Merrilee Gunst was born in Seattle, Washington. She grew up in Seattle’s North End, and studied classical piano from a young age. In 1960, she auditioned and became the singer for the Amazing Aztecs, a Seattle-area rock & roll band led by saxophone player Neil Rush, whom she would later marry. The two went on to form Merrilee and Her Men, doing mostly cover versions of pop hits, and then joined rhythm and blues group Tiny Tony and the Statics, whose regional hit “Hey Mrs. Jones”, on the Bolo label, featured Rush’s keyboard playing and vocals.
In 1965, the pair formed Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts, who soon became a popular act on the Pacific Northwest’s teen dancehall circuit. A member of the group’s road crew also worked for Paul Revere and the Raiders, and through this connection, Rush was invited to be the opening act on the Raiders’ tour of the southern United States in 1967.
While in Memphis, Tennessee, Raiders lead vocalist Mark Lindsay introduced Rush to record producer Chips Moman, who produced this song. Chip Taylor, actor Jonathan “Jon” Voight’s brother, wrote and composed “Angel of the Morning” and also wrote “Wild Thing” which was released by The Troggs in 1966. This tender ballad is surprisingly virtually the same song as Chip Taylor explained to Mojo magazine September 2008: “I heard some guy playing ‘Wild Thing’ real slow on a guitar. It sounded nice. So I did the same, lifting one of my fingers off a chord to create a suspension”.
According to Kent Kotal at Forgotten Hits, Chip Taylor came up with this song in about 20 minutes:
“After strumming any variety of chords for close to two hours and coming up with nothing, he says the complete lyrics ‘There’ll be no strings to bind your hands, not if my love can’t bind your heart’ flowed out of his mouth.
“His first thought was ‘What is that? That’s beautiful!’ He then thought, ‘Nobody actually TALKS like that!!! Where did those words come from?’ Incredibly, in one sitting, spread out over no more than twenty minutes, he completed the entire song.
He says that during the entire process, he never once thought, ‘I’m gonna say this’ or ‘I’m gonna say that.’ In fact, most of the time he was thinking ‘I don’t even know what this means!’ In his own mind, he feels that he didn’t so much as WRITE this song as that he DREAMED it… the way the lyrics flowed out, meshing perfectly with the series of chords he had been strumming – there just had to be some kind of divine intervention.
‘I write melody and words at the same time and I hum nonsense things until something comes out. So I don’t think about what I want to say… I just let the emotion carry me. In this song, the emotion just totally took over and carried me. It was magic.'”
Evie Sands originally recorded this song in 1967. Her version was doing well, but two weeks after it was released, her record label, Cameo/Parkway, went bankrupt. Chip Taylor was devastated when he found out the label could not promote it or even make more copies of the song. It was one of several close calls for Sands, who never hit it big; she also did the original version of “I Can’t Let Go,” which was later a hit for The Hollies.
It was originally offered to Connie Francis to sing, but she turned it down because she thought that it was too risqué for her career. The song describes feelings about a one-night stand, with the added fact it was from a woman’s point of view. While the ’60s were very permissive in some regards, it was still a taboo subject in the media.
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