Tag: 1960s

#video Morning Dew – Bonnie Dobson with Robert Plant #MusicMonday

Cold Cream 'n' Roses

Morning Dew is one of the most iconic songs of 1960s folk and protest music. Canadian folk singer Bonnie Dobson wrote Morning Dew: amazingly, it was the first song she ever wrote.

“…I saw a film called On the Beach, and it made a tremendous impression on me,” she said. “[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 the apocalypse, that was what it was about.”

Fred Neil rearranged “Morning Dew” for his 1964 Elektra album Tear Down the Walls. Two years later, Tim Rose recorded the song for his debut album based on Neil’s arrangement. Rose took advantage of a loophole in US copyright law and tricked Bonnie Dobson out of full credits and some publishing royalties to her song (he did the same sh** with Hey Joe, which both Jimi Hendrix and The Byrds covered).

Tim Rose

In 1998, Bonnie Dobson heckled Tim Rose as he performed at London’s Half Moon music venue about stealing her song. She took legal action against Rose and was at last credited as the sole author of “Morning Dew”.

Bonnie Dobson felt that she reclaimed her song when Robert Plant invited her to sing it at his concert. She said that “[Robert] gave me back my song that night.”

In 2018, Morning Dew was inducted as a song into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Frame.

References

Bell, M. (2014). The Story Behind The Songs: Bonnie Dobson – Morning Dew. loudersound. Retrieved 12 September 2021, from https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-stories-behind-the-songs-bonnie-dobson-morning-dew.

Morning Dew | Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. (2018). Retrieved 25 October 2021, from https://cshf.ca/song/morning-dew/.

Morris, C. (2021). Morning Dew — how Bonnie Dobson reclaimed her anti-war song. Ig.ft.com. Retrieved 12 September 2021, from https://ig.ft.com/life-of-a-song/morning-dew.html.

Schneider, J. (2018). Bonnie Dobson finally gets her due for “Morning Dew” | Roots Music Canada. Roots Music Canada | Listening to Canadian roots music and loving it. Retrieved 12 September 2021, from https://www.rootsmusic.ca/2018/06/28/bonnie-dobson-finally-gets-her-due-for-morning-dew/.

White Heat: Britain in the 1960s

Cold Cream 'n' Roses

White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging SixtiesWhite Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties by Dominic Sandbrook

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I was a kid, really a kid, in the 1960s, I was fascinated by British fashion (notably Mary Quant and the mini-skirt) and the British music invasion. That’s why I wanted to read White Heat.

But White Heat is so much more than the swinging sixties. It covers political history throughout the Wilson years, in-fighting among those in Wilson’s cabinet, and economic crises, including devaluation of the pound and deflation. It relates the beginning of Protestant-Catholic conflict in Northern Ireland. It covers other social upheaval, such as corralling people into tower blocks.

While White Heat covers the swinging sixties in detail, it notes that the swinging sixties influenced few people and puts it into the larger context of life in the UK. Would you believe that the soundtrack for The Sound of Music outsold The Beatles’ albums? British society and tastes still remained fairly conservative by the end of the sixties.

Dominick Sandbrook also wrote Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, about the preceding years of recent British history. He has also written books about the UK in the seventies: I look forward to additional coverage of The Troubles. All are books that I plan to read.

If you would like to focus on the swinging sixties, then I recommend Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London by Shawn Levy.