Morning Has Broken

🎵 Sing along with the full lyrics at LyricFind

Morning Has Broken
Words by Eleanor Farjeon, 1931; music traditional Scottish Gaelic melody

Long before it was a pop hit, “Morning Has Broken” was a simple hymn of thanks for each new day. It started with a request. In the early 1930s, Percy Dearmer was preparing an enlarged edition of the English hymnbook Songs of Praise. He had a lovely old Gaelic tune he wanted to use, but no words that fit its unusual lilting rhythm. He also felt the book needed a song of gratitude for the gift of an ordinary morning. So he turned to Eleanor Farjeon.

Farjeon was born in London in 1881 and was one of England’s best-loved children’s writers, with stories, plays, and poems to her name. She later won the Carnegie Medal and the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Her verses were inspired by the village of Alfriston in East Sussex, and they captured the freshness of dawn: birdsong, new rain, and sunlight on a wet garden. The hymn first appeared in Songs of Praise in 1931.

The tune is called “Bunessan,” after a small village on the Isle of Mull in Scotland. It had been sung in the Highlands long before anyone wrote it down. Before Farjeon’s words came along, the melody carried a Gaelic Christmas carol by Mary MacDonald, known in English as “Child in the Manger.” For years, Scottish children sang it at Christmas, while English schoolchildren sang Farjeon’s morning song to the very same notes.

For four decades it lived quietly in hymnbooks. Then, in 1971, a young singer-songwriter named Cat Stevens hit a dry spell while working on his album Teaser and the Firecat. Browsing for ideas, he came across a hymnbook, found this song, and thought it was good. He added his own guitar chords. There was one problem: sung straight through, the hymn lasted less than a minute.

The answer came from a young session pianist named Rick Wakeman, who would soon join the rock band Yes. Wakeman wrote and played the piano introduction and interludes that stretch the song out and give it its sparkle. Many listeners would say that piano is half the magic of the record. Wakeman wasn’t credited on the album, though, and for years he told audiences, with a comedian’s timing, that he was never paid for the session either. When Stevens later tried to settle the debt, Wakeman reportedly turned him down. He joked that he’d made far more money telling the story on stage than the fee would ever have been.

Released as a single in 1972, “Morning Has Broken” reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 9 in Britain. Teaser and the Firecat climbed to No. 2 on the American album chart. Thanks to that recording, a hymn that few Americans knew found its way into most hymnals printed since. Today it is sung at weddings, at memorial services, and around campfires, and many people think of it as a Cat Stevens song. Stevens himself later took the name Yusuf Islam, and he still performs it.