Songfacts®:

• Irish singer Jackie Lee trained as a soprano for four years. She made her recording debut in 1955 before moving to London, where she became a member of The Raindrops. The vocal quartet made many appearances on British TV in the early 1960s and hosted their own BBC Radio show. The Raindrops also had in their ranks Vince Hill, whose 1967 recording of The Sound of Music's "Edelweiss" reached #2 on the UK singles chart.
  
  Lee left The Raindrops in 1965 to embark on a solo career. She had a UK Top 10 hit three years later with "White Horses," which she recorded under the name Jacky.
• Lee recorded "White Horses" for a children's TV show of the same name. A Yugoslav-German co-production shot in Slovenia in 1965, it follows the equine adventures of a teenage girl who leaves Belgrade to spend a holiday with her uncle on his stud farm. She spends the summer helping with her uncle's horses.
• The song came about when a dubbing company asked Michael Carr and Ben Nisbet to write a theme tune for the Eastern Europe drama White Horses. BBC One broadcast the dubbed version in 1968 and repeated it several times over the next decade.
  
  British popular music composer and lyricist Michael Carr also penned The Shadows' 1962 guitar instrumental "Kon-Tiki" and co-wrote "South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)" for the 1939 film of the same name.
• In 2003, the book The Penguin Television Companion listed "White Horses" as the best television theme in history.
• Lee also had a parallel career as a session singer. She sang backing vocals on "Green Green Grass Of Home" by Tom Jones, "Release Me (and Let Me Love Again)" by Engelbert Humperdinck, and "Hey Joe" by Jimi Hendrix.
• Jackie Lee had a second UK hit record based on a children's TV program. Her song "Rupert" was the theme tune for The Adventures of Rupert Bear, a live-action puppet television series based on the famous cartoon character, Rupert Bear. It reached #14 in the UK charts in 1971.