A retired fisherman from Brooklyn has shared a vivid memory from the summer of 1964 — a quiet, almost cinematic moment when a young Neil Diamond came to Coney Island Beach at dusk to practice singing, sending his voice across the water in the fading evening light. According to the fisherman, Diamond appeared there several times that season, always alone, always carrying the same worn notebook under his arm.
The fisherman said the beach was nearly empty during those dusk hours. Families had already gone home, boardwalk music had softened, and only a few locals remained — fishermen casting lines from the pier or sitting on overturned buckets, waiting for the tide to shift. On one particular evening, they noticed a young man walking slowly along the shoreline, stopping occasionally as though testing the air.
“He didn’t look like he was meeting anyone,” the fisherman recalled. “He looked like he came for the quiet.”
Diamond approached a patch of sand far from the pier, dropped his notebook beside a small driftwood log, and stood facing the open water. At first, the fishermen assumed he was talking to himself. His lips moved in silent rehearsal. But after a few moments, he lifted his chin toward the horizon and sang — softly at first, then with a confidence that startled the men sitting with their fishing poles.
“It wasn’t loud,” the fisherman said. “But it carried. The kind of voice that doesn’t need force — it just travels.”
Diamond sang in short bursts, stopping every few minutes to write something in his notebook. He paced in the sand, rehearsed a line, rewrote it, then tried again. His voice floated above the gentle crash of the waves and drifted out toward the boats resting just offshore. The fishermen, who usually kept to themselves, found themselves listening without meaning to.
According to another man present that evening, Diamond sang as if he were testing the ocean’s response. Some lines echoed faintly; others blended cleanly with the water and wind. At one point, he stepped closer to the tide, letting the waves soak his shoes while he tried a different melody.
“He wasn’t putting on a show,” the fisherman said. “It was like watching someone think out loud — but with music.”
For nearly an hour, Diamond repeated the routine: sing, write, adjust, sing again. When he finished, he closed the notebook, pressed it against his chest, and stood still as if absorbing the last minutes of daylight. The sky was streaked with orange and pink. The wind had settled. A few fishermen nodded in his direction; he nodded back.
On later evenings, the fishermen spotted him again — sometimes alone, sometimes humming as he walked, sometimes writing before he even reached the water. They came to expect him during warm weeks, describing him as “the kid with the voice the waves didn’t drown out.”
The notebook, the fisherman remembered, was almost always half open, pages ruffled by the sea breeze. Diamond guarded it carefully but never seemed self-conscious about his singing. There was something earnest and unpolished in the way he worked — not a performance, but a quiet ritual.
“It stuck with us,” the fisherman said. “Most voices get swallowed by the beach. His didn’t. It went out toward the boats like it belonged there.”
For those who witnessed it, the memory remains tied to the sound of twilight itself — a young man chasing songs in the fading light, with only the ocean to hear him.