Maiden's Prayer

For the gin-based cocktail, see Maiden's Prayer at Wikibooks.

"A Maiden's Prayer"
Music by	Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska
Lyrics by	Bob Wills
Language	English
Form	Piano / Western swing
Recorded by	many other artists

"A Maiden's Prayer" (original Polish title: Modlitwa dziewicy Op. 4, French: La prière d'une vierge) is a composition of Polish composer Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska (born 1834 in Warsaw, died September 29, 1861 in Warsaw), which was published in 1856 in Warsaw, and then as a supplement to the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris in 1859. The piece is a medium difficulty short piano piece for intermediate pianists. Some have liked it for its charming and romantic melody: others have described it as "sentimental salon tosh." The pianist and academic Arthur Loesser described it as "this dowdy product of ineptitude."

The English language lyrics were written by John Stowell Adams.^{[citation needed]} The American musician Bob Wills arranged the piece in the Western swing style and wrote lyrics for it. He published it first in 1935 as "Maiden's Prayer"; later, it became a standard, recorded by many artists. The song is now a standard in the repertoire of western swing bands. Bob Wills wrote words to a fiddle tune he learned while he was a barber in Roy, New Mexico.^[1] His lyrics reflect the title, and the song, as written by Wills, opens with:

Twilight falls, evening shadows find,

There 'neath the stars, a maiden so fair divine.

The moon on high seemed to see her there.

In her eyes is a light, shining ever so bright,

She whispered a silent prayer.

Wills first recorded the song in 1935 (Vocalion 03924) and it quickly became one of his signature songs. He recorded it again in 1941 (OKeh 06205) and on the 1963 Liberty Records album Bob Wills Sings and Plays. It has been recorded by many artists. Among them Buck Owens on the 1965 Capitol album I've Got a Tiger By The Tail.

When Wills was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, "Maiden's Prayer" was one of the works cited.

In popular media

Probably the most memorable use of "Maiden's Prayer" is in the 1930 opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. The song appears midway through act I; it is played on an out-of-tune piano at a honky-tonk frequented by prostitutes and their clients. Jakob Schmidt, one of the denizens of Mahagonny, refers to the song as "ewige Kunst" ("eternal art").

"Maiden's Prayer" appears as an insert piano song in the anime series Strawberry Panic.

"Maiden's Prayer" is also played by garbage trucks in Taiwan. As residents have to take out their own trash, the garbage truck signals everyone with the melody of this piece (or Beethoven's Fur Elise).^[2][3]

References

1. ^ McWhorter, Cowboy Fiddler, pp. 59–60: "Bob said, 'He played "The Spanish Two-Step" and I locked the door where he couldn't get out and nobody else could get in, and I made him stay there until he taught me that and "Maiden's Prayer." Finally he nodded. I didn't know whether he needed to go to the bathroom or if I was doing it right, bit I let him out.' That Mexican taught him those two tunes."
2. ^ "'A Maiden's Prayer': A call to dump all our garbage" by Leo Maliksi (7 October 2008)
3. ^ "From Consensus to Shifting Coalition: Tri-partite Politics in the Taipei City Council", p. 21, by Jaushieh Joseph Wu, National Chengchi University, in Working Papers in Taiwan Studies No. 8 (where the piece is mistakenly attributed to Beethoven)

Bibliography

• McWhorter, Frankie. Cowboy Fiddler in Bob Wills' Band. University of North Texas Press, 1997. ISBN 1-57441-025-3
• Mishler, Craig. The Crooked Stovepipe: Athapaskan Fiddle Music and Square Dancing in Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada. University of Illinois Press, 1993. ISBN 0-252-01996-2