Bonnie Dobson

A minor performer of the 1960s folk revival, Bonnie Dobson will be forever known (if she's even known at all) as the author of "Morning Dew," a moving ballad about the threat of nuclear devastation. Also titled as "Take Me for a Walk" -- that is how it's titled on the previously unreleased 1962 recording that came out on the 2000 The Best of Broadside 1962-1988 box set, anyway -- it was inspired by On the Beach, the film about the aftermath of nuclear war. It was covered about as often as any folk-rock standard that never became a hit, with versions released by Tim Rose, the Grateful Dead, Lulu, the Jeff Beck Group, Episode Six (with future members of Deep Purple), Clannad, Dave Edmunds, Nazareth, the Allman Brothers, and others. It is not well known that Dobson recorded a few albums of acoustic folk music herself for Prestige in the first half of the 1960s and also moved into singer/songwriter pop-folk-rock with full band arrangements on albums for RCA in 1969 and 1970. She never came up with another song as memorable as "Morning Dew," though, and her electric albums were disappointing, both for the unmemorable material and unsuitably mainstream arrangements. "Morning Dew" was actually the first song Dobson wrote. The first person to cover it was Fred Neil, who put it on an Elektra album he did in the mid-'60s as part of a duo with Vince Martin and made some changes to the lyrics. There has been some confusion about the songwriting credit, not only because Neil changed some words, but also because Tim Rose (who recorded it on his 1967 debut album) appears as the co-writer in some credits. In a 1993 interview with Randy Jackson, Dobson said, "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...