A comment or two lately mentioned the Moody Blues, and while I recently played their song, “Go Now“, I haven’t played this one for almost two years!
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.”
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 “Les 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.
“Les Jelly Roll” was a French band who did a cover version 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. As a joke, they put the now-famous sentence on the cover.
The poem at the end was recorded separately. It is called Late Lament and was written by their drummer, Graeme Edge. The poem was read by keyboard player Mike Pinder.
Nights in White Satin (The Night)
The Moody Blues
Nights in white satin
Never reaching the end
Letters I’ve written
Never meaning to send
Beauty I’d always missed
With these eyes before
Just what the truth is
I can’t say any more
‘Cause I love you
Yes I love you
Oh how I love you
Gazing at people, some hand in hand
Just what I’m going through they can’t understand
Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend
Just what you want to be, you will be in the end
And I love you
Yes I love you
Oh how I love you
Oh how I love you
Nights in white satin
Never reaching the end
Letters I’ve written
Never meaning to send
Beauty I’ve always missed
With these eyes before
Just what the truth is
I can’t say any more
‘Cause I love you
Yes I love you
Oh how I love you
Oh how I love you
‘Cause I love you
Yes I love you
Oh how I love you
Oh how I love you
Songwriters: Justin Hayward
Nights in White Satin (The Night) lyrics © T.R.O. Inc.
Tonight, I am … not sure what I am. I’m pleased that the majority of the people in this nation chose sanity over chaos, but disgusted and disappointed by the machinations of the losers. I’m like one of those happy/sad faces … I don’t know which to be. And so, a mellow song, a slow one that gives us a chance to feel the music without thinking. And thus it happens that I am reduxing one from about a year-and-a-half ago.
Filosofa's Word 