Angel Of The Morning

Merrilee Rush and the Song That Refused to Stay Forgotten

The history of "Angel Of The Morning" is a story about songs finding their singers across time, about the way a piece of music can travel through multiple artists before arriving at the voice that will make it permanently famous. Chip Taylor, the songwriter who composed it, wrote the song in 1967 with an understanding of female romantic agency that was genuinely unconventional for its era: here was a woman making her own choices about physical intimacy and declaring that she would accept no shame for them afterward. Taylor, whose credits also include "Wild Thing" (recorded by the Troggs), had a gift for finding the emotional centers of situations that pop music typically handled with considerable euphemism.

Several artists recorded the song before it became a hit. Evie Sands cut a version in 1967 that failed to chart. Then Merrilee Rush, a Seattle-based singer working with her backing group the Turnabouts, recorded her version for Bell Records with producer Tommy Cogbill. That recording entered the Billboard Hot 100 on May 4, 1968, debuting at number ninety-seven. Its ascent was steady and ultimately remarkable: the single climbed through the spring and into the summer, reaching its peak of number seven on June 29, 1968, where it remained during a chart run of sixteen weeks.

Rush had built her career in the Pacific Northwest music scene, a region that had produced Jimi Hendrix and the Kingsmen and maintained a robust circuit of clubs, dances, and regional radio that could sustain a working musician's career independent of the major-label infrastructure concentrated on the coasts. She had recorded previously without achieving national visibility, and "Angel Of The Morning" represented a commercial breakthrough of a different order entirely: a top-ten hit on the national chart that transformed her from a regional performer into a recognized name in the broader American pop landscape.

The production of the recording was notably restrained given the era's tendency toward ornate pop arrangements. Tommy Cogbill, who was a session bassist at Muscle Shoals and Memphis and brought considerable feel for Southern pop and soul production to his work, understood that Rush's voice and Taylor's lyric required space rather than density. The arrangement supported without overwhelming, and the result was a record whose emotional directness felt genuinely fresh in the commercially polished environment of 1968 pop.

Bell Records, which released the single, was a mid-sized label with a pop-oriented roster and the commercial infrastructure to support a record showing strong chart momentum. The label's promotional efforts behind "Angel Of The Morning" contributed to the single's sustained chart presence through the summer of 1968, a period when competition from the British Invasion's second wave and the emerging psychedelic rock movement was fierce. The song's relatively traditional pop construction was, paradoxically, part of its appeal: it offered clarity and emotional accessibility in a moment when much of the commercial landscape was moving toward complexity and experimentation.

Rush received a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for her recording, recognition that confirmed the industry's sense of the record as a genuine artistic achievement rather than merely a commercial accident. The nomination placed her in the company of artists whose institutional standing was considerably more established than her own, testimony to the force of the performance itself.

The song's subsequent history is almost as interesting as Rush's original hit. Juice Newton recorded a version in 1981 that reached number four on the Hot 100, introducing the song to a new generation and confirming that Taylor's lyric possessed a durability that transcended its specific period of origin. That second wave of commercial success inevitably raised questions about the relative standing of the two versions, with Rush's original often acknowledged as the definitive reading even as Newton's version reached the wider audience. The 1968 recording had established all the interpretive terms that subsequent versions would work within or against.

Merrilee Rush did not achieve further major commercial success on the scale of "Angel Of The Morning," a fact that places her within the category of artists whose careers are defined by a single extraordinary moment of commercial breakthrough. But that moment was substantial: sixteen weeks on the Hot 100, a peak of number seven, a Grammy nomination, and the introduction of a song that would continue to live in American popular music for decades. That is a legacy of genuine significance, built on a recording that captured something true about how a specific kind of emotional courage sounds when given exactly the right voice.