‘Four Strong Winds’: understanding one of Neil Young’s favourite songs of all time
Canada boasts an impressive roll-call of poets and songsmiths, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and the majority of The Band all hailing from North America’s ‘Maple Country’. Yet in 2005, it was folk duo Ian & Sylvia’s ‘Four Strong Winds’ that was voted the greatest Canadian song on CBC Radio One’s 50 Tracks: The Canadian Version. Looming large in the national songbook, their 1963 folk piece for many Canadians exists as an unofficial anthem, the lyrical references to the country’s Alberta province a source of cultural pride.
Finding fortune in the urban bohemia of New York’s Greenwich Village at the beginning of the decade, couple Ian and Sylvia Tyson rubbed shoulders with fellow folk vagabonds Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, securing a contract with Vanguard Records via Peter, Paul and Mary manager Albert Grossman.
Inspired by Dylan’s emerging confidence in penning original works among his traditional folk excavations, Ian reportedly wrote ‘Four Strong Winds’ in 20 minutes, his first-ever songwriting attempt. Exploring the pensive heartache of a failed romance, a familiar sting is felt with its reach for a possible reunion, a futile hope obscuring the reality that the relationship is well and truly over.
The simple but stirring examination of love’s departure struck a chord with a young Neil Young from Winnipeg. One of the country’s biggest musical exports, Young played a central role in the 1960s’ West Coast counterculture with Buffalo Springfield and his joining Crosby, Stills & Nash. Possessed with a fierce creative intuition, Young’s nearly 60-year output has been defined by a vitality unmatched by his peers, finding authentic affinity with everything from punk and synthpop, and even venerated as the ‘Godfather of grunge’ during Seattle’s alternative explosion in the early ’90s.
Young never entirely eschewed nostalgia, though. A striving for the ‘real’, while manifesting as discarding the old order and embracing new musical trends he did with aplomb, it could be argued that fundamentally, Young has spent his career searching to satisfy a yearning to return to some space where creativity flourished unbridled.
It’s a theory posited by Conan O’Brien on Team Coco, Young not protesting the analysis put to him, and when asked to select the special songs from his youth, Ian & Sylvia’s folk classic is discussed with evident affection.
“I loved it so much that I put nickels and dimes in the jukebox to play it over and over and over again until I didn’t have any change,” Young reminisced. “It’s a beautiful song. For some reason, it really, really got to me, and I could feel the magic of the music.”
It’s a song that’s stayed with him, memorably including a cover as the finale to his country-tinged Comes a Time in ’78 and performed at many of his Farm Aid benefit concerts. It’s also taken on a ritualistic dimension, played every night on the last day of Canada’s Edmonton Folk Music Festival. For such a simple and pure piece, Ian & Sylvia’s folk number looks set to endure for many a year yet.
