My paternal grandmother was born on February 13, 1879. I always remembered her birthday as the day between Lincoln’s birthday and Valentine’s Day. She shared many wonderful books with me as I was growing up. This song reflects some images from one of them.
This is a song I wrote back in the 1960s. It incorporates a lot of story motifs that I recalled from my favorite fairytale collection, East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon. George Webbe Dasent’s 1859 English translation of this Norwegian collection is most famous, but my childhood favorite was one my grandmother had on her bookshelf. The images here are from that book, accompanied by the song, “Man of No Dreams.”