Hummingbird (1973)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On the surface, Hummingbird sounds like a nature song, four minutes built around a small bright bird and a plea for it to stay. Jim Seals, who wrote it with his musical partner Dash Crofts, said plainly in a 1991 interview that the bird was never really the subject. It stood for Baha'u'llah, the founder of the Baha'i Faith, and the song was Seals and Crofts' own attempt to speak on behalf of humanity in asking forgiveness for how the world treats the people sent to teach it something true.

Seals put the pattern in blunt terms: every one of the world's great teachers, when they arrive, gets misunderstood, and the first response is to strike out at them, to jail them, to torture them, sometimes to kill them outright. Baha'u'llah's own life fit the pattern exactly. Declared a threat by the Persian and Ottoman authorities of his era, he spent decades in exile and imprisonment, including years in the fortress city of Akka, for teaching a message of unity among the world's religions that his opponents heard as something closer to sedition.

The refrain, Hummingbird, don't fly away, works two ways at once. On one level it is a small, ordinary plea to keep a beautiful thing from leaving. On the level Seals actually intended, it is an apology addressed backward through history, sung to a movement that both duo members belonged to, asking a persecuted teacher not to give up on a species that keeps meeting its prophets with violence. Baha'i scripture supplies the song's actual language in places, giving the metaphor a textual anchor rather than leaving it as songwriter's invention alone.

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.