162: The Everly Brothers, ‘Crying in the Rain’

The Everly Brothers – ‘Crying in the Rain’ (original audio)

The Everly Brothers – ‘Crying in the Rain’ (video)

James Taylor and Art Garfunkel, ‘Crying in the Rain’ (video)

The Rain Stays Mainly in the Plain

We had a veritable rainstorm here in our little corner of the world this week. That’s usually a cause for celebration here, because it only happens here during the winter (December–March), and we depend on rainfall to drink water and bathe, and even wash our cars and water our lawns on occasion.

But his winter we’re not doing a lot of celebrating. The skies have been grey for 166 days now. So the rain this year for us has felt like an appropriate backdrop for our national blues.

.

The Quintessential Rain Song

Rain and soppy songs, how well they go together. Our challenge for Song of The Week is to find The Quintessential Rain Song. No, not ‘Singing in the Rain’, dummy. A Rain Song is all about melancholy, a downcast  heart, soggy shoes, sloppy self-indulgent adolescent depression. Yeah, I know, there’s a myriad number of ways to feel about rain and an equal number of songs. I’m talking about the essence of that wet stuff. Rain = gloom. “Snap out of it” just doesn’t work. The essence of rain is the greys and the blues.

So in my quest for the grail of The Perfect Rain Song, I ran a search on my music directory and came up with over 500 hits, and another bunch from my analog grey-matter data base.

‘(T)rain’ doesn’t count (strangely I found no songs about a train in the rain). Neither do ‘Rain(bow)’ songs (a plethora). Knock out all the happy ones, from ‘Singing in the Rain’ to ‘Bus Stop’ to John Sebastian’s ‘Rain on the Roof’ (oh, I love that song so much) to ‘Soon It’s Gonna Rain’ from The Fantasticks.

Right off the bat, I see a couple of great songs about rain that really aren’t Rain Songs – most prominently Buddy Holly’s ‘Raining in My Heart’ (“The weatherman says ‘Clear today’”) and The Beatles’ monolithic ‘Rain’. Out go the Dead’s ‘Box of Rain’, ‘MacArthur Park’, the Rolling Stones’ salacious ‘Rain Fall Down’. Great songs all, but none are about mushy, sorrow-sodden Rain.

Two masterpieces get dropped because they’re too serious (I hope you’re grasping the logic of the criteria): Randy Newman’s ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’ (SoTW 85), and James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain’.

Regretfully, we also have to reject Peter Paul & Mary’s surprisingly dark (and very funny), ‘It’s Raining’. Oh, yeah, a nursery rhyme: ‘Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home – your house is on fire, and your children, they will burn.’

Dylan a priori lacks the soppy, soggy sentimentality, so out with such gems as ‘Buckets of Rain’, ‘It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, ‘Rainy Day Women’, ‘Percy’s Song’ (and its folk source ‘The Dreadful Wind and Rain’).

We’re even going to veto one of the most exquisitely painful songs we know, James Taylor’s ‘Rainy Day Man’ because it’s just too good. The Rain Song is about depression, not about existential angst. Here’s the perfect version from his first (Apple, 1968) album, here’s the revisit from “Flag” (1979), here from a bootleg performance with Joni Mitchell circa 1971. Here’s a fine 1971 video to chill you on a warm day.

The Candidates

I’m sure by now you understand that a real Rain Song has to be about clouds and eyes and crying and tears. So here it comes, the finalists in our unreality competition for the mantle of The Quintessential Rain Song

#7 – ‘Cry Like a Rainy Day‘, Etta James. A bit slick for my tastes, from a distinctly unslick singer.

#6 – ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’, Willy Nelson. Yeah, it’s a nice song. It meets all the prerequisites. But there are those where the heart is more fully saturated.

#5 – ‘Cry Like a Rainstorm’, sung by Linda Ronstadt, written by Eric Kaz. Lots of violins, and she can really hit those high notes.

#4 – ‘It Might As Well Rain Until September’, 1962, young Carole King’s first solo release, back when she was churning out Brill Building hits. You can read all about it in its very own Song of The Week.

#3 – ‘Early Morning Rain’, written by Gordon Lightfoot, as performed by Peter Paul & Mary. One of my very favorite emotionally sodden songs. It also had its own Song of The Week.

#2 – ‘Raindrops’ by Dee Clark, a one-hit wonder from 1961. I was in the 8^th grade, miserable, in the rainy Midwest, and I sure shed a lot of tears to this one. Check out the power soul wailing at the fade. Dee spent the last years of his short life in a welfare hotel in Toccoa, Georgia, impoverished and paralyzed by a stroke. So what was I doing, a Jewish boy, crying in the suburbs?

The envelope, please. Ladies and Gentlemen, the ultimate song of unrequited love and waterlogged self-pity:

#1 – ‘Crying in the Rain’, the Everly Brothers, music by Carole King, lyrics by Howard Greenfield.

Carole King’s corpus needs no elaboration. Howie grew up in Brighton Beach, in the same building with Neil Sedaka. Together they wrote such Brill Building gems as ‘Breaking Up Is Hard to Do’, ’Oh! Carol’, ‘Stairway to Heaven’, ‘Calendar Girl’, ‘Little Devil’, and ‘Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen’ for Neil; ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’ and ‘Breakin’ in a Brand New Broken Heart’ (Connie Francis); ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’(The Captain & Tennille); ‘Venus In Blue Jeans’ (Jimmy Clanton); and ‘Foolish Little Girl’ (the Shirelles)., not to mention the theme songs to Bewitched, The Flying Nun and Hazel.

The Everly Brothers

Don and Phil Everly, of course, are charter members of the pantheon of rock and roll. Their career split into two – recording for Cadence Records in 1957-1959 songs written by husband-and-wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant (‘Bye Bye Love’, ‘Wake Up Little Susie,’ ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’–SoTW 186, ‘Bird Dog’ and ‘Problems’), and then songs from a variety of sources in 1960-1962 for Warner Brothers (‘Cathy’s Clown’, ‘So Sad‘, ‘Walk Right Back’, ‘Crying In The Rain’, ‘That’s Old Fashioned’, and ‘When Will I Be Loved’. My, my, what a body of work. You can read all about them in their own dedicated SoTW here.

Not even a duo such as Art Garfunkel and James Taylor could match the Everly’s performance. And that’s saying something, because James has been known to rival them at their own game (here’s the Everly’s ‘Devoted to You’; here’s the treatment by James and then-wife Carly Simon).

But no one can beat the Everly Brothers. Simon and Garfunkel admitted to striving to be Everly ver. 2.0. The first time I heard a Beatles song (‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’) on the radio, sometime in late 1963, way before their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, I said to myself, “What’s the big deal? They sound like the Everly Brothers with a heavier beat.” Neil Young, inducting them into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame, said that every musical group he belonged to had tried and failed to copy the Everly Brothers’ harmonies.

‘Crying in the Rain’ the perfect soggy, squishy rain song. It’s a pretty perfect song for any season. You just put the needle down on that 45 with the big hole, it brings its own weather system. All the heartache, all the sogginess, all the rain mixed with all the tears. I think we could even declare it as a genre unto itself: ‘Crying In The Rain Songs’. And here’s the best of the bunch.

I’ll never let you see
The way my broken heart is hurting me
I’ve got my pride and I know how to hide
All my sorrow and pain
I’ll do my crying in the rain

If I wait for cloudy skies
You won’t know the rain from the tears in my eyes
You’ll never know that I still love you so
Though the heartaches remain
I’ll do my crying in the rain

Rain drops falling from heaven
Could never wash away my misery
But since we’re not together
I look for stormy weather
To hide these tears I hope you’ll never see

Some day when my crying’s done
I’m gonna wear a smile and walk in the sun
I may be a fool but till then darling you’ll
Never see me complain
I’ll do my crying in the rain

I’ll do my crying in the rain
I’ll do my crying in the rain

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

002: Buddy Holly, ‘Learning the Game’

076: Roy Orbison, ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’

125: Bee Gees, ‘Holiday’

Tags: Crying in the RainEverly Brothers