Right as rain
Songs about rain. If you’re a country music fan, you’ll recognize those words as the title of a Gary Allan song. Like a lot of country songs, it talks about heartbreak and driving around in your truck on a lonely night. It references some of country’s most iconic “rain” ballads, like “Kentucky Rain” and “Rainy Night in Georgia.”
Heartbreak and rain go hand-in-hand in popular music. In fact, it’s a match made in songwriting heaven. Bruce Hornsby broke our hearts with “Mandolin Rain,” a song about the girl who wouldn’t stay. Billie Holiday and a few other jazz greats told us how it “keeps raining all the time” when love is lost and life is just a cloud of “Stormy Weather.”
Raindrops kept fallin’ on the heads of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, thanks to B.J. Thomas’ popular song from the movie. That song had more to do with a romantic bicycle ride than true heartbreak, but you could tell the heartbreak was coming. And by the end of the movie, it did.
This rain/heartbreak connection even finds its way into children’s songs. “Rain, Rain Go Away” speaks to the heartbreak of being trapped inside to play all day. As adults, we now recognize those days as an opportunity to curl up with a good book. With age comes wisdom.
On the more apocalyptic side, Prince gave us “Purple Rain,” the song that has endured as a power rock anthem for nearly three generations. Its place in the finale of the Netflix hit “Stranger Things” has set it up to be one of the great rain songs for generations to come, though Prince didn’t really need any help to make that happen.
Perhaps the most enduring rain song of all, thanks to the iconic movie and Gene Kelly’s genius as a dancer, is “Singing in the Rain.” Somewhere along the way, if we were caught out in a downpour, almost all of us have splashed through a puddle with both feet and twirled around a lamp post or a flag pole or whatever we could find, imitating Kelly’s moves and belting out the song as loud as we could.
I guess it proves that not every rain song is a heartbreak song. Take Bing Crosby’s “Pennies From Heaven.” There’s a classic from the 1930s that counts each raindrop as a blessing and every storm as a reminder to be grateful for the good things in life. Nobody could sell a song or a movie like Bing, and that storyline rang true throughout the Depression.
During our lifetime, we pray for rain to fall and we pray for rain to stay away, depending on our plans. I was brought up to love the rain. It always came with a sense of relief and high spirits. Sure, it could fall at the wrong time for farming, but we prayed and longed for it far more than we pleaded for it to stay in the clouds. If there was enough of it, it meant mud puddles, tadpoles and frogs. If it rained so much that the draw ran, that qualified as an almost historic event. The adults took pictures and talked about the old days, when rain fell easier and kids were less unruly and a good horse or a good dog was all a fella needed.
We make jokes about defaulting to the weather as a topic of conversation, but whether we’re discussing drought or the latest gully-washer, it’s relevant. In this area we live our lives by the weather. We earn our livelihoods out under the sky.
Considering the wildfires that continue across the state, a good general rain feels like a godsend. We could use more. That’s usually the case with rain. But what we’ve had makes me thankful. And it makes me consider that rain is so important, we write songs about it. In fact, we write songs about songs about rain. That feels about right.