Soul · R&B · Singer-Songwriter
From Belfast’s Them to Astral Weeks to Moondance — the singer who fused soul, jazz and Celtic mysticism into something entirely his own.
George Ivan Morrison was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on August 31, 1945, into a working-class family where his father’s record collection — jazz, blues, country and skiffle — became his first education. By his teens he was playing saxophone, harmonica and guitar in local showbands, and in 1964 he joined Them as singer and harmonica player. The band’s “Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night” were raw, snarling rhythm and blues, and “Gloria” became a transatlantic hit covered by everyone from the Doors to Patti Smith.
Morrison went solo in 1967 with “Brown Eyed Girl,” a bright pop-soul single that reached the American Top 10, but the record-business machinery around it left him wary for life. His answer was Astral Weeks (1968), recorded in New York in the fall of 1968 with jazz musicians — including bassist Richard Davis and drummer Connie Kay — at Century Sound Studios. It sold little at first and is now routinely named among the greatest albums ever made: eight songs of stream-of-consciousness poetry about Belfast, love and spiritual longing, sung in a voice that seems to come from somewhere older than pop music.
Moondance (1970) was the commercial breakthrough its predecessor was not. Recorded at A&R Studios in New York, it wrapped Morrison’s mysticism in warm, swinging arrangements — jazz, soul and folk in perfect balance — and gave him signature songs in the title track, “Into the Mystic,” “Caravan” and “Crazy Love.” That November he released His Band and the Street Choir, whose single “Domino” reached No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100, his biggest American hit.
The seventies kept him prolific: Tupelo Honey (1971) with “Wild Night,” Saint Dominic’s Preview (1972), and the magnificent live double album It’s Too Late to Stop Now (1974), recorded on tour with his Caledonia Soul Orchestra. After a fallow mid-decade, Into the Music (1979) — home of “Bright Side of the Road” — announced a full return to form, joyful and spiritually recharged.
Why Van Morrison matters
Morrison invented a genre and then spent decades refusing to repeat it. “Celtic soul” — his fusion of American R&B and jazz with the folk memory of Ireland — runs through the seventies and eighties like a private religion, from the moonlit swing of Moondance to the radiant optimism of Into the Music. He remains one of rock’s most uncompromising figures: famously prickly with the industry, utterly devoted to the music, and still chasing the same transcendence he first reached for on Astral Weeks.