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Lisnaholic · 06-14-2011, 08:54 PM

My choice may not be the purest blues, but according to this review (of the exquisite studio version) of Cypress Avenue, it`s still blues :

Quote:

Like the other songs on Astral Weeks, it has an unusual musical arrangement. Built out of a basic blues structure, it features Morrison on acoustic guitar, Richard Davis on acoustic bass, a flute, a harpsichord, and strings. Davis improvises like the jazz musician he is, and the ... result is a chamber-music hybrid of folk-blues and jazz, and over it Morrison sings a meditative memory lyric about his adolescence in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Cyprus Avenue is a residential street in that city, not far geographically, but a considerable distance economically, from the working-class Hyndford Street where Morrison grew up. The narrator of the song is a youth who goes up to Cyprus Avenue, where he observes its houses and people, and is overcome with emotion. In its simplest form, "Cyprus Avenue" is part of a genre of songs about teens from the wrong side of the tracks and their aspirations, a genre that includes everything from Hank Williams' 1948 song "A Mansion on the Hill" (a title that Morrison borrows in his lyric) to the Four Seasons' "Dawn (Go Away)" of 1964 and Billy Joe Royal's "Down in the Boondocks" (1965). But Morrison's narrator only implies the rich-poor dichotomy of such songs; he is more concerned with an overwrought psychological response that he can barely articulate, finally falling back on a near-quote from "All Shook Up," the 1957 Elvis Presley hit written by Otis Blackwell -- "My tongue gets tied every time I try to speak/And my insides shake just like a leaf on a tree." He decides to go walking by the railroad and drink some wine, but before he can leave, he spots a girl, presumably the rich girl he had come looking for to begin with, which brings him back to his sense of being "caught one more time," but he resolves that no one will stop him from loving her.