TOP 100 SONGS OF 1967 ― NUMBER 27

50 years ago this year these songs were released. I took the top 100 from Rolling Stone for 1967 and put them in the order in which I think they should have listed, since this was the decade of the music I grew up on. Enough of the formalities, here we go. Enjoy.  

NIGHTS IN WHITE SATIN ― THE MOODY BLUES

Genre ―  Symphonic Rock



Video  

"Nights in White Satin" is a 1967 single by the Moody Blues, written and composed by Justin Hayward and first featured as the segment "The Night" on the album Days of Future Passed. When first released in 1967, the song reached number 19 on the UK Singles Chart and number 103 in the United States in 1967. It was the first significant chart entry by the team since "Go Now" and its recent lineup change, in which Denny Laine had resigned and both Hayward and John Lodge had joined.

Upon its 1972 reissue, the single hit number two – for two weeks – on the Billboard Hot 100 (behind "I Can See Clearly Now" by Johnny Nash) and hit number one on the Cash Box Top 100 in the United States. It earned a gold certification for sales of over a million U.S. copies. It also hit number one in Canada. In the wake of its American success, the song recharted in the U.K. in late 1972 and climbed to number nine. The song was released yet again in 1979, and charted for a third time in the U.K. – peaking at number 14.

Production ―
Band member Justin Hayward wrote and composed the song at age 19 in Swindon, and titled the song after a girlfriend gave him a gift of satin bedsheets. The song itself was a tale of a yearning love from afar, which leads many aficionados to term it as a tale of unrequited love endured by Hayward. Hayward said of the song, "It was just another song I was writing and I thought it was very powerful. It was a very personal song and every note, every word in it means something to me and I found that a lot of other people have felt that very same way about it."

The London Festival Orchestra provided the orchestral accompaniment for the introduction, the final rendition of the chorus, and the "final lament" section, all of which were in the original album version. The "orchestral" sounds in the main body of the song were actually produced by Mike Pinder's Mellotron keyboard device, which would come to define the "Moody Blues sound".

The song is written in the key of E minor and features the Neapolitan chord (F).

False claim of ownership ―

In the late 1990s, the UK magazine Record Collector printed a claim that "Nights in White Satin" had not been written by Justin Hayward at all, but that in fact the Moody Blues' management had simply bought the song outright in 1966 from an Italian group called the Jelly Roll and taken credit for it. This claim seems to have arisen from the discovery of a 7" single by the Jelly Roll which carries the words "This is the original version of Nights in White Satin" on the label.

Actually, "Les Jelly Roll" was a French band who did this cover of the Moody Blues song, and had the opportunity to release it in Italy, on Ricordi (an Italian record label), a few months before the original was released there. So as a joke (they appear not to have been a very serious band), they put the famous sentence on the cover.

Personnel ―

Justin Hayward – acoustic guitar, lead vocals

Ray Thomas – flute, backing vocals
Mike Pinder – Mellotron, backing vocals, narration (on "Late Lament"), gong
John Lodge – bass, backing vocals
Graeme Edge – drums, backing vocals, percussion

Additional personnel
Peter Knight and the London Festival Orchestra – orchestral arrangements

From Wikipedia and Google (image)