I started out with great gusto on my American Odyssey in Song in early 2017, but floundered last year upon reaching little Delaware. Well, getting back to that old chestnut time, or rather the lack of it this week, I am going to cheat a little and include a song that has previously been included as part of another series. The Snow Moonīut this is a moon post, so what song to feature this time.
As I said at the start of this series, no two years will ever be the same.
#Moonlight in vermont full
Instead, we ended up with two Blue Moons (a second full moon in the same calendar month) on either side. I had intended to use the alternate names for the full moon this year, however last year, because of the 29 and a half day lunar cycle, we didn’t have a full moon in February at all.
This month, we should witness the Snow Moon on the night of the 19th February. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.” How apt I thought.Īnyway, it is now nearly a month since we witnessed (or didn’t in my case) January’s lunar eclipse. I heard a great quote recently, where the phenomena was described as such: “Life is like a roll of toilet paper. What is it with time? The older you get, the faster it seems to whizz by. I can scarcely believe it’s been four weeks since my last “moon post”. To accompany the post I always include one of the numerous songs that have been written about the moon and its many foibles. Get your own “Moonlight In Vermont” on LP, CD or MP3 from Amazon.Since discovering that all full moons have a name (given to them by the Native Americans who kept track of the months by the lunar calendar), I have written about each one as they appear in our skies. More interestingly, the melody of each verse’s third line (“moonlight in Vermont” or “snowlight in Vermont”) is the exact same as the line “moonlight through the pines” from “Georgia On My Mind”, arguably Ray’s most famous song. Anyone familiar with that song will prick up their ears during those familiar-sounding lines of “Moonlight In Vermont”. “Moonlight In Vermont” is one of two songs on The Genius Hits The Road to mention Earth’s satellite in its title, along with “Moon Over Miami”. The idiosyncratic structure of this solo finds Ray’s dexterous fingers wandering busily over unexpected notes, using the technique he’d explored on his jazz LPs for Atlantic to further recall a night of shifting patterns of light and shade on a chilly night in Vermont. His delicate, deliberate piano solo is where the song’s jazz side emerges: the strings disappear almost entirely for the duration, and what remains is his prominent keys over a low drums and bass background. Rules always seemed to stir his inner defensiveness.) (Actually, Ray Charles winkingly disrupts the strictness of haiku on the very first line, turning the five-syllable “Pennies in a stream” into the six-syllable “Pennies in a stream-ah”. The effect echoes, indeed, moonlight twinkling through the branches of sycamore trees or glinting off the snow in winter: a mysterious and mercurial sense of blurry beauty. Those lyrics set “Moonlight In Vermont” apart from other soft, contemplative music of the era. Each verse is a haiku, with a 5/7/5-syllable structure, and it doesn’t even rhyme. His warm tenor oozes the song’s impressionistic lyrics like maple syrup, as the orchestra glows incandescent around him. The version that Ray recorded is sweet and wistful, plodding along among pillows of lush strings and an angelic choir. Its words and music were written in 1944 by, respectively, John Blackburn and Karl Suessdorf (neither of whom was actually from Vermont).īy the time Ray got around to adding it to his first ABC Records LP, “Moonlight In Vermont” had been covered by a wide range of artists including Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Betty Carter, with whom Ray would soon make a duets album. “Moonlight In Vermont” is well-known in that state, and although it is not in fact the state song it often assumes that role in various ceremonies. On his musical journey around the United States for his 1960 LP The Genius Hits The Road, Ray Charles stops off to rhapsodize about the “Moonlight In Vermont”, adding a slightly jazz element to an otherwise pop standard with his unconventional piano.
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