It was slightly misty this morning as it so often is at this time of year, so I thought that our selection of music for today should be about mist and it’d bigger denser brother fog.
“To Autumn” is a poem by English poet John Keats (1795 – 1821). The work was composed in September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats’s poetry that included Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes. “To Autumn” is the final work in a group of poems known as Keat’s 1819 odes. Although personal problems left him little time to devote to poetry in 1819, he composed “To Autumn” after a walk near Winchester one autumnal evening. The work marks the end of his poetic career, as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. A little over a year after the publication of “To Autumn”, Keats died in Rome.
“One Misty Moisty Morning” is a track taken from the studion album ‘Parcel of Rogues’ by English electro-folk group Steeleye Span. It was released in April 1973 and broke into the Top 30 becoming their most successful album to date. The song is a traditonal nursery rhyme, and talks of an “old man all clothed in leather”. Although the origins of this Nursery Rhyme cannot be traced the subject of leather clothing is an interesting one and worthy of mention. The hides of animals have been used for time immemorial by man in an effort to keep warm. The manufacture of making items of apparel leather dates back thousands of years. The father of William Shakespeare moved from farming the land and used the skins of animals to set up trade as as a Glover and Whittawer.
“Misty Mountain Cold” is a song from the Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein written in 1937. It is sung by the dwarves whilst they are met together in Biblo’s house in the Shire before they set out on their quest to recapture their home from the dragon Smaug.
“Duel in the Mist” is an intrumental piece taken from the action role playing game Genshin Impact, developed and published by Chinese studio miHoYO. It was released for Windows, Playstation and Android in September 2020, and, as of September 2021, is planned for future release on Nintendo Switch. The game features an open world environment and an action-based battle system using elemental magic and character-switching.
“Foggy Dew” is the name of several Irish ballads, and of an Irish lament. The song chronicles the Easter Rising of 1916, and encourages Irishmen to fight for the cause of Ireland, rather than for the British Empire, as so many young men were doing in World War I. The brutal response to the Rising, and the execution of its leaders that followed, marked a turning point for many Irish people. The public revulsion at the executions added to the growing sense of alienation from the British Government. Canon O’Neill reflected this alienation when he wrote The Foggy Dew commemorating the few hundred brave men who had risen out against what was then the most powerful empire in the world. In 1919, he attended the first sitting of the new Irish Parliament, Dail. The names of the elected members were called out, but many were absent. Their names were answered by the reply faoi ghlas ag na Gaill – “locked up by the foreigner”.
“Foggy Mountain Breakdown” is a bluegrass instrumental, in the common “breakdown” format, written by Earl Scruggs and first recorded in December 1949 by the bluegrass artists Flatt & Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys. It is a standard in the bluegrass repertoire. The 1949 recording features Scruggs playing a five string banjo. It is used as background music in the 1967 motion picture Bonnie & Clyde, especially in the car chase scenes, and has been used in a similar manner in many other films and TV programs, particularly when depicting a pursuit scene in a rural setting.
“Fog on the Tyne” is the title track from the 1971 album of the same name by Lindisfarne. Bob Johnston produced the album, which was recorded at Trident Studios in the mid-1971 and released in October that year on Chrisma Records in the United Kingdom and Elektra in the U.S.. It gave the group their breakthrough in the UK, topping the album charts early in 1972 for four weeks and remaining on the chart for 56 weeks in total. “Meet Me on the Corner”, one of two songs written by bassist Rod Clements, reached No. 5 as a single. The title track became the band’s signature tune.
“The Morning Fog” is the last track on the second side of the 1985 album The Hounds of Love by Kate Bush. The second side, subtitled The Ninth Wave, forms a conceptual suite about a woman drifting alone in the sea at night. “The Ninth Wave” uses a great many textures to express the story: in the style of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Arthurian poems, Bush pursues a vision quest, taking the listener through a death and rebirth. The warmth of familiar sleep is cut by dangerous speed, ice and frigid water, an otherworldly trial and judgement, an out-of-body limbo, and finally a vigorous emergence and grounding in life energy. The disparate musical elements of “The Ninth Wave” were described by Ron Moy as “classically prog” because of their evident experimentation, and because Bush wholly embraces European music traditions without a trace of American influence.
