Lookin' for the Morning

Although it's hard to date the year the rare LP Lookin' for the Morning came out with precision, it's almost certainly from the mid-'60s. While the style's very much in the early-'60s acoustic folk revival mode, the presence of covers of early songs by Gordon Lightfoot ("Early Morning Rain") and Eric Andersen ("Violets of Dawn" and "Thirsty Boots") indicates that it was probably recorded in 1965 at the very earliest, and possibly even later than that. It's pleasant, well-played, and well-sung, the duo's male-female vocal harmonies closer in range than they were in many such pairings of the time. However, it's also lacking in character and originality, and not just in its reliance on well-known songs by '60s folkies for half of the tracks (Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" are also here, the last retitled "Ain't No Use" for some reason). It's the sound of competent folk musicians from a generation with many, some of whom went on to much bigger things. Many of them never got any further. But many in the latter group never recorded, and Gloria Lima & Bob Steger did, leaving this as a document of the period's folk fare, though it was likely passing out of fashion by the time they entered the studio.