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Today's Song: Cold Haily Windy Night by Steeleye Span

Steeleye Span

One of my favorite songs from one of the earliest incarnations of Steeleye Span is Cold, Haily Windy Night. It's a song about a soldier standing outside in terrible weather, begging a young girl to let him in to her bed chamber. Naturally the way these folk stgories always go is that the woman relents and then later regrets doing so, because the soldier never sticks around afterwards.

Steeleye Span on their second and third albums included Martin Carthy and Ashley Hutchings (who by the way founded Steeleye Span after leaving Fairport Convention, which he had also helped found. He later went on to found the New Albion Band, yet another very long-lived English folk/rock band). Anyway the nasally voice of Hutchings along with Maddy Prior's voice gives these early albums an austere sound that I quite like. These cds were before the band really began to "rock out" as it were, but the best tracks are quite haunting.

In recent years Steeleye Span has returned with most of their "classic" lineup in tact (generally their classic lineup is said to be the one used from their 4th album Below the Salt to their 9th cd Rocket Cottage, during which period they reached the height of their popularity). They recorded an album in 2002 with this lineup, They Call Her Babylon and an excellent live double-disc cd called Present which includes all-new versions of many of their favorites. In 2006 they released Bloody Men. I confess that I don't have this particular cd yet, but when I saw that it included a new version of Cold, Haily Windy Night I had to download that from iTunes.

The new version is played faster with a driving beat. It does not, of course, showcase Hutchings or Carthy as their original did, but Maddy's vocals are still there, as are many of the other band members that played the original. It's quite good.

There's no video of this song by Steeleye Span up, but surprisingly there's a live version by an English folk-rock band called Black Rat which is amazingly similar to the Steeleye Span version. They don't have Maddy Prior, of course....

Cold Haily Windy NIght by Black Rat

black rat @ myspace

Here's another cover of the song, which might give you a better idea of how the original Steeleye Span cover might sound (sorta). This is just some guy and his accoustic guitar but he does a very good job:

Cold Haily WIndy Night by Patrice Goyaud