Seven Bridges Road
| "Seven Bridges Road" | |
|---|---|
| Single by Steve Young | |
| from the album Rock Salt & Nails | |
| B-side | "Many Rivers" |
| Released | 1969 |
| Format | 45 single |
| Recorded | 1969 |
| Genre | Country |
| Length | 3:22 |
| Label | Reprise |
| Writer(s) | Steve Young |
| Producer(s) | Paul Tannen |
| "Seven Bridges Road" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Single by Eagles | ||||
| from the album Eagles Live | ||||
| B-side | "The Long Run (live)" (4:08) | |||
| Released | 15 December 1980 | |||
| Format | 45 single | |||
| Recorded | 28 July 1980 | |||
| Genre | Country rock | |||
| Length | 3:02 | |||
| Label | Asylum 2051 | |||
| Writer(s) | Steve Young | |||
| Producer(s) | Bill Szymczyk | |||
| Eagles singles chronology | ||||
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| "Seven Bridges Road" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single by Ricochet | ||||
| from the album What You Leave Behind | ||||
| A-side | "Do I Love You Enough" | |||
| B-side | "Seven Bridges Road" | |||
| Released | 17 March 2000 | |||
| Format | CD single | |||
| Recorded | Sound Stage Studio Nashville TN 1999 |
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| Genre | Country rock | |||
| Length | 3:06 | |||
| Label | Columbia 79379 | |||
| Writer(s) | Steve Young | |||
| Producer(s) | Ron Chancey, Blake Chancey | |||
| Ricochet singles chronology | ||||
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"Seven Bridges Road" is a song written by American musician Steve Young, recorded in 1969 for his Rock Salt & Nails album. It has since been covered by many artists, the best-known version being a five-part harmony arrangement by English musician Iain Matthews recorded by the American rock band Eagles in 1980.
Steve Young was inspired to write "Seven Bridges Road" during a sojourn in Montgomery, Alabama, in the early 1960s: according to Young "a group of friends...showed me [a] road [that] led out of town...After you had crossed seven bridges you found yourself out in the country on a dirt road. Spanish moss hung in the trees and there were old farms with old fences and graveyards and churches and streams. A high-bank dirt road with trees. It seemed like a Disney fantasy at times. People went there to park or get stoned or just to get away from it all. I thought my friends had made up the name 'Seven Bridges Road'. I found out later that it had been called by that name for over a hundred years. "
The song's locale has been identified as Woodley Road, a rural two-lane road which runs south off East Fairview Avenue - the southern boundary of Montgomery's Cloverdale neighborhood - at Cloverdale Road, and which once featured seven bridges. Young himself never evidently endorsed this identification: however Alabaman journalist Wayne Greenhaw in his book My Heart Is in the Earth: True Stories of Alabama & Mexico (Red River Publishing/ 2001) relates how on a Sunday in springtime he accompanied Young and their friend Jimmy Evans on a drive down Woodley Road to Orion for a guitar jam session with bluesman C. P. Austin, and that it was on the return trip up Woodley Road that Young began the composition of "Seven Bridges Road".
Jimmy Evans, then Young's room-mate and later Attorney General of Alabama, also endorses Woodley Road as being Young's inspiration: (Evans quote:) "I'd go down [Woodley Road] to Orion a lot to listen to listen to...C. P. Austin...There [were] seven wooden bridges [on Woodley] and we'd go out there a lot...I thought it was the most beautiful place around Montgomery that I'd ever seen. That road was a cavern of moss; it looked like a tunnel." Evans specifically recalls the Woodley Road trip which occasioned Young's writing "Seven Bridges Road": "That night there was a full moon. We were in my Oldsmobile, and when I stopped Steve got out on the right side fender. We sat there a while, and he started writing down words." Evans recalls that after beginning to write the song on Woodley Road that night, Young completed his composition at the apartment he and Evans shared in Montgomery's Capitol Heights neighborhood.
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