Cover Story: 1917 by David Olney or Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt
July 19, 2024
We all face death, sooner or later, writes Colin Randall.
It’s nevertheless heartbreaking to think of all the wasted lives taken early on battlefields, in violent society or through accidents and illness.
When I listen to 1917, David Olney’s gripping song about a WWI soldier seeking comfort in the arms of a Parisian prostitute before returning to the trenches and probable death, I am moved almost to tears.
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It is equally distressing to know that the composer of this wonderful song, with it’s sensitive and supremely poignant lyrics, is also no longer with us. As I noted in a Cover Story item about his Jerusalem Tomorrow, also a great song, he stopped midway through a song in 2020, apologised to the audience and breathed his last. Just 71, he deserved to live a lot longer.
1917 is up there with Eric Bogle’s magnificent No Man’s Land as one of the finest songs (how did songs become swings when this was first published ?) to be written about aspects of that war to end war
Since this is an edition of our Cover Story series, I should say it has been covered by Emmylou Harris as was Jerusalem Tomorrow. I felt she did that song tremendous justice and enjoy it pretty much as I enjoy’s Olney’s treatment of his own song.
But with the song of the Parisian fille de joie, though tart with a heart might be more apt, and her fleeting encounter with a man more or less certain ly about to die in combat, there is no contest. Olney’s sympathetic narrative is head and shoulders higher in quality. In duet with Linda Ronstadt, Harris fails to engage the heart in quite the same way.
He speaks to me in schoolboy French
Of a soldier's life inside a trench
Of the look of death and the ghastly stench
I do my best to please him
And this is how Olney sang this powerful song, I am grateful to my exiled-in-Spain pal John Clark for drawing my attention to it.
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