It lasts barely three minutes, it was never released as a single, and it never troubled any chart in the world. Yet “Soldier of Fortune”, the quiet ballad that closes Deep Purple’s 1974 album Stormbringer, has outlasted almost everything else the band recorded in that turbulent period. Written by Ritchie Blackmore and David Coverdale at the moment their partnership was breaking down, it is a song about a drifter who has spent his life on the road and grown old doing it — and over the decades it has been covered by Whitesnake, Opeth and Blackmore’s own folk project, sung in Finnish, Hungarian and Czech, and adopted by generations of listeners who discovered it at the end of an album many of them bought for something else.
Nine Months After Burn
Stormbringer was Deep Purple’s second album of 1974, and the speed of its making tells its own story. Burn, the debut of the Mk III line-up, had appeared in February and silenced the doubters, reaching the Top 10 in Britain and America. By August the band were back in the studio — Musicland in Munich, with mixing completed at the Record Plant in Los Angeles — cutting a follow-up that leaned hard into the soul and funk instincts of the two new men, Coverdale and bassist Glenn Hughes.
Even the album’s title carried a whiff of the guitarist’s private tastes: Stormbringer borrowed its name from the demonic sword in Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels, the kind of sword-and-sorcery literature Blackmore loved and the pop-funk mainstream had no use for.
Blackmore hated the direction the music was taking. He publicly dismissed the band’s new sound as “shoeshine music”, and during a break in the American tour dates that surrounded the sessions he began recording material of his own with singer Ronnie James Dio and members of Dio’s band, Elf — sessions that grew, within months, into the first Rainbow album, and the clearest possible signal that his mind was elsewhere. The album was bookended, pointedly, by the two songs he wrote with Coverdale: the thunderous title track at the front, and “Soldier of Fortune” at the back. Between them sat the funk he wanted no part of.
Released in November 1974, Stormbringer reached No. 6 in the UK and No. 20 on the US Billboard chart, and went gold in America, like its predecessor. Reviewing it retrospectively for AllMusic, Alex Henderson called “Soldier of Fortune” the album’s “melancholy ballad” and counted it among the record’s definite classics. Hughes, for his part, has always defended the sessions and their guitarist: “People who listen to Stormbringer, please listen… Ritchie Blackmore is damn funky, whether he likes it or not. He played wonderfully on the album.”
A Drifter’s Confession
“Soldier of Fortune” strips away everything the 1974 Deep Purple stood for. No Hammond organ assault, no funk strut, no duelling vocalists: unusually for the Mk III band, Coverdale sings alone, over Blackmore’s gentle, folk-inflected guitar figure, delivering a lyric of remarkable plainness. The soldier of the title is no warrior but a wanderer — a man who has travelled through life like a gypsy, told his tale many times, and arrived at the end of his strength still unable to settle, still hearing the call of the road. It is closer in spirit to a medieval ballad than to anything on the charts in 1974, and it pointed directly at the music Blackmore would make two decades later with Blackmore’s Night.
There is a quiet irony in who is singing it. Coverdale was twenty-two when the band recorded Burn and barely twenty-three when he cut “Soldier of Fortune”, a novice fronting the biggest hard rock band in the world, delivering a lyric about a lifetime’s weary wandering with the gravity of a man three times his age. “I have often told you stories about the way I lived the life of a drifter,” the song begins, and what sells the fiction is restraint: no screaming, no showing off, just a young singer trusting a simple melody to carry the weight of an old man’s story. It announced, more clearly than any of the album’s rockers, the kind of vocalist he would grow into.
In the context of the band’s collapse, the song reads almost as inadvertent autobiography. Within months of the album’s release, Blackmore had left Deep Purple for the first time, quitting in April 1975 to form Rainbow properly; the Mk III line-up dissolved entirely the following year. The drifter who could not stay had written his own farewell and placed it, whether he intended the symbolism or not, as the final word on the final album of his first tenure with the band.
Never a Single, Always a Standard
Deep Purple never released “Soldier of Fortune” as a single, and it never charted. Its career was built the slow way: as the closing track of an album that stayed in print, passed hand to hand, and turned its final three minutes into a word-of-mouth classic. It turned up on the live documents of the era, including Last Concert in Japan (1977) and This Time Around: Live in Tokyo, and anchored compilations such as The Platinum Collection and the 30th anniversary edition of Deepest Purple — the quiet song fans kept insisting belonged in the canon.
Its standing has only grown with the reissue era. When Stormbringer received its 35th Anniversary Edition in February 2009 — remastered at Abbey Road, with Glenn Hughes contributing remixes of album tracks — “Soldier of Fortune” was the song reviewers returned to, the still centre of an album whose funk experiments had divided opinion for three and a half decades. Anniversary pieces and retrospective reviews that are lukewarm about Stormbringer as a whole routinely make an exception for its final track, a pattern that has repeated so consistently that the ballad has effectively become the album’s ambassador to posterity.
The song even outlasted Blackmore inside Deep Purple itself. After his departure, the band recruited the young American guitarist Tommy Bolin and carried on as Mk IV — and “Soldier of Fortune” stayed in the set, sung by Coverdale over a departed founder’s guitar part. The Mk IV concerts in Tokyo in December 1975, documented on Last Concert in Japan and This Time Around: Live in Tokyo, preserve that strange afterlife: the drifter’s ballad, still being sung on the road by a band its writer had already left behind.
Coverdale never let it go. Whitesnake performed it acoustically on the 1997 live album Starkers in Tokyo, and in 2015 he recorded a full studio version for The Purple Album, Whitesnake’s record of his Deep Purple material — this time releasing the song as a single, forty-one years after he had first sung it. Blackmore, too, kept faith with it: Blackmore’s Night, the renaissance-folk project he formed with Candice Night, recorded it for the live album Past Times with Good Company in 2002, the song finally at home in the acoustic, old-world setting it had always seemed to be dreaming of.
The Covers Trail
The most telling evidence of the song’s reach is the company it keeps. In 2005, the Swedish progressive metal band Opeth recorded “Soldier of Fortune” as a bonus track for the special edition of Ghost Reveries, and released it as a single in March 2007. Mikael Åkerfeldt, a lifelong Deep Purple admirer, sang it with unexpected soulfulness, and Roadrunner Records singled the performance out in its list of the label’s wildest covers, praising it as a faithful reading — a death-metal frontman finding, in Coverdale’s restraint, something worth honouring exactly as written. The Opeth version did more than flatter the original: carried on a bestselling album by one of the biggest metal bands of the 2000s, and then issued as a single in its own right in 2007, it delivered “Soldier of Fortune” to a generation of listeners who had never owned a Deep Purple record, many of whom went looking for the 1974 original and found a three-minute ballad waiting patiently at the end of an album. Black Majesty covered it on Tomorrowland in 2007, and Bosquito in 2003.
Long before that, the song had begun a second life in the languages of Europe, the surest sign of folk-standard status. Jiří Schelinger recorded a Czech version, “Šípková Růženka” (“Sleeping Beauty”), as early as 1977; Gyula Vikidál sang it in Hungarian as “Szerencse katonája” in 1985; and Topi Sorsakoski made it Finnish in 2002 with “Luotu lähtemään” — “born to depart”, a title the song’s narrator would have recognised as his own biography.
There is a final symmetry in its survival. Stormbringer was the album that split Deep Purple: the record on which its founding guitarist decided, audibly, that he no longer belonged. The songs built to be singles have faded into the catalogue; the title track survives as a period piece of magnificent bombast. But the three-minute confession tucked away at the end — written by the two men whose clashing instincts were tearing the band apart, sung by one voice over one guitar — became the Mk III era’s most durable bequest. The soldier of fortune walked away from the band in 1975. The song never did.