Van Morrison

Irish rock singer and songwriter

• Born: August 31, 1945
• Place of Birth: Belfast, Northern Ireland

Characterized as a White soul singer, Morrison extended himself musically and lyrically in a number of disparate genres, including garage-band rock, blues, rhythm and blues, folk, jazz, and country.

MEMBER OF Them

The Life

George Ivan Morrison was born on August 31, 1945, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to George and Violet Stitt Morrison. His interest in American music, particularly blues and rhythm and blues, was fueled by his father’s extraordinary record collection. Almost from infancy, Morrison listened to blues from Muddy Waters, jazz from Charlie Parker, folk from Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter), and country music from Hank Williams. He had his first spiritual vision at the age of three while listening to gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Later, the memory of that intense emotional experience gave him the desire to recreate that experience for his listeners.

Morrison began by playing guitar, but when the skiffle (folk music with a jazz and blues influence) craze produced a surplus of guitar players, he learned to play saxophone and soon found work with several dance bands. At the age of sixteen, Morrison became a professional musician, and he spent a grueling musical apprenticeship in clubs in Germany, playing seven sets a night, seven days a week with a band called the Monarchs. In 1964 he formed the rock band Them, and Morrison proved to be an electrifying performer and talented songwriter, producing the classic “Gloria.” In 1966, after numerous personnel changes, the band dissolved.

Morrison moved to the United States to record as a solo artist, and he had an immediate Top 10 hit with the single “Brown Eyed Girl.” In 1968 he married Janet (Planet) Rigsbee, and his next several albums centered on the themes of conjugal love and domestic harmony. They had a daughter, Shana, but by 1973 they divorced. After that, Morrison went nearly three years without releasing an album or touring. He returned to the stage at The Band’s Last Waltz concert in 1976, and by 1978 he was firmly back on top with Wavelength. The 1980s saw Morrison delving into spirituality and mysticism and furthering the limits of his experimentation. In the 1990s and the 2000s, he continued to ignore genre boundaries, and his numerous projects included albums devoted to traditional Celtic music, skiffle music, country, and his trademark blend of soul, jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues.

Morrison won Grammy Awards in 1996 for his work with traditional Irish musicians the Chieftains and in 1998 for his work with John Lee Hooker. What’s Wrong with This Picture? was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 by Robbie Robertson of The Band (characteristically, Morrison was the first member not to attend his own ceremony), and he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003 by Ray Charles. He also has several records that have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in February 2016. Morrison also has two children with his second wife, Michelle Rocca (Miss Ireland of 1980). The couple, who met in 1992, separated in 2013.

The Music

Morrison frustrated record labels with his disinterest in trying to write hit singles and becoming a rock star. Pursuing his personal artistic vision was always more important than selling records. As it happened, his decision to produce high-quality albums of lasting beauty rather than give in to the pressure to write hits coincided with the rise of album-oriented rock (AOR) radio stations, and the steady sales of his albums over his long career transformed his purely artistic convictions into prescient commercial wisdom.

Astral Weeks (1968). By 1968, Morrison was regarded as a rising pop star, but he showed little interest in devoting himself to churning out hits. Nothing in his previous work could have prepared audiences for Astral Weeks, the first record over which he had complete artistic control. He abandoned the frenetic rhythm-and-blues style he had perfected with Them and worked with a small group of veteran jazz musicians. Morrison showed them the basic structure of the songs on his acoustic guitar, and then he let the recording tape roll, improvising impressionistic stream-of-consciousness lyrics as the other artists improvised the music, forging a unique hybrid of jazz, folk, blues, and rock. While “Brown Eyed Girl” was the result of a tightly produced session demanding twenty-two takes, there were no rehearsals for Astral Weeks, and many of the songs on the album are first takes, edited down from long jam sessions, with strings and harpsichord overdubbed later.

Moondance (1970). Morrison followed the artistic triumph (but commercial failure) of Astral Weeks with another completely different album, determined not to repeat himself or grow complacent as an artist. Moondance was a radio-friendly set of ten short, meticulously crafted songs, most with conventional verse and chorus structures. Working with a new band that featured a horn section and keyboards, Morrison added elements of Stax Records-style soul music to the raw blues sound of Them and the jazz of Astral Weeks, a blend that Morrison dubbed Caledonia soul music. This Top 40 album produced a Top 40 single, “Come Running,” and his next two albums, His Band and the Street Choir and Tupelo Honey, continued in this accessible vein, producing three successful singles each.

Saint Dominic’s Preview (1972). Despite the commercial success of his previous albums, in 1972 Morrison broke away from their formula and released the meditative Saint Dominic’s Preview. This album juxtaposed compact and tuneful rock-and-rhythm-and-blues-styled songs with ten- and eleven-minute improvised meditations that recalled the free-form lyricism of Astral Weeks. This hybrid, with a mixture of shorter and longer songs, allowed Morrison to range freely as a writer and was adopted for many of his future albums.

Veedon Fleece (1974). An introspective song cycle with affinities to Astral Weeks, Veedon Fleece created little stir, because of market factors as well as critical myopia. It was released in the shadow of a superb double live album, It’s Too Late to Stop Now, that functioned as both a greatest-hits collection and an introduction to the excitement of Morrison’s legendary live performances. The quiet and contemplative Veedon Fleece may also have suffered from the tendency of critics to use Bob Dylan’s songwriting, with its unpredictable rhymes and ingenious wordplay, as the touchstone for evaluating lyrics, which trounced Morrison’s plainer style. Critics eventually realized that Morrison was using his voice as a musical instrument rather than a means for reciting verses to a repetitive strummed background. In Veedon Fleece he breaks down his lyrics into fragments over the course of a song, repeating and varying them, improvising with syllables much as a saxophone player does with musical notes. Morrison was an accomplished musician well before he began singing, and he often pointed to his saxophone playing as his model for vocal phrasing.

Into the Music (1979). While Morrison always emphasized the spirituality and healing powers of music, not all critics were pleased by the overtly religious themes and more polished production values that characterized his albums of the 1980s, roughly from Into the Music to Hymns to the Silence. Morrison strongly denied that he was a disciple of any organized religion or thought system, as exemplified by the title of his 1986 release No Guru, No Method, No Teacher. Rather, he drew from many philosophies, as he often had from literature, to produce meditative states in his listeners, the goal of many of his albums since Astral Weeks and one of his measures of success for his live performances. He increasingly turned from saxophone, guitar, and harmonica to piano as his primary instrument, creating a more ethereal sound, and included instrumentals on several albums.

Magic Time (2005). Morrison’s albums continued to earn critical praise, and Magic Time followed the model of much of his mature work, at least since Too Long in Exile, with a mixture of soul, jazz, and blues originals, from fast shuffles to slow ballads, accompanied by a few cover versions of standards. The follow-up to Magic Time, Pay the Devil, showed Morrison in an experimental mood, with a collection of a few originals mixed with straightforward country-western songs.

Moving on Skiffle (2023). In March of 2023, Morrison released his forty-fourth studio album, Moving on Skiffle, a follow-up to his 2000 The Skiffle Sessions – Live in Belfast 1998 album. The track Freight Train, written by Elizabeth Cotton, is the track's highlight song. The album received relatively positive reviews.

Later in 2023, Morrison released another album, this one a double album of classic rock and roll songs, Accentuate the Positive. A year later he released a compilation of previously unreleased material with a focus on big band sounds, New Arrangements and Duets.

Musical Legacy

In 1995 Morrison began publishing under his own Exile Productions, which resolved his antipathy toward the music business and recording contracts by doing without them. He had complete control over all aspects of production, using record companies only to distribute finished albums. His large body of recorded work was unmatched in terms of quantity, consistent quality, and breadth of musical range by any other rock musician. His expressive vocal style and synthesis of musical genres directly influenced generations of musicians. His commitment to artistic integrity above commercial success helped lead the way for many serious rock musicians to produce well-crafted albums, rather than hit singles, as the basic units of musical expression.

Van Morrison is not only one of the most influential musicians of the last fifty years, he is also an anomaly for the longevity of his career and the prolific consistency of his creative output. In 2003, thirty-five years after its release, Astral Weeks ranked number nineteen on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list, a testimony to the timeless qualities of Morrison’s best work. He continued to produce new albums at a prolific pace into the twenty-first century, including The Prophet Speaks (2018) and Latest Record Project, Vol. 1 (2021), though he encountered controversy when critics called out some of his later work as anti-Semitic and adhering to conspiracy theories that spread false information.

Principal Recordings

ALBUMS (solo): Blowin’ Your Mind!, 1967; Astral Weeks, 1968; His Band and the Street Choir, 1970; Moondance, 1970; Tupelo Honey, 1971; Saint Dominic’s Preview, 1972; Hard Nose the Highway, 1973; Veedon Fleece, 1974; A Period of Transition, 1977; Wavelength, 1978; Into the Music, 1979; Common One, 1980; Beautiful Vision, 1982; Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, 1983; A Sense of Wonder, 1985; No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, 1986; Poetic Champions Compose, 1987; Irish Heartbeat, 1988 (with the Chieftans); Avalon Sunset, 1989; Enlightenment, 1990; Hymns to the Silence, 1991; Too Long in Exile, 1993; Days Like This, 1995; How Long Has This Been Going On, 1996 (with Georgie Fame); Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison, 1996; The Healing Game, 1997; Back to the Top, 1999; You Win Again, 2000 (with Linda Gail Lewis); Down the Road, 2002; What’s Wrong with This Picture?, 2003; Madame George, 2004; Magic Time, 2005; Pay the Devil, 2006; Keep It Simple, 2008; The Prophet Speaks, 2018; Latest Record Project, Vol. 1, 2021; Moving On Skiffle, 2023; Accentuate the Positive, 2023; New Arrangements and Duets, 2024.

ALBUMS (with Them): Here Comes the Night, 1965; Them, 1965; Them First, 1965; Them Again, 1966; Now and Them, 1967; Them Belfast Gypsies, 1967; Time Out! Time in for Them, 1968; Them in Reality, 1971.

Bibliography

Ankeny, Jason. "Van Morrison." All Music, 2024, www.allmusic.com/artist/van-morrison-mn0000307461. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Collis, John. Van Morrison: Inarticulate Speech of the Heart. Da Capo Press, 1996.

Friskics-Warren, Bill. I’ll Take You There: Pop Music and the Urge for Transcendence. Continuum, 2005.

Heylin, Clinton. Can You Feel the Silence? Van Morrison: A New Biography. Chicago Review Press, 2003.

Hinton, Brian. Celtic Crossroads: The Art of Van Morrison. 2d ed. Sanctuary, 2000.

Macnie, Jim. "Van Morrison." Rolling Stone, 2016.

"Moving on Skiffle." Van Morrison, March 2023 www.vanmorrison.com/music/moving-on-skiffle. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Turner, Steve. Van Morrison: Too Late to Stop Now. Bloomsbury, 1993.

Walsh, Ryan H. "What Happened to Van Morrison? The Fall from Eccentric Genius to Conspiracy Theorist." Los Angeles Times, 10 May 2021, www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-05-10/van-morrison-latest-record-project-antisemitism-coronavirus. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.