“Moonlight In Vermont”

On his musical journey around the United States for his 1960 LP The Genius Hits The Road, Ray Charles stops off to rhapsodize about the “Moonlight In Vermont”, adding a slightly jazz element to an otherwise pop standard with his unconventional piano.

“Moonlight In Vermont” is well-known in that state, and although it is not in fact the state song it often assumes that role in various ceremonies. Its words and music were written in 1944 by, respectively, John Blackburn and Karl Suessdorf (neither of whom was actually from Vermont).

By the time Ray got around to adding it to his first ABC Records LP, “Moonlight In Vermont” had been covered by a wide range of artists including Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Betty Carter, with whom Ray would soon make a duets album.

The version that Ray recorded is sweet and wistful, plodding along among pillows of lush strings and an angelic choir. His warm tenor oozes the song’s impressionistic lyrics like maple syrup, as the orchestra glows incandescent around him.

Those lyrics set “Moonlight In Vermont” apart from other soft, contemplative music of the era. Each verse is a haiku, with a 5/7/5-syllable structure, and it doesn’t even rhyme. The effect echoes, indeed, moonlight twinkling through the branches of sycamore trees or glinting off the snow in winter: a mysterious and mercurial sense of blurry beauty.

(Actually, Ray Charles winkingly disrupts the strictness of haiku on the very first line, turning the five-syllable “Pennies in a stream” into the six-syllable “Pennies in a stream-ah”. Rules always seemed to stir his inner defensiveness.)

His delicate, deliberate piano solo is where the song’s jazz side emerges: the strings disappear almost entirely for the duration, and what remains is his prominent keys over a low drums and bass background. The idiosyncratic structure of this solo finds Ray’s dexterous fingers wandering busily over unexpected notes, using the technique he’d explored on his jazz LPs for Atlantic to further recall a night of shifting patterns of light and shade on a chilly night in Vermont.

“Moonlight In Vermont” and other songs

“Moonlight In Vermont” is one of two songs on The Genius Hits The Road to mention Earth’s satellite in its title, along with “Moon Over Miami”. More interestingly, the melody of each verse’s third line (“moonlight in Vermont” or “snowlight in Vermont”) is the exact same as the line “moonlight through the pines” from “Georgia On My Mind”, arguably Ray’s most famous song. Anyone familiar with that song will prick up their ears during those familiar-sounding lines of “Moonlight In Vermont”.

Listen to “Moonlight In Vermont”

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