages of South Africa's proletarian music seemed a miraculous gesture of respect in synch with many of the country's deepest longings and convictions. Unpolitical in its agenda yet unconditional in its enthusiasm, Simon's reflex passion for the Soweto-based music of "township jive" or mbaqanga (the word literally means dough, owing to African corn bread's pliant density) and the Zulu choral mabazo (or moonshine records) of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, signified a turning point in the modern appreciation of black South Africa's hybrid rural/ghetto heritage, cementing its worth at home as well as abroad.

It's crucial to understand that mbaqanga, particularly in its 1930-40's barroom alloy of ragtime and traditional marabi melodies, was always a scorned orphan of South African pop, being the largely instrumental product of migrant workers compelled to leave the rural villages with their traditional Zulu and/or mission-based choral singing-the admixture typified at the turn of the century by the Christian nationalist works of the Siyamu, Natal-born Reuben T. Caluza.

Music has always been a primary component of black South Africa's protracted fight against racist disenfranchisement, and when the white Dutch-German Afrikaner colonial government instituted the Native Lands Act of 1913, forcing the black peasantry off its own farms and reapportioning less than 15 percent of the country's land to over 80 percent of its native populace, Caluza's "Silusapho Lwase Afrika (We Are The Children of Africa)" was adopted as an early anthem of the ANC due to its fervent refrain, "We are crying for our land/Zulus, Xhosas, Sothos, unite over the Lands Act issue." Caluza's music, which merged choral, minstrel, jubilee, ragtime and English music hall elements with poignant laments for the decline of ancient Zulu customs, became popular enough to accelerate the growth of the modest South African recording industry (first initiated in 1908, and fortified by the foundation in 1926 of Eric Gallo's still-flourishing Gallo Records label).

Caluza signed with the prestigious His Master's Voice firm in England, travelling to London with his troupe in 1930 to record for its renowned HMV label. As the live and recorded music of Caluza's Ohlange Choir mingled in the farm laborers' barracks and mining encampments of South Africa's industrialized heartland with Sotho sefela folk songs, Zulu ingoma dance styles and rustic polka-like boloha wedding ditties, it gave birth to the innovative and highly sophisticated style of bass-heavy men's Zulu choral singing called isicathamiya.

This somewhat slick yet strangely ceremonial approach was formally pioneered by Natal-born soprano Solomon Linda and his five-member Evening Birds, who recorded for Gallo Records (Linda initially worked at the label's Roodepoort pressing plant as a packer) and dominated the urban choral scene from the 1930's until 1948. One of Linda's biggest hits, "Mbube" (Lion), was popularized worldwide on Decca Records in 1952 by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Woody Guthrie of the Weavers folk trio as "Wimoweh," with the Tokens taking a heavily revised pop version of it to No. 1 in Billboard's Hot 100 in 1961 as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."

Nonetheless, the harder kewla (meaning quicker, i.e. "Come on, get up!" to dance) and newly electrified mbaqanga sound, as well as isicathamiya in its contemporary ingoma ebusuku (night music) incarnation, both still remained the music of the more unrefined shebeens (illegal saloons) during the 50's, 60's and 70's, even though certain black jazz and dance bands borrowed aspects of the forms.

Meanwhile, South Africa's government was splintering the social contract in the townships, passing apartheid laws in 1948 that strictly separated blacks from whites, and then the Group Areas Act of the 1950's that compelled all racial groups (including Indians) to live in restricted neighborhoods and prohibited them from mixing in public events. After the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, assemblies of more than 10 individuals were outlawed, unless the participants were white. The South African Broadcasting Corporation took obsessive steps to be certain the airwaves were carefully censored, even employing a team of linguistic experts to screen records for idiomatic lyrics of a political nature.

The proliferation of black music in South Africa in the 60's and 70's thus became the province of the recording industry at the relatively unpoliced local retail level, with Gallo Records taking the lead in promoting the electrified rock, soul and jazz-funk tempos updating the township beat of mbaqanga.

But isicathamiya was stalled as a style until the rise of another choral group hailing from Solomon Linda's old stomping grounds in the area near the Natal town of Ladysmith. Organized in 1960 by leader Joseph Shabalala, and turning professional in 1971, Ladysmith Black Mambazo featured a tightly choreographed, ingoma-rooted brand of isicathamiya which they christened cothoza mfana (i.e. to walk proudly), and recorded several dozen albums in the 1970's and 1980's before Paul Simon, a modern American musician with a folk background, caught the vocal ensemble on the BBC documentary "Rhythm of Resistance: The Music of South Africa." He took them into London's Abbey Road studios, the session resulting in the haunting collaboration between Simon and Shabalala called "Homeless." When the song appeared in 1986 on the revelatory Graceland-which subsequently earned the Album of The Year Grammy�-it catapulted Ladysmith Black Mambazo into international prominence, later lifting their own 1987 Shaka Zulu album on Warner Bros. to success on the British charts.

"Prior to Graceland, the music of South Africa was largely unknown outside the country, except to a small minority of world music fans," notes fellow singer-composer Peter Gabriel, who adds that Graceland was pathbreaking artistically as well as culturally. "The music at its best brimmed with life and emotion, and was charged with a blend of spirituality and sensuality. With his elegant composition and diffident observations, Paul Simon fused these elements with his own extraordinary songwriting skills. He produced an irresistible and classic album, which I have played many, many times."

All in all, it was an uncommonly emotional pan-cultural pilgrimage for Simon, the symbolic completion of a creative passage begun back in 1985 when he'd spent nine days in Johannesburg at Ovation Studios, recording with a variety of the top native musicians for the undertaking that eventually became Graceland.

That trip had itself been triggered in the summer of 1984 by a gift to Simon from New York singer-songwriter Heidi Berg: a cassette copy of the mbaqanga compilation Gumboots: Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II. Simon was fascinated by the gliding, harmony-laced tumult of the Boyoyo Boys Band and other township jive artists from the dusty lanes of Soweto. He contacted Johannesburg producer Hilton Rosenthal, who mailed him another 20 albums worth of the segregated work camps' best acts. The sessions that ensued in London and in New York with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and in Los Angeles with South African guitarist Chikapa "Ray" Phiri's popular Gallo Records group, Stimela, lent shape to the Graceland epic.

Fans sometimes forget, however, that the Cajun zydeco of Rockin' Dopsie and the Twisters, plus the East L.A. Chicano rock of Los Lobos, and the creamy vocal consonance of the Everly Brothers also played critical roles in the album's triumphant passage toward completion. But then Simon had been forging such novel record-making alliances as far back as his work with Peruvian folk instrumentalists Los Incas on "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)" for Simon and Garfunkel's 1970 Bridge Over Troubled Water release (likewise awarded an Album of The Year Grammy�).

Graceland faced its own troubled evolution from the moment Simon got off the plane in Johannesburg in February '85, with the United Nations Committee Against Apartheid threatening to censure him for allegedly breaking the cultural boycott of South Africa. Simon was startled by this reaction, having long been a vocal critic of apartheid and a supporter of the boycott, even refusing repeated offers to publicly perform during his visit. "This is a motion toward helping," he explained at the time. "It exposes a culture, a people...I'm trying to be in a dialogue."

The controversy persisted in some quarters as the world tour in support of Graceland got underway in 1987-Ray Phiri and Ladysmith Black Mambazo being among those on board for the extensive trek. But Simon picked up key supporters in trumpeter Hugh Masekela and legendary singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba, two self-exiled South Africans whose stern political stance against apartheid included vows not to return to their homeland until it was free. "As far as the cultural boycott is concerned," Masekela told reporters, "I am completely in favor of it when it stops people playing in South Africa. But Paul Simon has brought the music of South Africa to ten million ears-that's never been managed before."

In 1990, National Party leader F.W. deKlerk opened the South African parliament with a vow to end apartheid and introduce fundamental reforms of the country's oppressive racist political system. On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela, the last of the incarcerated ANC leaders, was unconditionally released after serving 27 years in jail. On June 5, 1991, the apartheid laws concerning property ownership were scrapped, and on June 17 the Population Registration Act, which since 1950 had classified all South Africans at birth by race, was abolished. In July 1991, Mandela was elected, unopposed, to the presidency of the ANC.

In January 1992 Simon journeyed to South Africa (at the invitation of the multi-racial South African Musicians Alliance, and with the approval of Nelson Mandela and the ANC) for a series of concerts. The radical Azanian People's Organization (AZAPO) protested the shows, calling them a denigration of the cultural boycott, even though Nelson Mandela had officially dropped that measure after the government had lifted racial sanctions in the country. AZAPO and its youth group, AZAYO, vowed to halt Simon's performances by any means necessary, and an allied group, the Azanian National Liberation Army, took responsibility for two hand grenades tossed into the offices of the tour's local promoter.

The motives of AZAPO were shown to be less than pure, however, when it emerged that its leadership had tried to pressure Simon, just prior to the opening Johannesburg appearance, into re-booking his tour to include some Botswana dates through which AZAPO could reap box office proceeds. Simon sternly rebuffed AZAPO, kept to his original itinerary, and contributed some $36,000 to the South African Musicians Alliance, while absorbing the $500,000 loss the tour itself would necessitate.

The first show, held in Johannesburg's Ellis Park Stadium, marked the 151st date in a 27-country marathon for the Born At The Right Time Tour (named for Simon's 1990 Brazilian-flavored The Rhythm Of The Saints album). Whites outnumbered blacks in the throng of 40,000 spectators, reportedly because of the threatening protests by AZAPO. Ironically, the concert proved to be an incident-free opportunity for white South Africans to experience some of the nation's foremost black musical talents, among them Ladysmith Black Mambazo; but, tragically, one member of the vocal group was absent-singer Headman Tshabalala, 44, had been fatally shot December 10, 1991 in a highway dispute in Durban, South Africa.

Moreover, the estimated 129,000 South African fans who attended the various dates were also being exposed to premier Brazilian musicians such as percussionists Mingo Ara(tm)jo, Sidinho Moreira and Dom Chacal, plus Cameroonian guitarist Vincent Nguini and New York jazz-rock session stars Steve Gadd (drums), Richard Tee (keyboards) and Michael Brecker (saxophone). Lastly, the shows were the culmination of a thrillingly instructive collaborative experiment for Simon, in which he shared Graceland writing credits with Shabalala (on the aforementioned "Homeless" and on "Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes"), General M.D. Shirinda ("I Know What I Know"), Jonhjon Mkhalali and Lulu Masilela ("Gumboots"), and Forere Motloheloa ("The Boy In The Bubble"). The multi-million-selling Graceland would yield three hit singles around the planet with its title track, "You Can Call Me Al" and "The Boy In The Bubble."

Discussing Graceland with Simon in his Manhattan offices in New York City's famed Brill Building in autumn 1990, Paul showed a disarming humility as this writer observed that the eleven-song masterpiece seems to possess the mood and logic of a long dream, making one wonder if the always-prolific artist had gotten frustrated with conventional song structures and elected to be freer in his composing and recording process.

"That was something that occurred while I was making Graceland," he explained. "It wasn't the song form I was frustrated with-although maybe I was-but that wasn't what I was consciously frustrated with. What I was consciously frustrated with was the system of sitting and writing a song and then going into the studio and trying to make a record of that song. And if I couldn't find the right musicians or I couldn't find the right way of making those tracks, then I had a good song and a kind of mediocre record. And that was frustrating.

"So, when I started making what was to become Graceland, I set out to make really good tracks, and then I thought, �I have enough songwriting technique that I can reverse this process and write the song after the tracks are made.' And if I have a really good song, well then, my chances of making a good record are vastly improved over the other way of working.

"In the process of working in that way," Simon continued, "I discovered different ways of turning the form around, from constantly listening to the way African guitarists and the bass players were altering what they were playing from verse to verse. Graceland is like that because choruses didn't have to always be the same. They could repeat, they could use material from a verse, they could introduce some new lyric idea and retain elements from one chorus to the next. Like in the song �Graceland,' none of the choruses are exactly symmetrical. In a way, it reflects what the guitar parts [by Ray Phiri] are. And that shift keeps it fresh and makes the repetition exciting."

One of the greatest things about the fluid quality of Graceland, this journalist suggested, was that it almost made one forget about the listening process, the listener somehow disappearing along with the songwriter into the experience of the music, rendering it a new, intuitive journey for both parties.

"If that was the experience of everybody," answered Simon with a smile, "I would be very pleased-because that's what I'm trying to achieve. If you can recognize a pattern, and you anticipate the pattern, you're already slightly bored, and your mind is wandering a little bit. I like to establish a pattern that's recognizable-'cause there's something pleasurable in feeling, �I can understand what the pattern is'-and then change that pattern. And if you can engage their imagination and their interest, and if you feel instinctively that you've really got their attention, you can make a quick turn. You can move into another area and instead of it being a disconcerting kind of a musical jolt, it'll feel like driving down a familiar road and you decide to take a turn onto a street that you haven't been on before. You still know that parallel to that street is a familiar highway, but you're in a new place and it's fresh.

"You know, after many, many years, you reach a point and you think, �Well, I don't know what to do, I've run out of ideas,'" Simon revealed, "and so starting with Graceland, the possibilities of new thoughts, it just exploded. In terms of writing, I like to be the audience. You can't go in there and dictate or superimpose where you're coming from because it would be self-defeating. You would be taking away why you're there, so you're there and you're a student and there's something about that that's humbling.

"If I actually can get myself in the songwriting process to feel like I am along on the ride as opposed to the conductor of the train," Simon added, "the process is more interesting. And I'm always more interested in finding what it is that I have to say by discovering it by accident, just because that's where my mind bounced!

"I know that when I'm working, if I find myself in some new area and I can remain there, remain calm enough to notice what's happening, it gives me the opportunity for growth as a songwriter and a record maker. So if the listener can observe that and feel that, then in a good way they're getting some of the excitement that I'm feeling when I'm in the situation."

And so, in the end, the creation of Graceland advanced on a path somewhat parallel with the rebirth of freedom in South Africa, everybody involved generally hopeful but no one able to fully anticipate what was coming next.

"That's right!" Simon agreed. "And when the familiar comes back at you, it's pleasant, it's like unexpectedly seeing your home. I like to be lost and find my way back to the familiar sounds that mean certain things to me, and at this point in my life, and in my creative life, I know what those sounds are."

As Ray Phiri movingly recounts in a segment of the stunning audio-visual documentary within this enhanced CD, "Paul was the one who was brave enough to say, �Listen man, it's all about music at the end of the day. Let's have fun.'" In short, a person is a person because of other people, however distant, who arrive unexpectedly to help reaffirm humanity's potential for compassion, growth and self-renewal.

In April 1994, all the people of South Africa went to the polls in its first free elections and chose Nelson Mandela to be the leader of the multi-racial African nation's new society. And now, more than a decade since the release of Graceland, there really are lasers in the jungle; the narrow, intense beam once seen primarily as a potential weapon is now indispensable for the CD Walkman and other compact disc players that carry the sonority of Graceland to all corners of a democratic South Africa, its rhythms not unlike the inner cadences of an answered prayer.

"Certain sounds are going to represent certain feelings to me," confided Paul Simon during our talk in 1990. "You can't just automatically press the button and have those sounds produce those feelings, but if you approach them in the right way, they will do that. If you don't come at it from an unexpected place, it's going to be a clich�. But if you come at it from the right place, it sounds like a moment in church."

TIMOTHY WHITE is the Editor In Chief of BILLBOARD and author of the international bestseller, CATCH A FIRE: THE LIFE OF BOB MARLEY and MUSIC TO MY EARS: THE BILLBOARD ESSAYS, winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism. He donated his fee for this essay to Amnesty International in memory of Bob Marley.