So who is Van’s Brown Eyed girl?
QUESTION Who was the Brown Eyed Girl Van Morrison sang of in his most famous song? THE identity of the Brown Eyed Girl in Van Morrison’s most famous song has never been revealed and Van Morrison himself has been typically enigmatic over who she was.
Van Morrison, brought up in the terraced streets of the Bloomfield area of east Belfast, had had a few brief moments of chart fame by the time he was 21, in 1966. Songs such as Gloria, Here Comes The Night and Baby Please Don’t Go that he had performed with the Belfast rhythm and blues band, Them, had charted.
After that success, the singer was back living with his parents in Belfast and further success seemed elusive. But American record producer Bert Berns believed in his talent and in a two- day recording session at the A&R studios in New York in late March, 1967, Brown Eyed Girl was recorded. Morrison was just 22.
Berns had a very commercial approach to shaping Morrison’s material which was very personal and very introspective.
He knew immediately once the track for Brown Eyed Girl had been laid down, that it was a hit in the making, so much so that he had its release rush-released.
One of the most frequently pedalled myths about the song is that it is in fact all about heroin and the effects of taking drugs on the body.
But Morrison himself has often said that this is totally untrue, that the song is about an inter-racial relationship. His original title for the song was ‘Brown Skinned Girl’ , but he changed it to Brown Eyed Girl, to give it a better chance of airtime on radio stations.
He said that the song had begun life as a calypso, vaguely inspired by Lewis Carroll’s novel, Sylvie And Bruno. Van Morrison’ s first love in terms of his musical tastes was black American music.
Some of the original lyrics in the song were also changed, because they were considered too racey. One reference to ‘making love in the green grass’ was changed to the innocuous ‘laughin’ and a-running, hey hey.’
The identity of the Brown Eyed girl has never been revealed and no-one is quite sure whether Morrison is referring to an unknown woman he had had a relationship with during his teenage years in Belfast, or whether the song is merely the creation of his very fertile imagination.
This was Morrison’s first solo single, unusually upbeat and catchy for the singer, and it soon took off in the US. After its release as a 7in. vinyl single, in June, 1967, it soared to Number 10 in the Billboard Hot 100 listings in the US.
In the decades since, it has come to be regarded as Morrison’s signature tune, has stayed a staple disc on classic rock radio around the world, and has been covered by hundreds of other bands.
It has been listed in numerous musical listings of famous songs, i ncluding i nclusion i n the 2007 Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2004, it had been listed at Number 109 in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.
Brown Eyed Girl remains, to this day, the most downloaded and most played song from the 1960s, despite Van Morrison’ s misgivings over it.
He says that the song is not among his favourites, adding that he has about 300 other songs that he thinks are better. Worse still, he has never made any money from either writing or performing the song.
He had signed a contract with Bang Records, owned by Berns, that included this song, but before he signed the contract, he hadn’t bothered to get any legal advice.
To add insult to injury, in September 1967 Berns issued an album called Blowin’ Your Mind, which had the songs recorded by Van Morrison in March that year.
The album also had Brown Eyed Girl as i ts l ead- off track. But Morrison had no input into the creation of this album and didn’t in fact know in advance that it was being released.
Morrison, of course, has gone on to have a stellar career, recently picking up a knighthood in the process. But even today, no- one is any the wiser as to who the Brown Eyed Girl in his first big hit was or whether she was more than a mythical creation of the singer.
Tommy Devlin, Cork.
QUESTION Why are rewards given because of your job called ‘perks’? THE word perk is an Anglicisation of the word perquisite, which sounds French but owes its origin to the medieval Latin perquisitum (from the Latin perquirere), which means ‘to search diligently for’.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines perquisite as ‘an extra profit or allowance additional to a main income’ or ‘a customary extra right or privilege – an incidental benefit attached to employment’.
It is not, of course, to be conf used with prerequisite, which means a thing required as a precondition.
Richard M. Billinge, York. QUESTION Is the exhumation of saints for veneration (as with that of Padre Pio), standard practice in the Roman Catholic Church? THE official process for declaring a saint, called canonisation, is preceded by beatification, the recognition accorded by the Roman Catholic Church of a dead person’s entrance into Heaven and ability to perform miracles.
In 1234, Pope Gregory IX established formal procedures to investigate the life of a candidate for sainthood and any attributed miracles.
Beginning with Urban VIII in 1634, various popes have revised and improved the norms and procedures for canonisation.
Pope John Paul II greatly relaxed the system and beatified more people than all his predecessors combined, and was himself beatified six years after his death.
The process of beatification begins with a series of inquiries to confirm via witnesses the veracity of a martyr’s veneration and miracles.
Urban VIII introduced refinements aimed at proving to Catholic authorities that the tomb had not been tampered with in any way, suggesting some connection with a cult.
It was usually conducted by the bishop of the place where the martyr was interred and required exhumation of the body and relics.
Sometimes the remains are remarkably intact and the Church vi ews t hese bodies as being incorrupt, that is to say their bodies have not decomposed.
There are more than 250 incorrupt Catholic saints and many of these are on display for veneration in chapels around the world. Padre Pio, whose real name was Francesco Forgione, was born in 1887 and died in 1968.
He is reputed to have had stigmata, the wounds of Christ’s Crucifixion.
He was credited with more than a thousand miraculous cures and built up a huge following.
He was also said to have given off the scent of flowers and to have had the ability to bilocate – to be in two places at once.
Padre Pio was originally shunned by Church authorities and accused of self-mutilating with carbolic acid to create the stigmata, but he was finally recognised due to the popular devotion.
He was beatified in 1999 and canonised in 2002.
His cult became so popular he was exhumed for a second time and put on display in a crystal coffin in 2008.
In 2010, the body was transferred to the new San Pio church, next to San Giovanni Rotondo in Rome.
Capitilising on his ever-growing popularity, t he r emains were brought to the Vatican for veneration last year.
This happened as part of an Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy to inspire people to become reconciled to the Church and to God by the confession of their sins.
Annette Groves, by email.