Morning Is Definitely Broken

Living in New Paltz puts me in a different mindset for sure. In New York City, I drive like an Israeli cabbie (and if you haven't been to Israel, I can only tell you that a cab ride there is more likely to put the fear of god into you than any visit to the Wailing Wall). In New Paltz, however, I'm a pussycat. I frequently have to check my rear view mirror to ensure that I'm not holding up a line of cars.

This relaxed mentality also shows up in my song choices. In Manhattan, I want to listen to hard-rocking The The or something noisy and boppy by Outkast. In New Paltz on the other hand, I'm all about James Taylor and Cat Stevens. In listening to one of my favorite songs, however, I came up against a problem that took me out of New Paltz and put me thru a weird ride on Web.

"Morning Has Broken" is a religious tune that sounds like a hymn with a catchy jingle, so it comes as little surprise that this is what it is. The song was written not by Mr. Stevens himself but rather by a well-known children's author of the early 20th century who was commissioned to write a few hymns. Cat rightly omitted the other three (clunkier) stanzas and repeated the first one, creating a folk hit, but what exactly was he singing?

Typing "morning has broken" and any other line of the song into a Google search brought up between up to 15,000 'hits.' I noticed, however, that some of the webpages had conflicting lyrics. Further investigation turned up several errors. Since most websites borrow (steal?) from each other, the errors showed up with varying frequency.

Here are the 'correct' lyrics, penned in 1931 and recorded by Cat Stevens several decades later:

Morning has broken, like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.

Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlit from heaven,
Like the first dew fall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass.

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning,
Born of the one light Eden saw play.
Praise with elation, praise every morning,
God's re-creation of the new day."

In errant version #1, the last two lines of the first verse are:

Praise for the springing
Fresh from the world.

This makes no sense; after all, what is a springing? But since Stevens didn't publish the lyrics in liner notes, people made guesses, and some of those folks had bad wiring in their accoustic (or neurological) equipment.

There are actually two subvariants here. Some webpages have "the springing fresh from the word," while other have "them springing fresh from the world."

Variant #2 is a substitution of "dew fall" with either "dewfall" or "dew-fall." Both of these show up in dictionaries, but neither is as the author wrote it. Oddly, of the nearly 1,000 hits examined more closely, 772 have "dewfall" as one word while fewer than 200 have it as two words.

The funniest error, variation #3, is the substitution seen in the line:

Born of the one light Eden saw play.

In 44 webpages (many of them connected to some singer named Nona) the line reads incorrectly (and quite bizarrely) as:

Born of the one light Eden so play.

Interestingly, in singing the song, Stevens made an error of his own. The lines are:

God's re-creation
Of that first day.

Stevens sings it not as "re-creation" but instead as if god is entertaining himself. Recreation is akin to hangin' out and havin' fun. Re-creation is a different matter entirely.

Here is a bad idea: Why not borrow the tune (which Stevens borrowed from a Gaelic song) and then write your own words celebrating, say, marriage? Click here to check out some really awful lyrics.

That linked page (above) also highlights a rare variation (#4), substituting "God's feet" for "his feet." This change went against the wishes of the hymn's author, who envisioned the blackbird as the garden walker (as opposed to God); that's why she didn't capitalize 'his' to "His." If you think about it, there is no biblical mention of God walking in the Garden of Eden, so the very idea of it is laughable at best and sacrilege at worst. This variation only appears 40 times, however, so not a whole lot to get worked up about.

For more information, check out this link to the Unitarian Universalist Association forum for a really interesting discussion about the origins of the lyrics and music of this song.