Jul 21
I saw an old interview with Ian Tyson recently where he said that the royalties from Neil Young's cover of "Four Strong Winds" paid for his ranch. It was the third song he ever wrote, and the first he ever published. In another interview, Neil said that Ian & Sylvia's original recording was on the jukebox of a bar he hung out in, and he played it over and over until he knew it by heart.
(It would have driven my old music theory instructor crazy, ending as it does on the dominant and never resolving back to the tonic. If he was ever late coming into the classroom, we always knew we could get him to hurry along by playing a chord progression on the piano and leaving it unresolved. He'd come running in to play the resolution.)
