"Chestnut Mare" is a song by the American rock band the Byrds, written by Roger McGuinn and Jacques Levy during 1969 for a planned country rock musical named Gene Tryp. The musical was never staged and the song was instead released in September 1970 as part of the Byrds' (Untitled) album. It was later issued as a single, peaking at number 121 on the Billboard singles chart and number 19 on the UK Singles Chart.
Composition
Throughout most of 1969, the Byrds' leader and guitarist, Roger McGuinn, had been writing songs with psychologist and Broadway impresario Jacques Levy for a country rock stage production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt that the pair were developing. The intended title for the musical was Gene Tryp, an anagram of the title of Ibsen's play.
McGuinn and Levy's production was to loosely follow the storyline of Peer Gynt, albeit with some modifications to transpose the story from Norway to south-west America during the mid-19th century.
"Chestnut Mare" was intended to be used during a scene in which the play's eponymous hero attempts to catch and tame a wild horse, a scene that had featured a deer in Ibsen's original. Lyrically, the song's spoken verses recount the story of one man's quest to tame a wild horse, and, as such, it echoes the familiar Byrds' themes of nature and freedom. "Chestnut Mare" was the first UK Top 20 hit that the Byrds had achieved since their cover of Bob Dylan's "All I Really Want to Do" had peaked at number 4 in September 1965. The band also performed the song in 1971 and 1972 on the German music television program, Beat-Club.
In addition to its appearance on the (Untitled) album, "Chestnut Mare" appears on several Byrds' compilations, including The Best of The Byrds: Greatest Hits, Volume II, History of The Byrds, The Byrds, The Very Best of The Byrds, The Essential Byrds, and There Is a Season.