Morning Dew

Dobson says she wrote it in Los Angeles in 1961, aged 20, after a night of talk with friends and inspired by the film On the Beach: I had never written anything in my life, she told an interviewer in 1993. She called it really apocalypse; it is a dialogue between the last two people alive after nuclear catastrophe. She first performed it at the inaugural Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, Ontario in August 1961, where the Globe and Mail called it a mournful dirge, and it was printed in Broadside. Her recording is on Bonnie Dobson at Folk City. Fred Neil changed the opening line, and that wording became standard in later covers.

Covers include the Briarwood Singers (January 1964), Fred Neil and Vince Martin (1964), the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Tim Rose, the Pozo-Seco Singers and Episode Six (all 1967), the Grateful Dead on their debut album (March 1967; played 274 times, the last on June 21, 1995), Lulu (a single in 1968, number 55 on the Canadian chart), the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart on Truth (1968), Nazareth (1971), Duane and Gregg Allman, Clannad, Long John Baldry, Einstürzende Neubauten (1987), Devo (1990), Robert Plant on Dreamland (2002) and the National (2016). Wikipedia cites more than 70 covers via SecondHandSongs, and her site hosts a playlist of 84. Plant joined her to sing it at the Royal Festival Hall in December 2013, saying Bonnie, you've got your song back.

Setlist.fm logs it twice for her, on June 23, 2007 and August 12, 2026 at the Betsey Trotwood in London. Which version our upload is has not been verified. No chart for her own version was found.