Chestnut Mare
"Chestnut Mare" | ||||||||
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File:The Byrds Chestnut Mare.jpg
Cover artwork for the single, as used in the Netherlands.
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Single by The Byrds | ||||||||
from the album (Untitled) | ||||||||
B-side | "Just a Season" | |||||||
Released | October 23, 1970 | |||||||
Format | 7" single | |||||||
Recorded | June 1 – June 5, June 9, June 11, 1970, Columbia Studios, Hollywood, CA | |||||||
Genre | Country rock | |||||||
Length | 5:08 2:58 (single edit) |
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Label | Columbia | |||||||
Writer(s) | Roger McGuinn, Jacques Levy | |||||||
Producer(s) | Terry Melcher, Jim Dickson | |||||||
The Byrds singles chronology | ||||||||
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"Chestnut Mare" is a song by the American rock band The Byrds, written by Roger McGuinn and Jacques Levy during 1969 for a planned country rock musical named Gene Tryp.[1][2] The musical was never staged and the song was instead released in September 1970 as part of The Byrds' (Untitled) album.[3] It was later issued as a single, peaking at number 121 on the Billboard singles chart and number 19 on the UK Singles Chart.[4]
Composition
Throughout most of 1969, The Byrds' leader and guitarist, Roger McGuinn, had been writing songs with psychologist and Broadway impresario Jacques Levy for a country rock stage production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt that the pair were developing.[5] The intended title for the musical was Gene Tryp, an anagram of the title of Ibsen's play.[6] McGuinn and Levy's production was to loosely follow the storyline of Peer Gynt, albeit with some modifications to transpose the story from Norway to south-west America during the mid-19th century.[2] Ultimately, the Gene Tryp stage production was abandoned and among the twenty-six songs that McGuinn and Levy had written for the project, six (including "Chestnut Mare") would end up being released on The Byrds' (Untitled) and Byrdmaniax albums.[7][8]
"Chestnut Mare" was intended to be used during a scene in which the play's eponymous hero attempts to catch and tame a wild horse, a scene that had featured a deer in Ibsen's original.[9] While the majority of "Chestnut Mare" had been written specifically for Gene Tryp, the musical accompaniment to the song's Bach-like middle section had actually been written by McGuinn back in the early 1960s, while on tour in South America with the Chad Mitchell Trio.[9]
Musically, "Chestnut Mare" echoes the sound of The Byrds' mid-1960s recordings, with McGuinn's chiming 12-string Rickenbacker guitar sitting alongside guitarist Clarence White's country-style acoustic and electric guitar picking.[10][11] Lyrically, the song's spoken verses recount the story of one man's quest to tame a wild horse and echo the familiar Byrds' themes of nature and freedom.[1][11] The song's narrative can also be seen to deal in mythic archetypes; the wild mare being an embodiment of untamed nature, which the narrator wants to control, and as such, an analogy of mankind's attempts to dominate and subjugate the natural environment.[10]
Release and reception
"Chestnut Mare" was initially released as part of The Byrds' (Untitled) album on September 14, 1970.[3] It was then issued as a single on October 23, 1970, with "Just a Season", another McGuinn and Levy song left over from the Gene Tryp project, on the B-side.[2][3] The single stalled at number 121 on the Billboard singles chart but nonetheless, "Chestnut Mare" went on to become a staple of FM radio programming in America during the 1970s.[1][4] The song did much better, however, when it was released as a single in the United Kingdom on January 1, 1971, reaching number 19 on the UK Singles Chart, during a chart stay of eight weeks.[12]
"Chestnut Mare" was the first UK Top 20 hit that The Byrds had achieved since their cover of Bob Dylan's "All I Really Want to Do" had peaked at number 4 in September 1965.[9][12] Although the U.S. single release featured the full-length album version of "Chestnut Mare", in the UK and Europe a severely edited version of the song was issued instead.[9] The running time of the album version is 5:08, while the single edit is noticeably shorter at 2:58, due to the removal of the song's second verse and middle section.
Following its appearance on the (Untitled) album, the song would go on to become a staple of The Byrds' live concert repertoire, until their final disbandment in 1973.[13] The band also performed the song in 1971 and 1972 on the German music television program, Beat-Club.[14]
In addition to its appearance on the (Untitled) album, "Chestnut Mare" also appears on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Very Best of The Byrds, The Essential Byrds and There Is a Season.[1] A live performance of the song is also included on The Byrds' Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971 album.[1]
The Icicle Works covered "Chestnut Mare" as a medley with another Byrds' song, "Triad", on the 1989 Byrds' tribute album, Time Between – A Tribute to The Byrds.[15]
References
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