By the Sleepy Lagoon
| "Sleepy Lagoon" | |
|---|---|
| Song | |
| Written | 1930 |
| Published | 1940 |
| Genre | Valse serenade |
| Writer(s) | Composer: Eric Coates Lyricist: Jack Lawrence |
"By the Sleepy Lagoon" is a light orchestral valse serenade by British composer Eric Coates composed in 1930. In 1940, lyrics were added with Coates's approval by Jack Lawrence, and the resultant song "Sleepy Lagoon" became a popular music standard of the 1940s.
Coates had originally been inspired to write the piece in 1930 while overlooking a beach in West Sussex. His son, Austin Coates, remembers:
It was inspired in a very curious way and not by what you might expect. It was inspired by the view on a warm, still summer evening looking across the "lagoon" from the east beach at Selsey towards Bognor Regis. It's a pebble beach leading steeply down, and the sea at that time is an incredibly deep blue of the Pacific. It was that impression, looking across at Bognor, which looked pink — almost like an enchanted city with the blue of the Downs behind it — that gave him the idea for the Sleepy Lagoon. He didn't write it there; he scribbled it down, as he used to, at extreme speed, and then simply took it back with him to London where he wrote and orchestrated it."
The resultant piece is a slow waltz for full orchestra lasting roughly four minutes in duration. Michael Jameson suggests that the piece is "elegantly orchestrated" with "a shapely theme for violins presented in the salon-esque genre entirely characteristic of British light music in the 1920s and '30s". In 1942, Coates's original orchestral version was chosen (with added seagulls) to introduce the BBC Home Service radio series Desert Island Discs, which it still does to this day on BBC Radio 4.
In early 1940, songwriter Jack Lawrence came across the piano solo version of "By the Sleepy Lagoon" and wrote a song lyric, then took it to Chappell, the publisher of Coates's original melody. The head of Chappell's New York office, Max Dreyfus, was concerned that this lyric had been added without consulting its famous British classical composer. Dreyfus warned Lawrence that Coates "may resent your tampering with his melody." Dreyfus also didn't think the melody belonged in the popular genre and that it was better suited to its original treatment as a light classical piece.
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