Skip to main content

How Stevie Nicks Wrote “Rhiannon” & Embodied the Medieval Witch Character Onstage

It seems as inevitable as bell bottoms and shoulder-wide collars that Stevie Nicks would transform into the New Age priestess who greeted the 70s with a wave of a billowy, shawl-draped arm. “It makes sense,” Bill DeMain writes at Classic Rock, that her “signature song was inspired by a kind of ancient magic” of the kind that everybody was getting into. That song, “Rhiannon,” takes its name from “an old Welsh witch,” as Nicks would often announce onstage. During Fleetwood Mac's heyday onstage, Nicks embodied the character as though possessed, her performances of the song “like an exorcism,” Mick Fleetwood recalled.

The story of how “Rhiannon” came to be, however, is not as straightforward as Nicks’ reaching into the pages of the Mabinogion, the Welsh prose cycle in which Rhiannon first appears. The name came to her several steps removed from its mythical context, in a novel by Mary Leader called Triad.

“It was just a stupid little paperback that I found somewhere at somebody’s house,” she recalls of the uncanny 1974 composition. “And it was all about this girl who becomes possessed by a spirit named Rhiannon. I read the book, but I was so taken with that name that I thought: ‘I’ve got to write something about this.’ So I sat down at the piano and started this song about a woman that was all involved with these birds and magic.”

“I come to find out,” she says, “after I’ve written the song, that in fact Rhiannon was the goddess of steeds, maker of birds.” The perfect anthem for a singer on the threshold of turning the already famous Fleetwood Mac into one of the biggest rock bands in the world. They were in a kind of wilderness period, having fired longtime guitarist and musical linchpin Danny Kirwan and lost guitarist Bob Welch. When Lindsay Buckingham, his replacement, insisted that Nicks join with him. She brought the song “about an old Welsh witch" along with the pair's shawls, capes, and kimonos.

You can learn more about the myths of the Mabinogion, the oldest known prose stories in Britain, in the Polyphonic video above. The collection inspired the epic fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, and by proxy the epic fantasies of Led Zeppelin and every heavy metal band thereafter. It also features in Lloyd Alexander’s 1960's fantasy series Chronicles of Prydain (later poorly adapted in Disney’s The Black Cauldron). The pop culture of the 70s had been infused with ancient Welsh before Rhiannon came along, but the goddess herself seemed to belong exclusively to Stevie Nicks, who intuited a deep magic in the music of her ancient name.

Related Content:

How Fleetwood Mac Makes A Song: A Video Essay Exploring the “Sonic Paintings” on the Classic Album, Rumours

Stevie Nicks “Shows Us How to Kick Ass in High-Heeled Boots” in a 1983 Women’s Self Defense Manual

When Lucy Lawless Impersonated Stevie Nicks & Imagined Her as the Owner of a Bad Tex-Mex Restaurant: A Cult Classic SNL Skit

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

How Stevie Nicks Wrote “Rhiannon” & Embodied the Medieval Witch Character Onstage is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3htwO0Q
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more