My Morning Song

You are locked into The Zoo, the place where the deep cuts still get the long ride and the needle does not jump when a song decides to testify. This one comes off The Black Crowes’ second album, The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion, released May 12, 1992, on Def American. Track nine. Six minutes and fifteen seconds. “My Morning Song.” Written by the brothers Robinson, cut live-in-the-room at Southern Tracks in Atlanta, and still the number the faithful wait on when the set gets loose. If you have been riding with us, you already know the station lives at thezoorocks.com, commercial-free, listener-supported, built for album sides instead of skip buttons.

The Crowes had come out of Marietta, Georgia, as Mr. Crowe’s Garden, a teenage outfit steeped in Faces, Humble Pie, the Stones, and whatever Otis Redding records the older kids would loan them. Chris Robinson, born December 20, 1966, had the voice, the scarves, and the preacher’s cadence. Rich Robinson, born May 24, 1969, had the open tunings and the riffs that sounded like they had been left in a church basement since 1971. By 1989 they were The Black Crowes. Rick Rubin’s Def American took the bet. Shake Your Money Maker arrived in 1990 and turned “Jealous Again,” “Twice As Hard,” “She Talks to Angels,” and a cover of Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle” into radio staples while hair metal was still hogging the video channels. They toured hard, fought with promoters, got tossed off a ZZ Top run for bad-mouthing corporate sponsors, and somehow sold multi-platinum while insisting they were a band and not a marketing plan.

By the time they circled back to write the follow-up, they had played something like 350 shows in a year and a half. Rich has said that only two songs written out on that Money Maker tour actually made the second album: “Thorn In My Pride” and this one. The rest of Southern Harmony was sketched in a garage over a weekend and then cut, start to finish, in about eight hazy days at Southern Tracks in early 1992. Producer George Drakoulias was back in the chair. Brendan O’Brien engineered and mixed. Howie Weinberg mastered it. Drummer Steve Gorman has the story that the live tracks were down by midweek and the overdubs followed fast. No three-year Def Leppard calendar. A snapshot.

The lineup had changed, and that change is all over “My Morning Song.” Lead guitarist Jeff Cease was out. Marc Ford, late of Burning Tree, was in, and he plays the slide lines here in open G, D-G-D-G-B-D, the Keith Richards church key. Eddie Harsch, nicknamed Eddie Hawrysch in some old credits and simply the keyboard saint to the fans, sat in on Wurlitzer and organ for the first time on a Crowes album. Johnny Colt held the bass. Barbara Mitchell and Taj Harmon stacked the background voices that turn the last chorus into a revival. Chris has said of at least one song from these sessions that the tape is the band learning the tune, lyrics half-wrong and choruses right. Whether or not that exact line was aimed at this track, the record still feels like a first take that refused to be improved.

The title of the album comes from William Walker’s 1835 shape-note hymnal, The Southern Harmony, a songbook that taught congregations to sing in parts off printed shapes instead of standard notation. The Crowes were not a gospel act, but they understood the idea: harmony as a public act, a room singing the same figure until it lifts. “My Morning Song” is the track where that idea stops being a sleeve note and becomes the arrangement. It opens on a patient groove, Chris already in the middle of a vision. “Dizzy found me last night / I saw some kind of new light / I woke up in a whirlwind / Just you watch my head spin.” The images pile up like a road dream: a plane ride, ringside, the seven seas, a ruby ring, a kiss on an Easter Sunday. Then the turn that every jam-band kid and every AOR lifer can quote without looking it up: “If music got to free your mind / Just let it go, ’cause you never know.” If the rhythm falls out of time, bring it here. He will make it all right.

That bridge is why the song never stayed a studio curio. Fan logs put the live debut at June 5, 1991, nearly a year before the album hit the racks, which means the road version existed before the eight-day session froze one of them. Across the decades it has been played hundreds of times, a warhorse in the same drawer as “Thorn In My Pride.” Live, the intro jam mutates. The middle section has swallowed other songs and spit them back out. On the 1993 Sam Houston Coliseum tape that later landed in the Southern Harmony box, the number stretches and breathes the way a hymn does when the choir decides the service is not over. The 2023 super-deluxe edition, rebuilt by the brothers and Drakoulias from the original quarter-inch production master, put that Houston performance back in circulation alongside outtakes and a January 4, 1992, studio-floor party filmed at the end of the sessions. Rich’s line on the whole record still holds: one or two takes, a band in possession of its powers.

The album itself entered the Billboard 200 at number one. “Remedy,” “Sting Me,” and “Thorn In My Pride” parked at number one on the Mainstream Rock chart for a combined twenty-one weeks, a run that made Southern Harmony the Crowes’ consensus classic even among people who wore out Shake Your Money Maker first. “My Morning Song” was never the single. It did not need to be. It sits between “No Speak No Slave” and the Bob Marley cover “Time Will Tell,” the deep cut that explains the rest of the side. After it they would make Amorica, Three Snakes and One Charm, and By Your Side, break up, reunite, sit in with Jimmy Page for the Greek Theatre shows, break up again, and come back. In 2025 they were Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees. The arguments between the brothers are part of the lore. The songs outlasted the arguments.

Put the needle on the last chorus and you hear what they were chasing in that Atlanta room: two guitars in open G, a Wurlitzer comping like a Saturday service, Colt and Gorman refusing to rush, Chris riding the vowel until the background singers answer him. It is Southern rock only if you let the phrase include Stax, the Allmans, the Faces, and a shape-note book from 1835. It is also just a great band, young and sure of itself, catching a song before anybody could sand it down.

The band keeps the porch light on at theblackcrowes.com. The social desks are Facebook, Instagram, and X. The set-list archivists and tape heads still gather at Crowesbase, the fan ledger that has tracked every known performance for years. And when you want the long version without a commercial in the middle of the solo, you are already in the right room: The Zoo. Let it go. You never know.