Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken”: The Sunrise That Never Fades
Released in 1971 on his album “Teaser and the Firecat,” Cat Stevens’ version of “Morning Has Broken” sounds like a song that has always been there, as if it drifted in with the sunrise rather than being tracked in a London studio. The first thing you feel is stillness: a single piano line, clear and bell-like, stepping gently into the room before Stevens’ voice appears, soft yet confident, like someone opening curtains and letting the morning in.
Long before Cat ever touched it, though, “Morning Has Broken” lived as a hymn in English churches. In 1931, poet and children’s author Eleanor Farjeon was asked to write a text that could fit a traditional Scottish tune called “Bunessan,” a melody that had already carried another carol, “Child in the Manger.” She imagined a small village in Sussex bathed in first light, and wrote verses that praised the ordinary miracles of a new day: birds, dew, sunlight, and the simple fact of being alive.
The hymn was meant for children, but it didn’t stay in the schoolroom. Congregations of all ages took to it, partly because the words were easy to sing, partly because they avoided heavy doctrine. Farjeon never preaches; she simply points. Blackbirds, wet gardens, new rain, first light over Eden—these images became a kind of shared mental photograph for anyone who grew up with the hymn. By the time the 1970s arrived, “Morning Has Broken” was quietly embedded in church life across Britain.
Cat Stevens discovered the hymn not through a priest, but in a bookshop. While searching for song ideas, he opened a hymn book and found Farjeon’s words paired with the lilting Bunessan melody. In them he heard something that matched where he was headed as an artist: away from pop hits and toward music that sounded like prayer, even if it never said the word. He took the hymn home, began experimenting with tempo and structure, and slowly reshaped it for his own voice.
Producer Paul Samwell-Smith loved the idea, but knew that a straight hymn, sung once through, would be over in under a minute. For a record, they needed a small journey, not a fragment. So Stevens stretched the song, adding instrumental passages and space between verses. The words themselves he left untouched, trusting that their simplicity was precisely their power. The aim wasn’t to modernize the hymn with tricks; it was to give it enough room to breathe on a 1970s singer-songwriter album.
To build that breathing space, Stevens called in a then–little-known session player: Rick Wakeman, the keyboard wizard who would soon join Yes. Wakeman arrived with a classically trained touch and a head full of ideas. He crafted the now-famous piano part—those rising arpeggios, the cascading runs between verses, the ornamental little turns that sound like light playing on water. His arrangement doesn’t compete with the vocal; it prepares the listener, laying a path of melody for the voice to walk down.
The finished recording feels almost weightless, yet it is carefully built. Listen closely and you’ll hear how the piano introduces each verse with a slightly different flourish, how the dynamics swell just enough in the second and third stanzas to keep the listener moving forward. Stevens sings without vibrato or theatrical strain, his tone almost conversational, like someone reading a beloved poem out loud. It’s the opposite of a show-off performance; the point is the song, not the singer.
When “Morning Has Broken” was released as a single in 1972, it behaved like a slow sunrise on the charts. In the United States it climbed to number six on the Billboard Hot 100 and hit number one on the easy listening chart—a remarkable feat for what is essentially a reverent hymn in pop clothing. In the United Kingdom it rose into the Top 10, giving Stevens a major hit five years after “Matthew and Son” had first put him on the map. Around the world, from Canada to Norway to Australia, it quietly became one of his signature songs.
What listeners connected to was not just the melody, but the mood. In an era of bombastic rock and politically charged songwriting, “Morning Has Broken” felt like a pause button. It carried no anger, no swagger, no psychedelic swirl—only gratitude. People played it at weddings and baptisms, but also at funerals and memorials, moments when families needed language that acknowledged both sorrow and blessing in the same breath. The song became a gentle companion to life’s threshold moments.
On stage, Stevens often introduced “Morning Has Broken” with the same understated calm that you hear on the record. Early television appearances show him seated, eyes half-closed, almost disappearing into the hymn rather than standing above it. When Wakeman or another pianist recreated those crystalline runs, audiences would fall into a hush that felt closer to a chapel than a concert hall. It isn’t a song that invites sing-along shouting; it invites people to listen, to remember mornings of their own.
Part of the song’s magic lies in its imagery of “first” things—first bird, first dew, first sunlight. Farjeon wrote as if each day were a replay of creation, a miniature Genesis unfolding outside the window. Stevens’ gentle delivery amplifies that sense of freshness. Even if you’ve heard the track a hundred times, the opening line still arrives like curtains being drawn back on a new day. There’s no cynicism in it, no wink; just the idea that gratitude itself can be a kind of rebellion.
Over the decades, “Morning Has Broken” has found new homes beyond its church and Cat Stevens origins. It appears in hymnals, yes, but also in school assemblies, TV documentaries, and personal playlists built for reflection. Choirs arrange it in lush harmonies, solo singers strip it back to guitar and voice, and instrumentalists linger on the Bunessan tune as if it were a folk air passed down by ear. Each version seems to orbit Stevens’ recording, acknowledging it as the modern center of the song’s story.
Not everything around the track has been as serene as its sound. In later years, Rick Wakeman voiced frustration that his contribution went uncredited and unpaid beyond the original session fee, even though the piano arrangement helped propel the song to worldwide success. It’s a reminder that even the most peaceful music can sit atop very human disagreements about ownership, credit, and the business of art. Yet when the record plays, those disputes fall away; all that remains in the air is the sound of shared creation.
For Cat Stevens himself—now known as Yusuf—the song has become part of a larger spiritual journey. In interviews, he has spoken about being drawn to its universality, how the lyrics transcend one religious tradition and speak instead to the simple miracle of a new dawn. That idea dovetails with his later life, in which questions of faith, identity, and peace have become central. “Morning Has Broken” stands as an early signpost pointing toward that search.
What makes this recording endure isn’t just history, chart numbers, or famous collaborators. It’s the feeling that, inside a very short span of time, the song manages to reset the listener’s emotional clock. You don’t need to share its theology to understand its message: another day has started, and that fact alone is worth noticing. In a world that often greets morning with alarms and notifications, Stevens offers an older rhythm—wake, watch, give thanks.
More than fifty years on, “Morning Has Broken” still sounds strangely untouched by fashion. You can place it next to modern acoustic tracks and it doesn’t creak or crack; it just sits there, still, like a window that opens the same way no matter the decade. Maybe that’s because the song was old even when Cat Stevens recorded it. Maybe it’s because dawn itself never goes out of style. Either way, the record plays on, modest and luminous, an anthem of hope and beauty hiding in plain sight.
For many fans, the most powerful moment comes at the very end, when the final piano figure rises and then gently falls away, leaving a brief silence before the next track begins. That silence feels like the listener’s turn to respond—to breathe, to remember, to carry the song’s calm into the rest of the day. In that sense, “Morning Has Broken” isn’t just something you hear; it’s something you step into, like light spilling across a floor.
And so, whether you first heard it in a church pew, through a transistor radio in the early seventies, or on a streaming playlist decades later, the effect is remarkably similar. For a few minutes, the noise of the world recedes, and you’re left with birds, rain, sunlight, and a human voice quietly giving thanks for all of it. That is the quiet miracle of Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken”: a pop hit that behaves like a prayer, and a hymn that feels like home.
