Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Shadows of the Night-Quentin's Theme

From a podline6 of YouTube
A nicely done Dark Shadows theme For BB:

I actually taught myself to play this song on the piano when I was twelve. One of 3 songs I mastered: "Shadows of the Night", "Greensleeves" (yes, I was burgeoning Anglophile even then), and "Chopsticks". None were as proficient as these versions I link yo here...

Notes from YouTube version of Greensleeves posted by eur0tec:

A tune by this name was registered at the London Stationer's Company in 1580 as: "A New Northern Dittye of the Lady Greene Sleeves." No copy of that printing is known. It appears in the surviving A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584) as: "A New Courtly Sonnet of the Lady Green Sleeves. To the new tune of Green sleeves. "It remains debatable whether this suggests that an old tune of "Greensleeves" was in circulation, or which one our familiar tune is.

The widely-believed legend is that it was composed by King Henry VIII of England (1491-1547) for his lover and future queen consort Anne Boleyn. Anne, the youngest daughter of Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire, rejected Henry's attempts to seduce her...

(Gunga D. notes: Well, we all know how well that ended...)

3 comments:

val said...

Very nice. Quite a young-sounding voice from that grey head.

Boston_Betty said...

Beautiful!!! SO much better than the original version where poor David Selby ("Quentin Collins"--who really couldn't carry a tune to begin with--tried simply reciting the lyrics through the music. This one one of my late mom's favorite songs.

SnarkAngel said...

Well, I never played piano, or learned to play it on my trumpet, but I did hum it a lot as a kid. Used to drive my dad batty.