Van Morrison has a very individual singing style. His voice is definitely not a classically trained singing voice, but it is by no means an untrained amateur voice either. Morrison stands in the tradition of the black blues singers. Important characteristics of blues singing, as of the blues in general, can be found in the following definition of the term blues feeling in the dictionary of popular music (Lexikon der populären Musik) by Wicke et al:

Blues feeling: Blues feeling: in the blues, the ability of musicians to to adequately express the emotional quality of their music by conveying a sense of inner involvment, which is often reflected in barely discernable nuances of intonation, phrasing, timbre and rhythm (Wicke et.al. (78)

Van Morrison's vocals in Ancient Highway feature all these characteristics: for instance the sliding intonation, often within one syllable as in case of cafe (l.1); the phrasing is often idiosyncratic: stressed syllables rarely fall onto the beat, and often, like in case of town (l.2) entire phrasis are sung on one vowel; the timbre of Van Morrison's voice is dark and slightly pressed and is reminiscent of that of John Lee Hooker. The following illustration shows a simplified transcription of the first two phrases of the melody of Ancient Highway:

The traditional Western musical notation is not particularly suitable for transcribing of improvised music⁽¹⁾. What this simplified transcription shows, and this is typical for Morrison's style, is that Morrison rarely places syllables exactly on the beat; most of the time, he is slightly ahead of the beat. It is also apparent that syllables, usually the final syllables of a word, are held for the duration of several notes, with the intonation being more gliding that is shown in the illustration. It is often difficult to distinguish between syllables and affect vocalizations in Scherer's sense.

This has certain implications for the lyrics and the way one examines them. If the lyrics of Ancient Highway are read without the music, there is no apparent meter or rhythm, and the lines are of very uneven lenght; the latter however should not be overemphasized as one cannot be sure who is responsible for the line division. The phrase divisions and pauses in the vocals do not always coincide with the line endings in the booklet. Singing with blues feeling, Morrison does not sing the lyrics exactly as printed either. The following simplified illustration shows the phrasing and affect vocalizations in the in the first stanza; deviations form the printed text are in bold letters, affect vocalization added in small letters:

Particularly interesting passages are mentioned in the detailed analysis; however, no transcription or verbal description can replace listening to the record, especially when certain emotional qualities are attributed to the certain acoustic qualities, which, in the end remains a subjective enterprise, no matter how refined the analytical tools may be.

Exactly how the "inner involvement" mentioned by Wicke et al manifests itself and how we perceive it often seems to defy exact analysis. Our perception seems to involve what Gundermann calls "kinaesthetic experience" (Gundermann 1994: 37), the experience that when we the hear sound of a human voice, we can immediately, physically, feel how the body and the voice of the person producing these sounds, feels. How the expression of inner involvement works in Van Morrisons case, is described very vividly by the rock critic Greil Marcus⁽³⁾:

"When I was very young," the late Ralph J. Gleason wrote in a review of Moondance, "I saw a film version of the life of John McCormack, the Irish tenor, playing himself. In it he explained to his accompanist that the element necessary to mark the important voice off from the other good ones was very specific. 'You have to have,' he said, 'the yarrrrragh in your voice.'"

Van Morrison has the yarrrrragh. His career, especially since 'Astral Weeks', can be seen as an attempt to deal with the yarrrrragh: to find music appropriate to it; to bury it; to dig it out; to draw from that sound, that aesthetic (for it is an aesthetic more than it is merely a sound), new tales to tell, or old tales to tell in new ways. The yarrrrragh is Van Morrison's version of Leadbelly, of jazz, of blues, of poetry. It is a mythic incantation, and he will get it, or get close to it, suggest it, with horns (no white man working in popular music can arrange horns with the precision and grace of Van Morrison), strings, in melody, in repetition (railing the same word, or syllable, 10, 20, 30 times until it has taken his song where he wants it to go). To Morrison the yarrrrragh is the gift of the muse and the muse itself. He has even written a song about it: "Listen to the Lion." Across 11 minutes, he sings, chants, moans, cries, pleads, shouts, hollers, whispers, until finally he breaks away from language and speaks in Irish tongues, breaking away from ordinary meaning until he has loosed the lion inside himself. He begins to roar: he has that sound, that yarrrrragh, as he has never had it before. He is not singing it, it is singing him. (Marcus)

How the "yarrrragh" manifests itself in the specific case of Ancient Highway, and how lyrics, music, and "yarrrragh" interact in the song will be the focus of the detailed analysis following now.

Part 3 to follow soon

Notes:

1.
Many nuances such as the often minute rhythmical or dynamic variations or the nuances in intonation which are outside the traditional Western diationic scale which became part of rock music because of the influence of the blues are almost imposible to represent within the Western notational system. Hartman therefore advises caution: "When the notational system is applied retrospectively to an existing performance, the exactitude is deceptive, because it is inaedequate" (Hartman 68). The above illustration intends to show approximate tendencies only.