CoronaVinyl Day 84 (Irish): Tupelo Honey by Van Morrison

For an explanation of CoronaVinyl, click here.

Today's CoronaVinyl category is Irish, and since I already featured Thin Lizzy on the very first edition of CoronaVinyl -- on St. Patrick's Day, a mere twelve weeks ago -- I had to go with another Irish artist.  I don't have any U2 on vinyl, nor any Pogues or Boomtown Rats, but I do have Van Morrison's fifth studio album, 1971's Tupelo Honey.

Though Morrison is technically from Belfast in Northern Ireland, I'm taking the view for purposes of this exercise that "Irish" means from anywhere on the Emerald Isle, regardless of the division between the Republic and Northern Ireland.  Separatists, be damned!

Van Morrison is obviously a legend and one of the most important Irish musicians.  He grew up as the only child in a working class Belfast family, but his dad spent time in Detroit and acquired a massive record collection that Van absorbed.  He formed the band Them in the early '60s, and they had hits with "Baby Please Don't Go," "Here Comes the Night," and "Mystic Eyes," but it was the B-side to "Baby Please Don't Go," the Morrison-penned "Gloria," that remains their most lasting and important contribution to rock history, having been famously covered by The Shadows of Knight, The Doors, and Patti Smith, among others.

He eventually went solo, starting with the Blowin' Your Mind album in 1967, which featured the now-ubiquitous "Brown-Eyed Girl."  However, when I think of Van Morrison, I don't think of pop.  I think of his next several albums -- especially Astral Weeks and Moondance -- that were kind of fusions of rock, R&B, folk, traditional Celtic music, and jazz.  Thanks to Morrison's soulful voice, he could do it all pretty well.

Tupelo Honey was largely written while Morrison was in Woodstock, New York, and it was originally intended to be a country album.  The album title (and title track) comes from the honey produced by tupelo trees in the Southern U.S. -- and is not a reference to Elvis Presley's hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi, as I had assumed.  Regardless, Morrison and his family moved to Marin County, California before recording the album, and he had to use new musicians and scrapped the idea of a full country album.  The result is that Tupelo Honey is a nice mix of blue-eyed soul, rock, country rock, and folk.  The album was co-produced by Morrison and a young Ted Templeman, who would go on to produce most of the Doobie Brothers albums in the '70s, as well as most of Van Halen's albums, among others (it's Templeman's in Van Halen's "Unchained" that says, "Come on Dave, gimme a break," to which David Lee Roth replies "One break, coming up!").  In addition, Ronnie Montrose played guitars on Tupelo Honey, before he joined Edgar Winter Group and then left that to form his eponymous band with Sammy Hagar on vocals.

The album reached #27 on the Billboard album chart -- which was Morrison's highest-charting album in the U.S. to that point -- but I was surprised to see that it didn't chart in the UK, where his prior four albums had been pretty successful.  The album produced two songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100.  The title track went to #47, and "Wild Night" was Morrison's last Top 40 hit in the U.S., reaching #28.  The latter was later covered by John Mellencamp and Meshell Ndegeocello in 1994, and that version reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100.

For whatever reason, Tupelo Honey is not on Spotify, though every other Van Morrison album seems to be, so I again find myself having to post a YouTube playlist version of the full album, which may or may not work.

Favorite song from Side 1:  "Old Old Woodstock"
While I love "Wild Night," I wanted to go with a song that is not as well-known.  "Old Old Woodstock" is what I consider to be a classic Van Morrison song.  It's soulful, with interesting lyrics.  This could very much have been on an album by The Band, not only because it relates to Woodstock, where The Band lived, but also because it sounds like a Band song.  The song also could have just as easily fit on Morrison's Astral Weeks or Moondance albums.

Favorite song from Side 2:  "Tupelo Honey"
The title track is a great, soulful song, up there in the pantheon of Van the Man's great songs.  Like many of his songs, it has elements of soul, gospel, jazz, and rock.  When he tells you that "she's as sweet as tupelo honey," you can't do anything but assume she mus be, and then wish that you could sing and write this well.  At nearly seven minutes, the song is sweet and quiet during the verses, but then exultant during the choruses.