Bonnie Dobson -- "Morning Dew" (1969)

You can't go walking in the morning dew today

You can't go walking in the morning dew today

In 1969, Bonnie Dobson re-recorded “Morning Dew” for an eponymous album that was released in the United States on RCA.  

The album was produced by Jack Richardson, a Canadian who is best-known as the Guess Who’s producer.  (Richardson also produced albums by Alice Cooper, Poco, Badfinger, and Bob Seger’s very successful Night Moves.)

Dobson’s previous album had what one reviewer termed a “sparse, chaste style” – most of the tracks featured only Dobson’s voice and an acoustic guitar.  (Think early Joan Baez.)  But her 1969 album represented a shift in style from traditional folk to middle-of-the-road pop – the arrangements incorporated a little percussion but a lot of strings.  (Think Bobbie Gentry without the Southern accent.)

I like this arrangement of “Morning Dew” a lot.  Dobson has a very pure soprano voice, and her vocal style is simple and straightforward.  There’s nothing groundbreaking about the arrangement or her performance, but there’s nothing objectionable either.   Primum non nocere – “first, do no harm” – applies to musical performance as much as it does to the practice of medicine.

The lyrics on Dobson's 1969 recording of "Morning Dew" are slightly different from the original lyrics.  This version has five verses, although the first and last verses are essentially identical.

Bonnie Dobson in 1969

Each verse consists of two pairs of repeated lines.  The second pair of lines seems to be spoken by a different person, and represent a negative response to the first pair of lines.

For example, here's the first (and last) verse:

Take me for a walk in the morning dew, my honey

Take me for a walk in the morning dew, my love  

You can't go walking in the morning dew today

You can't go walking in the morning dew today

The first speaker in the second verse says (twice) "I hear a man moaning, 'Lord.'"  The second speaker responds by saying (twice) "You didn't hear a man moan at all."

In the third verse, the first speaker says "I know I hear my baby crying, 'Mama!'" and then repeats herself.  But her companion answers in the negative: "You'll never hear your baby cry again" (and then repeats himself).

Finally, the first speaker in the fourth verse twice asks "Where have all the people gone?"  Mr. Answerman twice responds "Don't you worry about the people anymore."

So the whole song really has only eight lines.  It doesn't seem as if it would be that hard to come up with eight lines.  But I've never come up with eight lines that I've turned into a song.  (Have you?)  Bonnie Dobson has, which is why 2 or 3 lines is talking about her today.

Bonnie Dobson in 2009

By the way, Bonnie released yet another version of "Morning Dew" on her 2010 album, Looking Back.  I don't like that arrangement as much as the one on the 1969 recording, but I think her voice is just as pure and beautiful as it was 40 years ago.  (It's hard to believe she was almost 70 when Looking Back was recorded.)

Here’s Bonnie Dobson’s 1969 recording of “Morning Dew”:  

Click the link below to buy the 2010 version of "Morning Dew" from Amazon:

Tim Rose -- "Morning Dew" (1966)

Now there's no more morning dew

What they were sayin' all these years is so true

They have chased away all our morning dew

You regular readers of 2 or 3 lines may be surprised to see me posting on a Thursday.  

("Surprised?" I can hear you saying to yourselves.  "Thrilled is more like it!")

I usually post three times a week -- Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday.  (Except for February, when I post each and every day, and twice on SuperBowl Sunday.)  This week, you're getting a bonus fourth 2 or 3 lines at absolutely no extra charge -- you don't even have to pay additional shipping and handling!

Of course, the free bonus post is about a cover of the same song that was featured in the previous two posts.  Back in the day, I might have written one big-ass post featuring not only the original version of "Morning Dew" but also all the significant cover versions.

Now that I'm an experienced blogger, I've learned to break those long posts into four or five small ones . . . make it look like the reader is getting more product when he or she is really getting less.  (Hey, I'm a busy guy.  I still have a lot of Christmas shopping to do.)

Why am I giving you this peek behind the curtain of my wildly successful blog?  Because I'm honest with my readers -- I believe in full transparency.  Also because I've pumped this post full of enough hot air that I only have to do a cursory research job on Tim Rose to end up with enough material.

Tim Rose grew up in the Washington, DC, area in the fifties, and graduated from Gonzaga College Prep School, a noted Jesuit all-boys high school near the U.S. Capitol.  

After a brief stint with the Air Force, Rose joined forces with his boyhood friend, the late Scott McKenzie, who had a big hit in 1967 with "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)," and John Phillips (of Mamas & Papas fame) to form a group.  Later, Rose was in a folk trio called "The Big 3" with Cass Elliot before going solo.

In 1966, Rose's single of "Hey Joe" was getting a lot of airplay, especially in San Francisco.  The song had been copyrighted in 1962 by singer Billy Roberts, but Rose claimed he had heard the song sung when he was child and credited himself as the author of the song on his single.  Jimi Hendrix released his version of "Hey Joe" -- which was similar in style to Rose's -- later that year.

Rose's 1966 cover of "Morning Dew" was inspired by the Fred Neil-Vince Martin version.  Rose claimed a co-writing credit for the song, which outraged the song's creator Bonnie Dobson.

"If anyone is going to be credited as co-writer or co-lyricist, it should have been Fred Neil because all Tim Rose did was take Freddy Neil's changes," Dobson said in a 1993 interview.  "I've written songs with other people and never claimed them for my own.  I just think it was a dreadfully dishonest thing to do."

The lines quoted at the beginning of this post are from Rose's cover of the song -- the Bonnie Dobson and Fred Neil-Vince Martin versions did not include those words.  I thought that the "morning dew" referred to the radioactive fallout that was about to snuff out the lives of the people who had survived the fictional nuclear war in the movie On the Beach, which inspired Dobson to write this song.  In Rose's version, "morning dew" seems to refer to . . . morning dew.

Rose's take on "Morning Dew" is much more rock-and-roll than Bonnie Dobson's or Fred Neil's.  It influenced many of the bands who did subsequent covers of the song -- those covers use Rose's lyrics and feature a similar musical style.  

Tim Rose in 2002

Rose released six albums between 1967 and 1976, but then his career stalled.  He worked as a construction laborer, sang jingles and did voiceover work, graduated from Fordham University in 1984 (when he was 43), and worked for a time as a stockbroker.

With the help of Nick Cave, Rose moved to the UK and revived his career in the nineties.  He released his final album in 2002, and died of a heart attack later that year.

Here's Tim Rose's version of "Morning Dew":

Here's a link you can use to buy a CD of Rose's 1969 album, Through Rose Colored Glasses (which includes "Morning Dew"), from Amazon:

Bonnie Dobson -- "Morning Dew" (1962)

Take me for a walk in the morning dew, my honey

Take me for a walk in the morning sun, my love

Bonnie Dobson was a folk singer/songwriter who was born in Toronto in 1940.  In 1960, she left her university studies and came to the United States to perform at folk festivals and coffeehouses from California to New York.

Dobson was working in Los Angeles when she saw On the Beach, a post-apocalyptic movie starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Tony Perkins, that was set in Australia.  The movie, which is based on the 1957 novel of the same name by Nevil Shute, is about the aftermath of a nuclear war that has wiped out the entire population of the northern hemisphere.  As deadly radioactive fallout drifts inexorably towards Australia, most of the population opts to take suicide pills rather than waiting for the inevitable.

I remember On the Beach vividly -- especially the movie's score, which featured the traditional Australian song, "Waltzing Matilda."  The movie scared the hell out of me, and it had a similar effect on Bonnie Dobson:

[I]t made a tremendous impression on me, that film. Particularly at that time because everybody was very worried about the bomb and whether we were going to get through the next ten years. . . . I remember I was singing in Los Angeles . . . and suddenly I just started writing this song. . . . I'd never written songs and this song just came out and really it was a kind of re-enactment of that film in a way where at the end there is nobody left and it was a conversation between these two people trying to explain what's happening. It was really [about] apocalypse . . . .

Dobson later told an interviewer that she thought she first performed "Morning Dew" at the Ash Grove, a famous folk music club in Los Angeles.  (Doc Watson, Pete Seeger, Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, and many other greats played at the Ash Grove.)

But the song first came to the attention of a larger audience at the inaugural Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, Ontario, in 1961.  (That festival is still going strong after 50 years.)

This version of "Morning Dew" was recorded live at Gerdes Folk City, another legendary music venue in lower Manhattan, in 1962.  (Folk City was where Peter, Paul & Mary and Bob Dylan debuted, and where Dylan met Joan Baez.  Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds, Emmylou Harris, Phoebe Snow, Hüsker Dü, and Sonic Youth also performed at Folk City before it lost its lease and closed in 1987.)

Gerdes Folk City

A lot of people have covered "Morning Dew," and the next several 2 or 3 lines posts will feature the most significant of those cover versions.

Here's Bonnie Dobson's original recording of her song, "Morning Dew," which is sometimes called "(Walk Me Out in the) Morning Dew":

Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon: