Bonnie Dobson

Bonnie Dobson remains identified above all as the creator of “Morning Dew,” the moving ballad that warns of nuclear devastation, even though she occupied only a marginal place in the 1960s folk revival. The song first appeared under the alternate title “Take Me for a Walk” on a previously unreleased 1962 recording included in the 2000 box set The Best of Broadside 1962-1988; its inspiration came from the film On the Beach, which depicts the aftermath of nuclear conflict. Versions followed from Tim Rose, the Grateful Dead, Lulu, the Jeff Beck Group, Episode Six (whose membership later fed Deep Purple), Clannad, Dave Edmunds, Nazareth, the Allman Brothers, and numerous others. Few listeners realize that Dobson herself issued several albums of acoustic folk material on Prestige during the first half of the 1960s before shifting, on her two RCA LPs of 1969 and 1970, toward singer/songwriter pop-folk-rock supported by full-band arrangements. No subsequent composition matched the resonance of “Morning Dew,” and the electric records suffered from both forgettable songs and overly commercial production.

Dobson wrote “Morning Dew” first among all her compositions. Fred Neil, performing as half of a duo with Vince Martin, delivered the earliest cover on a mid-1960s Elektra album and altered portions of the lyric. Uncertainty over authorship persisted because of those alterations and because Tim Rose, who recorded the piece for his 1967 debut album, is listed as co-writer on certain releases. Speaking with Randy Jackson in a 1993 interview, Dobson stated, “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 Freddie Neil’s changes.” She never exploited the song’s rising profile with an authoritative electric reading of her own, and the rendition placed on her self-titled 1969 RCA album fell short of its possibilities.

Her light, high soprano and discerning choice of outside material—songs by the little-known Jackson Frank and the then-obscure Ralph McTell among them—were evident strengths, yet neither her voice nor her writing carried sufficient individuality to lift her beyond the status of a capable but secondary figure in the 1960s folk world. When RCA steered her toward countrified MOR pop on the 1970 album Good Morning Rain, the results approached anonymity, softening her artistic identity without yielding any commercial return. Dobson relocated to England in 1969; during the following decade she essentially withdrew from music and eventually served as head administrator for the Philosophy Department at the Berwick College of the University of London.