Wrapping up a recent Christmas party at which we had a houseful of friends and neighbors (including our buddy Jim Rumbaugh sitting in as a guest artist), The Flood unwrapped its new anthem to winter.
It is this mashup of “Moscow Nights” and “Greensleeves.” Today we make this performance our gift to you. Merry Christmas from the Floodisphere!
The Songs
Let’s talk about the bits and pieces that make up this jolly seasonal offering.
“Moscow Nights”
As reported earlier, “Moscow Nights” was composed in 1955 by Russian musician Vasily Solovyov-Sedoy. It was originally entitled “Leningrad Nights,” but, it being the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Ministry of Culture directed it be renamed to celebrate Moscow and directed corresponding changes to poet Mikhail Matusovsky’s lyrics.
For the first half dozen years of its life, the song was known primarily in the Soviet Union, The melody didn’t hit the big time in the U.S. until November 1961 when trumpeter Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen recorded it under the title "Midnight in Moscow.”
For the recording, Ball was inspired by an arrangement he heard by a Dutch jazz group called “The New Orleans Syncopators” who recorded the melody earlier that year.
But there is a lot more to this story. Like when The Chad Mitchell Trio’s controversially battled with the U.S. State Department over performing the song in foreign lands.
And like the time that Flood manager Pamela Bowen got kudos for performing the song in its original Russian during her folksinging days as a student at Marshall University.
Click here to read these and other “Moscow Night” yarns.
“Greensleeves”
The song’s musical team mate in this track — “Greensleeves” — probably is the oldest melody we know. It has been associated with Christmas ever since a century and half ago when the tune was set to the verse “What Child Is This?”
But the song originally wasn’t religious in nature at all. On the contrary, as reported here, its earlier lyrics told the story of a painful romantic conundrum (with some, uh, subtly salacious references).
Popular legend even has sometimes attributed the song’s composition to England’s King Henry VIII, who was said to have written it for the ill-fated Anne Boleyn. That association, though, is wrong, says author Lisa Colton in her book Angel Song: Medieval English Music in History.
Colton finds “Greensleeves” originated a generation later, during the reign of Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I. First published in 1580, the tune was used for a wide variety of 16th and 17th century broadside ballads.
And there’s much more to this back story as well. Click here to read it.
Reviewing 2025
This is our last podcast of the year. We look forward to roaring into 2026 with you all. Meanwhile, if you’d like to get a jump on your auld-lang-syning, you can tune into a randomized playlist of this year’s 52 podcasts via the band’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
