Wakeman told Stevens he could not as it was his piece destined for a solo album, but Stevens persuaded him to adapt his composition. Stevens told Wakeman that he liked it and wanted something similar as the opening section, the closing section and, if possible, a middle section as well. It was a rough sketch of what would later become "Catherine Howard". Prior to the actual recording Stevens heard Wakeman play something in the recording booth. Producer Paul Samwell-Smith told him he could never put something like that on an album, and that it needed to be at least three minutes in length, although an acoustic demo exists of Stevens playing an early version which lasts almost three minutes. When shaping "Morning Has Broken" for recording, Stevens had to start with a hymn which took around 45 seconds to sing in its basic form. The familiar piano arrangement on Stevens' recording was performed by Rick Wakeman, a classically trained keyboardist best known for his tenures in the English progressive rock band Yes. Writing credit for "Morning Has Broken" has occasionally been erroneously attributed to Cat Stevens, who popularised the song abroad. The song became identified with Stevens when it reached number six on the US pop chart and number one on the US easy listening chart in 1972. English pop musician and folk singer Cat Stevens included a version on his 1971 album Teaser and the Firecat. It has words by English author Eleanor Farjeon and is set to a traditional Gaelic tune known as "Bunessan" (it shares this tune with the 19th century Christmas Carol "Child in the Manger"). When he returned in the 2000s as the rechristened Yusuf Islam, his explorations into world music retained the sweetness that left audiences feeling uplifted even when he was crooning the most sorrowful of tunes, while his embrace of religion and self-actualization revealed moving new dimensions to a long-beloved catalog."Morning Has Broken" is a popular and well-known Christian hymn first published in 1931. Decades of public silence and private humanitarian work followed. Stevens spent nearly a decade strumming his way toward enlightenment, but his 1977 conversion to Islam soon ended his career as an introspective pop singer. That warm-and-wise voice captured wistful tales of fraying love (“Wild World”), united crowds with hopeful anthems for social change (“Peace Train”), and sketched family life at its most poignant (“Father and Son”). He stripped his newly acoustic folk songs of the era’s orchestra-sized excesses to uncover their emotional core, gently leading a generation of listeners through a fraught decade. But a nearly fatal case of tuberculosis in 1969 found Stevens rethinking not only his ornate music, but also his life’s path forward. His early singles-such as the soon-to-be-endlessly covered ballad “The First Cut Is the Deepest”-were often dressed in baroque strings, catching the era’s lush pop-meets-psychedelia vibe. Many songwriters explored rock’s growing fascination with spirituality in the ’70s, but few would embrace faith as deeply as the Englishman originally known as Cat Stevens.