This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Hummingbird opened Seals and Crofts' 1972 album Summer Breeze and followed the title track to radio as the record's second single in January 1973. It climbed to number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and performed even better on the softer end of the dial, reaching number 12 on the Adult Contemporary chart and number 3 in Canada, a genuinely mainstream commercial run for a song built openly around Baha'i scripture and the persecution of the faith's founder.
That was not an accident the duo tried to soften. Jim Seals and Dash Crofts had both become Baha'is by 1969, and from that point their songwriting carried the religion's content forward with little disguise, sometimes as directly as songs later in their catalogue named for Baha'i figures outright. An academic press history of religiously motivated American popular music situates the pair within a documented lineage of artists who folded explicit religious advocacy into secular chart music years before contemporary Christian music existed as its own separate commercial genre with its own separate audience.
What makes Hummingbird notable within that lineage is exactly how unremarkable its chart run looks next to the duo's other hits. Nothing about its position on the Hot 100 or its Adult Contemporary placement marks it out as different from Summer Breeze or Diamond Girl, the duo's more overtly secular singles. Listeners bought and requested a song about a persecuted nineteenth century Persian religious teacher at the same rate they bought ordinary soft rock, mostly, it seems, without knowing that was what they were doing, which is closer to what Seals and Crofts said they were trying to achieve than any more confrontational approach would have been.