Chestnut Mare
| "Chestnut Mare" | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cover artwork for the single, as used in the Netherlands.
|
||||||||||||
| 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) |
|||||||||||
| Label | Columbia | |||||||||||
| Songwriter(s) | Roger McGuinn, Jacques Levy | |||||||||||
| Producer(s) | Terry Melcher, Jim Dickson | |||||||||||
| The Byrds singles chronology | ||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
| Audio sample | ||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||
"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. The musical was never staged and the song was instead released in September 1970 as part of The Byrds' (Untitled) album. It was later issued as a single, peaking at number 121 on the Billboard singles chart and number 19 on the UK Singles Chart.
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. The intended title for the musical was Gene Tryp, an anagram of the title of Ibsen's play. 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. 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.
"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. 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.
...
Wikipedia