In December 2013, Robert Plant stood before a sold-out Royal Festival Hall and told the audience about the day a woman knocked on his door and told him he was singing her song. He had been performing ‘Morning Dew’ since before Led Zeppelin, and had for decades assumed the song was Tim Rose’s. Ladies and gentlemen, Plant said, please welcome Bonnie Dobson. The Guardian’s Robin Denselow called what followed one of the most triumphant comebacks he had ever witnessed on a British stage.
Bonnie Dobson wrote ‘Morning Dew’ in 1961 in Los Angeles, twenty years old, staying up late with friends arguing about the bomb and the Berlin Wall. She went back to where she was staying and the song came out. It has since been covered nearly ninety times, by the Grateful Dead, Tim Rose, Nazareth, Robert Plant and Lulu, among others, most of them following a line change introduced by Fred Neil that took the song further from Bonnie’s original with each subsequent version. Tim Rose put his name on the publishing credit. It took Bonnie decades to reclaim sole authorship, with Rose’s estate still receiving twenty-five percent of royalties.
Canadian music historian John Einarson, whose previous books have covered Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, has now written Bonnie’s life with her. Take Me For A Walk In The Morning Dew is the story of a career that until recently not fully received its due. John speaks to Jason Barnard about Bonnie’s music.
You quote Kevin Courrier who said that Bonnie “should be remembered as one of the first female Canadian singer/songwriters” and that before Joni Mitchell and others, there was Bonnie Dobson. Given that framing has never quite taken hold, what did researching the book reveal to you about why that happened?
Joni Mitchell was writing her own distinctively unique songs almost from the get-go of her career. While she did perform some traditional folk songs, she was writing far earlier than Bonnie Dobson. Bonnie became a superb songwriter later in her career. She came to folk music via the more common route in the latter 1950s of researching and “discovering” traditional folk songs and interpreting them. Also, Joni ultimately moved to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles at the right time when the singer/songwriter era was beginning to blossom and quickly associated herself with many of the leaders of that movement such as David Crosby who was a huge boost to her early career. Joni was ambitious, Bonnie wasn’t ambitiously motivated or as aggressive about her career than Joni or Bonnie’s contemporaries such as Joan Baez and Judy Collins.
You write that journalists had repeatedly and wrongly placed Bonnie in the Yorkville coffeehouse scene in the mid-60s when she was actually flying in from gigs across the continent. Where does that persistent misreading come from?
There is often a misconception that the Yorkville folk to folk-rock music scene was the be-all and end-all of Toronto and therefore Canadian music. So, placing Toronto-born folksinger Bonnie Dobson within that milieu was simply assumed. Just journalists or writers not doing their homework. Bonnie was already a folk music star in the United States when those in Yorkville could only dream of such success. She was ahead of Yorkville folkies like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Bruce Cockburn et al. But it just seemed too easy to lump her into that group because of the Toronto connection and folk music path. Bonnie’s career predates all of them.
Bonnie describes writing ‘Morning Dew’ after a late night conversation. Was there any documentation of that night beyond her own recollection?
The story as it is known and included in the book is as Bonnie tells it. She offers more detail than previous accounts of the origins of the song in our book. A lot of the people who were present at that late-night conversation that in part inspired her writing the song are long lost or deceased. Besides, Bonnie went back to where she was staying and composed the song on her own. But seeing the feature movie On The Beach earlier in her life left a strong impression on her, enough to use it’s theme as the basis for “Morning Dew”.
Fred Neil changed the opening line from ‘Take me for a walk’ to ‘Walk me out’, and that became the template for every subsequent version. You make the point that this is almost certainly why very few of the eighty-plus cover artists ever heard Bonnie’s original. Was there anything about that substitution that surprised you in your research?
I was not aware of just how much the change in the opening line had carried through the history of the song. It’s pretty much ubiquitous. I think Serena Ryder’s cover of the song is one of the few, if any others, that went back to Bonnie’s original opening line. Besides, after Tim Rose employed the Fred Neil lyric change, far more people heard his version than Bonnie’s original and likely assumed his was the correct or at least definitive version.
Take Me For A Walk In The Morning Dew traces ‘Morning Dew’ from acoustic folk to rock via Tim Rose, the Grateful Dead and Robert Plant. Were there cover versions that surprised you?
In the book, I draw attention to a number of cover versions of the song, but not every single one. There are bad versions such as Devo’s rendition of the song and a heavy metal version from Spanish group La Muerte and some quite imaginative arrangements that are enjoyable such as Episode Six and Nazareth who even recorded a German-language version. Lulu’s version is kind of bizarre with horns and a marimba in the arrangement. The Bethlehem Exit turn the song into a jingle-jangle Byrds-like tune.I like Serena Ryder’s kind of eerie, haunting rendition. What makes all the covers of the song, close to 90 of them, apply their own arrangements to the song. The song lends itself to a multitude of styles. Some work, some don’t. I first heard “Morning Dew” on The Grateful Dead’s debut album in 1967 but it was the driving version by The Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart’s rendition on their 1968 Truth album that really grabbed me. I recall playing that version in a local band, me on wah-wah pedal lead guitar. It always went over well live.
You note that Tim Rose claimed in an interview that he thought ‘Morning Dew’ was a traditional song, but that he took his opening riff from Fred Neil’s version, and Fred had credited Bonnie alone. Was Rose ever confronted with that contradiction publicly, and did you find any evidence he was aware of it?
There can be no doubting that Rose was aware that the song was Bonnie’s. I explain how that came about in the book. If, as he says, he learned the song form Fred Neil’s version, did he not notice that the sole writing credit was Bonnie Dobson? Bonnie admits in the book that her mistake was to publish the words and music to the song in the folk newspaper Broadside before every publishing it with a music publisher. That left the song open for others to stick their name on it and get a music publisher to copyright it. Once Rose did that it “became” his song. Bonnie had to fight to get her name back in the credit but then had to surrender 50% of the songwriting royalties to Rose for several decades. Tim Rose knew exactly what he was doing and pulled the same shenanigans with “Hey Joe”. But he got caught on that one early on.
The book gives Tim Rose’s estate twenty-five percent of the royalties as the current settlement. How much of that story were you able to reconstruct, and how much remains unresolved?
When I interviewed Bonnie’s copyrights lawyer, Tony Morris, he indicated that there was so much baggage surrounding that song over many decades that to go back and fight for Bonnie’s 100% would be both difficult and costly. Rose was dead. His heirs continue to collect his reduced portion (25%). Bonnie has made peace with the fact that the song is now regarded legally as her song alone. She’s fine with that. It haunted her for years but she’s in a good place with the situation as it exists now.
Bonnie’s autobiography in song is one of the most striking things about the book. ‘Winter’s Going’, ‘Good Morning Rain’, ‘Rainy Windows’, ‘Don’t Look Down’, ‘JB’s Song’. She says all her songs come from her own experience. In working through her albums with her, were there songs where she was reluctant to explain what was behind them?
She was very open to discussing and explaining the inspiration to all of her songs however two were very close to the bone for her and it took a bit of nudging on my part to get her to provide some background and explanation: “JB’s Song” and “Don’t Look Down”. Both are about her son’s suicide, and that remains tender for her. She will never perform “JB’s Song” live because it is too painful and I don’t know if she’s performed “Don’t Look Down” live or not. I kind of doubt it. The thing about Bonnie’s songwriting is that it is all motivated or inspired by personal experience. She is not the kind of songwriter who sits down and creates a song about anything. It has to come from personal experience and insight. What is fascinating is the evolution of her songwriting over her career. She became a very talented songwriter.
Richard Olson says The Hanging Stars didn’t go in with a view to making an album, just to get Bonnie’s new songs laid down. At what point in that process did Dreams become a realistic prospect, and what changed?
As they were working through arrangements and laying down songs, it hit both Bonnie and the members of The Hanging Stars that this might, in fact, become a decent album. But it never started out that way. Bonnie had some songs she had written and wanted to get them recorded for herself to have. What evolved quite naturally was an album. The chemistry between Bonnie and the band was too good to merely record and shelve the tracks for posterity. I’m of the opinion, and reviews of Dreams bear this out, is that these five young men were a perfect fit for Bonnie’s songs. The results are quite marvelous.
The book covers an eight-decade life with multiple marriages, the death of a child, tours with the British Armed Forces, a stolen song credit, a return to academia, and a comeback in her eighties. What was the hardest thing to leave out?
Actually, nothing was left out. I went into this project believing that her life was as important to her story as her career. She was very open during our interviews to anything and everything I asked of her. There are many things in the book she has never divulged before, even to her own children and other family members. But she never balked at addressing them. She trusted me to tell the story, warts and all and I think we did that. Bonnie has lived an extraordinary life and I am honoured to have been the one she allowed to tell it. Who could ever have predicted her musical comeback in her 80s? That’s rare but down to the person she is and the lessons she has learned in those 80+ years.
Further information
Take Me For A Walk In The Morning Dew: The Life And Times Of Bonnie Dobson And the Story Of Her Iconic Song by John Einarson with Bonnie Dobson is released on 10 September 2026 by Jawbone Press
