A Spirit Rising With the Sun

Song 429: The week the playlist comes around to Angel of the Morning by Merrilee Rush & The Turnabouts, written by Chip Taylor, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. This 45 topped my own personal chart not long after it appeared in the summer between my HS junior and senior years, and at some point during that season my best friend and I had a conversation that referenced the tune. Two years earlier, I had given up resisting my obsession with the Devil's music, and this particular discussion circled around the idea that we didn't let our religious morality interfere with our listening pleasure. My friend mentioned that the couple in this saga are obviously not married, and after spending a romantic night together, are apparently about to split up, which ran counter to our foundational ethics, but that never moved us to turn down the dial when the radio played the single. A few years later, during the spring of my sophomore year at NU, I had an intense but short-lived romance with a young woman who I had met in a religious context, and had come to know mainly through letters we exchanged over a couple of years. We were just friends until we were suddenly more than that, and just as suddenly we were just friends again. After the romance ended, we still kept in touch by mail for another couple of years, and at some point, I wrote something about how much I relished this recording. Her next reply expressed surprise at my enjoyment of Merrilee's hit, and made clear that she shared my delight. So for all three of us, If morning's echo says we've sinned by savoring this track, Well, it was what I wanted now, and it was what we all wanted 50 years ago. On a side note, that stormy romance from early 1971 inspired a stack of songs, with Stormy Winds being perhaps the best of the bunch, and you can find a YouTube lyric video of it by clicking on the title. On a second side note, this marks at least the third appearance on this list of a composition by Chip Taylor - Wild Thing is Song 187 and Try (just a little bit harder) is Song 333.