Cinnamon Girl
by Neil Young
- 104
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 64
- Danceability
- 3
- Acousticness
Neil Young wrote "Cinnamon Girl" at his home in Topanga, California, while he had the flu and a high fever. He wrote two other songs from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Down by the River", in the same state. The album was his first with Crazy Horse. He played the song on a newly acquired Gibson Les Paul called Old Black, in double drop D tuning, and the guitar solo uses largely a single repeated note. Young said that to him each of those notes is different.
Danny Whitten sang the high harmony against Young's low one. Young said he wrote it for a city girl on peeling pavement, coming at him through Phil Ochs' eyes and playing finger cymbals, That was hard to explain to his wife. The finger cymbals are a reference to the folk singer Jean Ray. Fans guessed it was about Pamela Courson, the common-law wife of Jim Morrison, but Young denied it.
The single came out in 1970 and reached number 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 34 in Australia. It was the first record the British DJ "Whispering Bob" Harris played on his BBC Radio 1 debut in August 1970.
Cinnamon Girl runs at 104 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.31 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 577 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.